Three women chosen from a large pool of highly qualified candidates are the new recipients of Morphisec's Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship. An independent judge, Limor Elhayani, made the final determinations. Elhayani is vice president of threat engineering at Citi and has herself been the only woman in the room for most of her professional life.
In an effort to bring more women into a field where they are severely underrepresented, Netta Schmeidler, VP of product at Morphisec, launched the scholarship program in October 2017. The company offers three scholarships for female students who are pursuing degrees in cybersecurity, information assurance, information security, information systems security and other subdisciplines of computer science.
Two prerequisites to eligibility included that the women had to have been enrolled at an accredited academic institution of higher learning during the 2017–2018 school year and that they must be Israeli or US citizens or permanent legal residents of either country.
“The cybersecurity field needs more women,” said Schmeidler. “Their diverse voices, viewpoints and opinions help drive innovation, improvement and resilience. Although the latest figures on the number of women in cybersecurity show improvement, we have a long way to go."
"The Morphisec scholarship is our way to bring some visibility and encouragement to young women who are exploring or may not even have before considered a career in this field," she continued. "We were very impressed with the submissions of these outstanding students and know that they will be a tremendous asset to the industry.”
The first prize, which includes a scholarship and a personal mentoring session, was awarded to Inbar Oz, a computer science and bioinformatics student at Tel Aviv University. Undergraduate student of cybersecurity at University of West Florida Megan Morton received the second prize. The third scholarship went to Noa Yehezkel, who is a candidate for her master’s in computer science at Bar-Ilan University.
“Women deserve the same opportunities as men to grow and pursue their ambitions. I want to help bring more women into technology companies and increase diversity that will drive a change in the organizational culture and biases,” Elhayani said.