WorkingNation has partnered with Cognizant U.S. Foundation to explore solutions to the lack of diversity in the tech industry in a series of podcasts and articles. We’re sharing these stories every Friday through early March here on WorkingNation.com.

Because of the pandemic, the number of women in the workforce is declining. Still, they remain slightly more than 50% of the U.S. workforce. Despite outnumbering men overall,  they make up less than 30% of workers in tech jobs.

And while women are getting nearly 60% of all undergraduate degrees, less than 20% of graduates in tech are women. That’s even though women in other STEM fields—science, biology, chemistry, the life sciences—is much higher.

Where is the disconnect? Tech industry veteran Judith Spitz says it’s about barriers to access, misinformation about what it means to work in tech, and the notion that it is for men only.

The Role Model Challenge

Five years ago, after an impressive 30-year career in technology with Verizon, Spitz started Women in Technology New York—now known as Break Through Tech—to encourage women to consider tech as an educational path and a career.

“There is a role modeling challenge. Everybody can spit out the names of Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. Very few women come to mind,” she says. Spitz says almost all the stereotypes about tech are wrong, including “it’s only for guys, it’s a loner sport, it’s for people who like to sit alone in their basement and hack code.”

She adds, “Of course, any of us in the tech industry know that couldn’t be further from the truth, because there is nothing in a technology project that isn’t team-based.”

Spitz speaks from experience. She started her career at Verizon in 1986 as part of the R&D lab that developed—as a team—an industry-leading automated customer service system that featured pioneering advanced speech technology. Spitz eventually worked her way up to chief information officer, managing a team of more than 5,000.

Her mission now is to break down the barriers that are keeping more women from breaking into the industry.

The Three Cs: Curriculum, Community, and Career

In this episode of Work in Progress, Spitz explains how Break Through Tech works with large, diverse public education institutions in a city—the first in New York, now in Chicago—to encourage more women to take those first steps, then to support them in their journey.

“It’s about curriculum innovation, which is the what and how you teach introductory (computer) courses in order to cast a wider net and get more women to be willing to walk in that door of that first class.”

“Second, (it’s) around community development, delivering programs that not only create a community of these young women with each other, but importantly, introduce them to a network of professional women in their local ecosystem that these women don’t have access to, in order to help them network and get their foot in the door.”

The third leg of the program is career access. In New York, for example, they work with hundreds of companies to help women get that all-important first break, a paid internship. Break Through Tech innovated the “mini-internship” during the winter or spring terms.

“It’s a paid three-week immersion in a company, attending meetings, learning about the company by talking to the head of engineering, talking to the head of product, talking to HR and so on.”

“The whole idea of this program is,