Breaking Down Barriers – Cisco Sponsors Greenlight for Girls

Research shows that young women across the globe don’t generally choose tech careers because they think it’s not an interesting career, or they believe they wouldn’t be good at it, or, even worse, they imagine they wouldn’t be comfortable or happy with their potential colleagues.

Cisco is committed to breaking those notions! As proof of that, in December 2017, we sponsored the global Greenlight for Girls G4G event in the city of Madrid: Around 180 girls between 11 and 15 years old from different local schools had the chance to participate. They took part in a number of fun and engaging workshops related to biological sciences, mathematics, engineering, and technology. Cisco IT was there collaborating with Corporate Social Responsibility, HR, Legal and Sales organizers to make the event a total success.

As part of the agenda, I had the privilege to give a workshop called ‘I am a router’ in which our future female network engineers played a collective interactive game that helped them understand how data is routed from one place to another across the Internet. Lots of fun and lots of sharp questions from the young audience. I particularly remember this young lady asking: “Did the WannaCry attack have anything to do with the way these routers work”?

Greenlight for Girls is dedicated to inspiring girls of all ages and backgrounds to pursue STEM subjects. You can learn more about the organization here.