Self-driving taxis could be a setback for those with different needs – unless companies embrace accessible design now

Wheelchair advocates and taxi drivers protest lack of accessibility and surge pricing in New York City on Tuesday, January 19, 2016. Richard Levine/Corbis via Getty Images

John Lunsford, Cornell University

Autonomous vehicles (AVs), like self-driving taxis, continue to garner media attention as industry and political stakeholders claim that they will improve safety and access to transportation for everyone. But for people who have different mobility needs and rely on human drivers for work beyond the task of driving, the prospect of driverless taxis may not sound like progress. Unless accommodations are built in to autonomous vehicle designs, companies risk undermining transportation access for the very communities this technology is promising to include.

The promise

A January 2020 joint report issued by the National Science and Technology Council and U.S. Department of Transportation paints a bright picture of an autonomous-enabled future. They predict autonomous vehicles will provide “improved quality of life, access and mobility for all citizens.” Replacing the driver with an autonomous system will create safer transportation by removing the “possibility of human error.”

In addition, synchronizing vehicle movement with distance and traffic patterns would not only result in more efficient service, but safer roadway navigation. These advances should mean fewer cars, less traffic, more economical fuel use and increased vehicle availability.

More than driving

If done right, autonomous vehicles could improve access to transportation for everyone. But by not accounting for the many other kinds of labor a driver performs, current AVs may present problems for people with different needs.

Drivers perform work beyond driving. Justice Ender/Flickr

For older people, those with disabilities and even individuals in emergency situations, the driver bridges the gap between personal capability and vehicle accessibility.

Drivers help people to and from vehicles, as well as into and out of them. Drivers move and store luggage and mobility equipment like wheelchairs and walkers, and navigate emergency situations like cardiac arrest, allergic reaction or drug overdose.

Yet right now asking an AV interface for assistance would be like asking Siri to help you up if you’ve fallen down.

Two unequal systems

In the 1970s and years thereafter, Congress determined that redesigning transportation for accessibility was too costly. Instead they fitted assistive devices to old transportation networks and expected private sector taxi drivers to help. Some did, many didn’t.

Problems of discrimination led to the landmark American with Disabilities Act of 1990. The ADA made discrimination based on ability illegal – but access to transportation was still dependent on the driver.

Taxi access is already problematic due to a two-tiered system. mokee81/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Today, cities and companies are still struggling with accessibility. People with different needs remain vulnerable to the whims and prejudices of the driver. Too often people with different needs are denied assistance or transportation altogether.

It was only in 2016, for instance, that Boston’s taxis, Uber and later Lyft began integrating a small number of Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles into their fleets, and other companies have emerged like SilverRide offer specialty service for people who are older.

But even with these additions, taxi, Uber and Lyft riders still experience cancellations and longer wait times in cities like Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and New York.

A 2019 study comparing the wait times for Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles (WAVs) to inaccessible vehicles in New York City. The wait time for Uber WAV was more than two times as long and Lyft WAV was more than five times as long. New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Still Left Behind whitepaper, CC BY

While specialized vehicles are a valuable step toward accessible transportation, they also mean more cars on the road. A 2017 study found Uber and Lyft are increasing traffic congestion in cities leading to increases in safety risks, transit times and pollution. To add to the traffic problem, the International Transportation Forum predicts that traffic will likely increase even more as autonomous cars occupy the road alongside traditional ones.

The future

AV developers struggle with what accessibility should look like. Some leading AV companies focus on accessibility inside the car. Waymo and Lyft are working to communicate information to passengers with disabilities. Nissan’s Virtual Reality avatars may provide company, comfort and assistance to passengers in need.

Other AV companies approach accessibility by redesigning access. Startup May Mobility’s low speed shuttle can deploy a wheelchair ramp. Tesla’s gull wing doors open vertically for easier access and their Smart Summons feature allows drivers to call their car to fetch them.

In my opinion, vehicle specialization should not be the path forward. A wheelchair ramp in one car and Braille in another will increase cars on the road, decrease availability and increase consumer cost. For AVs to fulfill the promise of accessibility and be environmentally efficient, all cars need to be similarly accessible – even if the mechanisms of accessibility are not always in use. This way AVs can more closely mirror the variety of tasks human drivers currently perform and do it reliably, without discrimination. Standard features could include push button or voice activated motorized doors with sliding ramps, an entry space instead of front seats and interior handrails.

A good place to start is for stakeholders to agree on what accessibility needs must be met and treat AV developments as pieces of an accessibility solution rather than separate niche markets racing toward minimum accommodations. The nonprofit research and community equity organization, The Greenlining Institute, suggests, in addition to capability, accessibility should also include financial, cultural, technological, logistical, race, gender, age, class and geographic considerations. If autonomous vehicles are developed to handle the messiness and complexity taxi drivers currently deal with, society will be one step closer to real accessibility.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

John Lunsford, PhD Candidate in Media, Technology and Society, Cornell University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

To safely explore the solar system and beyond, spaceships need to go faster – nuclear-powered rockets may be the answer

Over the last 50 years, a lot has changed in rocketry. The fuel that powers spaceflight might finally be changing too. CSA-Printstock/DIgital Vision Vectors via Getty Images

Iain Boyd, University of Colorado Boulder

With dreams of Mars on the minds of both NASA and Elon Musk, long-distance crewed missions through space are coming. But you might be surprised to learn that modern rockets don’t go all that much faster than the rockets of the past.

There are a lot of reasons that a faster spaceship is a better one, and nuclear-powered rockets are a way to do this. They offer many benefits over traditional fuel-burning rockets or modern solar-powered electric rockets, but there have been only eight U.S. space launches carrying nuclear reactors in the last 40 years.

However, last year the laws regulating nuclear space flights changed and work has already begun on this next generation of rockets.

Why the need for speed?

The first step of a space journey involves the use of launch rockets to get a ship into orbit. These are the large fuel-burning engines people imagine when they think of rocket launches and are not likely to go away in the foreseeable future due to the constraints of gravity.

It is once a ship reaches space that things get interesting. To escape Earth’s gravity and reach deep space destinations, ships need additional acceleration. This is where nuclear systems come into play. If astronauts want to explore anything farther than the Moon and perhaps Mars, they are going to need to be going very very fast. Space is massive, and everything is far away.

There are two reasons faster rockets are better for long-distance space travel: safety and time.

Astronauts on a trip to Mars would be exposed to very high levels of radiation which can cause serious long-term health problems such as cancer and sterility. Radiation shielding can help, but it is extremely heavy, and the longer the mission, the more shielding is needed. A better way to reduce radiation exposure is to simply get where you are going quicker.

But human safety isn’t the only benefit. As space agencies probe farther out into space, it is important to get data from unmanned missions as soon as possible. It took Voyager-2 12 years just to reach Neptune, where it snapped some incredible photos as it flew by. If Voyager-2 had a faster propulsion system, astronomers could have had those photos and the information they contained years earlier.

Speed is good. But why are nuclear systems faster?

The Saturn V rocket was 363 feet tall and mostly just a gas tank. Mike Jetzer/heroicrelics.org, CC BY-NC-ND

Systems of today

Once a ship has escaped Earth’s gravity, there are three important aspects to consider when comparing any propulsion system:

• Thrust – how fast a system can accelerate a ship
• Mass efficiency – how much thrust a system can produce for a given amount of fuel
• Energy density – how much energy a given amount of fuel can produce

Today, the most common propulsion systems in use are chemical propulsion – that is, regular fuel-burning rockets – and solar-powered electric propulsion systems.

Chemical propulsion systems provide a lot of thrust, but chemical rockets aren’t particularly efficient, and rocket fuel isn’t that energy-dense. The Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the Moon produced 35 million Newtons of force at liftoff and carried 950,000 gallons of fuel. While most of the fuel was used in getting the rocket into orbit, the limitations are apparent: It takes a lot of heavy fuel to get anywhere.

Electric propulsion systems generate thrust using electricity produced from solar panels. The most common way to do this is to use an electrical field to accelerate ions, such as in the Hall thruster. These devices are commonly used to power satellites and can have more than five times higher mass efficiency than chemical systems. But they produce much less thrust – about three Newtons, or only enough to accelerate a car from 0-60 mph in about two and a half hours. The energy source – the Sun – is essentially infinite but becomes less useful the farther away from the Sun the ship gets.

One of the reasons nuclear-powered rockets are promising is because they offer incredible energy density. The uranium fuel used in nuclear reactors has an energy density that is 4 million times higher than hydrazine, a typical chemical rocket propellant. It is much easier to get a small amount of uranium to space than hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel.

So what about thrust and mass efficiency?

The first nuclear thermal rocket was built in 1967 and is seen in the background. In the foreground is the protective casing that would hold the reactor. NASA/Wikipedia

Two options for nuclear

Engineers have designed two main types of nuclear systems for space travel.

The first is called nuclear thermal propulsion. These systems are very powerful and moderately efficient. They use a small nuclear fission reactor – similar to those found in nuclear submarines – to heat a gas, such as hydrogen, and that gas is then accelerated through a rocket nozzle to provide thrust. Engineers from NASA estimate that a mission to Mars powered by nuclear thermal propulsion would be 20%-25% shorter than a trip on a chemical-powered rocket.

Nuclear thermal propulsion systems are more than twice as efficient as chemical propulsion systems – meaning they generate twice as much thrust using the same amount of propellant mass – and can deliver 100,000 Newtons of thrust. That’s enough force to get a car from 0-60 mph in about a quarter of a second.

The second nuclear-based rocket system is called nuclear electric propulsion. No nuclear electric systems have been built yet, but the idea is to use a high-power fission reactor to generate electricity that would then power an electrical propulsion system like a Hall thruster. This would be very efficient, about three times better than a nuclear thermal propulsion system. Since the nuclear reactor could create a lot of power, many individual electric thrusters could be operated simultaneously to generate a good amount of thrust.

Nuclear electric systems would be the best choice for extremely long-range missions because they don’t require solar energy, have very high efficiency and can give relatively high thrust. But while nuclear electric rockets are extremely promising, there are still a lot of technical problems to solve before they are put into use.

An artist’s impression of what a nuclear thermal ship built to take humans to Mars could look like. John Frassanito & Associates/Wikipedia

Why aren’t there nuclear powered rockets yet?

Nuclear thermal propulsion systems have been studied since the 1960s but have not yet flown in space.

Regulations first imposed in the U.S. in the 1970s essentially required case-by-case examination and approval of any nuclear space project from multiple government agencies and explicit approval from the president. Along with a lack of funding for nuclear rocket system research, this environment prevented further improvement of nuclear reactors for use in space.

That all changed when the Trump administration issued a presidential memorandum in August 2019. While upholding the need to keep nuclear launches as safe as possible, the new directive allows for nuclear missions with lower amounts of nuclear material to skip the multi-agency approval process. Only the sponsoring agency, like NASA, for example, needs to certify that the mission meets safety recommendations. Larger nuclear missions would go through the same process as before.

Along with this revision of regulations, NASA received US$100 million in the 2019 budget to develop nuclear thermal propulsion. DARPA is also developing a space nuclear thermal propulsion system to enable national security operations beyond Earth orbit.

After 60 years of stagnation, it’s possible a nuclear-powered rocket will be heading to space within a decade. This exciting achievement will usher in a new era of space exploration. People will go to Mars and science experiments will make new discoveries all across our solar system and beyond.

[You’re too busy to read everything. We get it. That’s why we’ve got a weekly newsletter. Sign up for good Sunday reading. ]

Iain Boyd, Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SpaceX astronaut launch: here's the rocket science it must get right

Gareth Dorrian, University of Birmingham and Ian Whittaker, Nottingham Trent University

Two NASA astronauts, Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, will make history by travelling to the International Space Station in a privately funded spacecraft, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. But the launch, which was due to take place on May 27, has been aborted due to bad weather, and will instead take place on May 30 at 3:22 pm EDT.

The astronauts will take off lying on their backs in the seats, and facing in the direction of travel to reduce the stress of high acceleration on their bodies. Once launched from Kennedy Space Centre, the spacecraft will travel out over the Atlantic, turning to travel in a direction that matches the ISS orbit.

With the first rocket section separating at just over two minutes, the main dragon capsule is then likely to separate from the second stage burn roughly an hour later and continue on its journey. All being well, the Dragon spacecraft will rendezvous about 24 hours after launch.

---

Read more: SpaceX reaches for milestone in spaceflight – a private company launches astronauts into orbit

---

Space mission launches and landings are the most critical parts. However, Space X has conducted many tests, including 27 drops of the parachute landing system. It has also managed an emergency separation of the Dragon capsule from the rocket. In the event of a failed rocket launch, eight engines would lift the capsule containing the astronauts up into the air and away from the rocket, with parachutes eventually helping it to land. The Falcon 9 rocket has made 83 successful launches.

Docking and return

The space station has an orbital velocity of 7.7km per second. The Earth’s rotation carries launch sites under a straight flight path of the ISS, with each instance providing a “launch window”.

ISS orbit. Author provided

To intercept the ISS, the capsule must match the station’s speed, altitude and inclination, and it must do it at the correct time such that the two spacecraft find themselves in close proximity to each other. The difference in velocity between the ISS and the Dragon capsule must then be near to zero at the point where the orbits of the two spacecraft intersect.

Once these conditions are met, the Dragon capsule must manoeuvre to the ISS docking port, using a series of small control thrusters arranged around the spacecraft. This is due to be done automatically by a computer, however the astronauts can control this manoeuvre manually if needed.

As you can see in the figure below, manoeuvring involves “translation control” as indicated by green arrows – moving left/right, up/down, forward/back. The yellow arrows show “attitude control” – rolling clockwise/anti-clockwise, pitching up/down, and yawing left/right.

How to manoeuver a spacecraft. Author provided

This is complicated by Newton’s first law of motion – that any object at rest or in motion will continue to be so unless acted upon by an external force. That means any manoeuvre, such as a roll to the right, will continue indefinitely in the absence of air resistance to provide an external force until it is counteracted by firing thrusters in the opposite direction.

So now that you have a grasp of orbital manoeuvring, why not have a go yourself? This simulator, provided by Space X, allows you to try and pilot the Dragon capsule to the ISS docking port.

The astronauts will return to Earth when a new set are ready to take their place, or at NASA’s discretion. NASA are already planning the first fully operational flight of crew Dragon, with four astronauts, although a launch date for that has not yet been announced and will undoubtedly depend on the outcome of this demonstration flight.

New era for spaceflight

The launch puts SpaceX firmly ahead of the other commercial ventures looking at providing crewed space launches. This includes both Boeing’s Starliner, which first launched last year but was uncrewed, and Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser which is planned to be tested with cargo during a trip to the ISS next year.

The ability of the commercial sector to send astronauts to the ISS is an important step toward further human exploration, including establishing a human presence at the Moon, and ultimately, Mars.

---

Read more: To the moon and beyond 4: What's the point of going back to the moon?

---

With companies competing, however, an open question remains whether safety could at some point be compromised to gain a commercial edge. There is no suggestion this has happened so far, but any crewed mission which failed due to a fault stemming from economic concerns would have serious legal ramifications.

In a similar way to modern aircraft legislation, a set of space safety standards and regulations will need to be put in place sooner rather than later. For commercial lunar and beyond missions we also have to ensure that any spacecraft does not contaminate the location they are visiting with germs from Earth.

With more nations and companies developing plans for lunar missions, there are obvious advantages in international cooperation and finding cost efficient launch methods. This is not least because it’s not as dependent on the whim of elected governments for direction, which can change completely from one administration to the next.

So for us scientists looking to expand our knowledge of space, it is a very exciting moment.

Gareth Dorrian, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Space Science, University of Birmingham and Ian Whittaker, Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How the Hubble Space Telescope opened our eyes to the first galaxies of the universe

The launch of Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990. This photo captures the first time that there were shuttles on both pad 39a and 39b. NASA

Rodger I. Thompson, University of Arizona

The Hubble Space Telescope launched on the 24th of April, 30 years ago. It’s an impressive milestone especially as its expected lifespan was just 10 years.

One of the primary reasons for the Hubble telescope’s longevity is that it can be serviced and improved with new observational instruments through Space Shuttle visits.

When Hubble, or HST, first launched, its instruments could observe ultraviolet light with wavelengths shorter than the eye can see, as well as optical light with wavelengths visible to humans. A maintenance mission in 1997 added an instrument to observe near infrared light, which are longer wavelengths than people can see. Hubble’s new infrared eyes provided two new major capabilities: the ability to see farther into space than before and see deeper into the dusty regions of star formation.

I am an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona who has used near infrared observations to better understand how the universe works, from star formation to cosmology. Some 35 years ago, I was given the chance to build a near infrared camera and spectrometer for Hubble. It was the chance of a lifetime. The camera my team designed and developed has changed the way humans see and understand the universe. The instrument was built at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, under our direction.

The light we can see with our eyes is part of a range of radiation known as the electromagnetic spectrum. Shorter wavelengths of light are higher energy, and longer wavelengths of light are lower energy. The Hubble Space Telescope sees primarily visible light (indicated here by the rainbow), as well as some infrared and ultraviolet radiation. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Seeing further and earlier

Edwin Hubble, HST’s namesake, discovered in the early 1900s that the universe is expanding and that the light from distant galaxies was shifted to longer, redder wavelengths, a phenomenon called the redshift. The greater the distance, the larger the shift. This is because the further away an object is, the longer it takes for the light to reach us here on Earth and the more the universe has expanded in that time.

The Hubble ultraviolet and optical instruments had taken images of the most distant galaxies ever seen, known as the Northern Hubble Deep Field, or NHDF, which were released in 1996. These images, however, had reached their distance limit due to the redshift, which had shifted all of the light of the most distant galaxies out of the visible and into the infrared.

One of the new instruments added to Hubble in the second maintenance mission has the awkward name, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, NICMOS, pronounced “Nick Moss.” The near infrared cameras on NICMOS observed regions of the NHDF and discovered even more distant galaxies with all of their light in the near infrared.

A typical image taken with NICMOS. It shows a gigantic star cluster in the center of our Milky Way. NICMOS, thanks to its infrared capabilities, is able to look through the heavy clouds of dust and gas in these central regions. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Astronomers have the privilege of watching things happen in the past which they call the “lookback time.” Our best measurement of the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. The distance that light travels in one year is called a light year. The most distant galaxies observed by NICMOS were at a distance of almost 13 billion light years. This meant that the light that NICMOS detected had been traveling for 13 billion years and showed what the galaxies looked like 13 billion years ago, a time when the universe was only about 5% of its current age. These were some of the first galaxies ever created and were forming new stars at rates that were more than a thousand times the rate at which most galaxies form stars in the current universe.

Hidden by dust

Although astronomers have studied star formation for decades, many questions remain. Part of the problem is that most stars are formed in clouds of molecules and dust. The dust absorbs the ultraviolet and most of the optical light emitted by forming stars, making it difficult for Hubble’s ultraviolet and optical instruments to study the process.

The longer, or redder, the wavelength of the light, the less is absorbed. That is why sunsets, where the light must pass through long lengths of dusty air, appear red.

The near infrared, however, has an even easier time passing through dust than the red optical light. NICMOS can look into star formation regions with the superior image quality of Hubble to determine the details of where the star formation occurs. A good example is the iconic Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula, also known as the pillars of creation.

The optical image shows majestic pillars which appear to show star formation over a large volume of space. The NICMOS image, however, shows a different picture. In the NICMOS image, most of the pillars are transparent with no star formation. Stars are only being formed at the tip of the pillars. The optical pillars are just empty dust reflecting the light of a group of nearby stars.

The Eagle Nebula in visible light. NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

In this Hubble Space Telescope image is the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. Here, the pillars are seen in infrared light, which pierces through obscuring dust and gas and unveils a more unfamiliar — but just as amazing — view of the pillars. NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team

The dawning of the age of infrared

When NICMOS was added into the HST in 1997 NASA had no plans for a future infrared space mission. That rapidly changed as the results from NICMOS became apparent. Based on the data from NICMOS, scientists learned that fully formed galaxies existed in the universe much earlier than expected. The NICMOS images also confirmed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down as previously thought. The NHDF infrared images were followed by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field images in 2005, which further showed the power of near infrared imaging of distant young galaxies. So NASA decided to invest in the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, a telescope much larger than HST and completely dedicated to infrared observations.

On Hubble, a near infrared imager was added to the third version of the Wide Field camera which was installed in May of 2009. This camera used an improved version of the NICMOS detector arrays that had more sensitivity and a wider field of view. The James Webb Space Telescope has much larger versions of the NICMOS detector arrays that have more wavelength coverage than the previous versions.

The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in March 2021, followed by the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, form the bulk of future space missions for NASA. These programs were all spawned by the near infrared observations by HST. They were enabled by the original investment for a near infrared camera and spectrometer to give Hubble its infrared eyes. With the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers expect to see the very first galaxies that formed in the universe.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Rodger I. Thompson, Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The lack of women in cybersecurity leaves the online world at greater risk

Women bring a much-needed change in perspective to cybersecurity. Maskot/Maskot via Getty Images

Nir Kshetri, University of North Carolina – Greensboro

Women are highly underrepresented in the field of cybersecurity. In 2017, women’s share in the U.S. cybersecurity field was 14%, compared to 48% in the general workforce.

The problem is more acute outside the U.S. In 2018, women accounted for 10% of the cybersecurity workforce in the Asia-Pacific region, 9% in Africa, 8% in Latin America, 7% in Europe and 5% in the Middle East.

Women are even less well represented in the upper echelons of security leadership. Only 1% of female internet security workers are in senior management positions.

I study online crime and security issues facing consumers, organizations and nations. In my research, I have found that internet security requires strategies beyond technical solutions. Women’s representation is important because women tend to offer viewpoints and perspectives that are different from men’s, and these underrepresented perspectives are critical in addressing cyber risks.

Perception, awareness and bias

The low representation of women in internet security is linked to the broader problem of their low representation in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Only 30% of scientists and engineers in the U.S. are women.

The societal view is that internet security is a job that men do, though there is nothing inherent in gender that predisposes men to be more interested in or more adept at cybersecurity. In addition, the industry mistakenly gives potential employees the impression that only technical skills matter in cybersecurity, which can give women the impression that the field is overly technical or even boring.

Women are also generally not presented with opportunities in information technology fields. In a survey of women pursuing careers outside of IT fields, 69% indicated that the main reason they didn’t pursue opportunities in IT was because they were unaware of them.

Organizations often fail to try to recruit women to work in cybersecurity. According to a survey conducted by IT security company Tessian, only about half of the respondents said that their organizations were doing enough to recruit women into cybersecurity roles.

Gender bias in job ads further discourages women from applying. Online cybersecurity job ads often lack gender-neutral language.

Good security and good business

Boosting women’s involvement in information security makes both security and business sense. Female leaders in this area tend to prioritize important areas that males often overlook. This is partly due to their backgrounds. Forty-four percent of women in information security fields have degrees in business and social sciences, compared to 30% of men.

Female internet security professionals put a higher priority on internal training and education in security and risk management. Women are also stronger advocates for online training, which is a flexible, low-cost way of increasing employees’ awareness of security issues.

Female internet security professionals are also adept at selecting partner organizations to develop secure software. Women tend to pay more attention to partner organizations’ qualifications and personnel, and they assess partners’ ability to meet contractual obligations. They also prefer partners that are willing to perform independent security tests.

Increasing women’s participation in cybersecurity is a business issue as well as a gender issue. According to an Ernst & Young report, by 2028 women will control 75% of discretionary consumer spending worldwide. Security considerations like encryption, fraud detection and biometrics are becoming important in consumers’ buying decisions. Product designs require a trade-off between cybersecurity and usability. Female cybersecurity professionals can make better-informed decisions about such trade-offs for products that are targeted at female customers.

Attracting women to cybersecurity

Attracting more women to cybersecurity requires governments, nonprofit organizations, professional and trade associations and the private sector to work together. Public-private partnership projects could help solve the problem in the long run.

A computer science teacher, center, helps fifth grade students learn programming. AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

One example is Israel’s Shift community, previously known as the CyberGirlz program, which is jointly financed by the country’s Defense Ministry, the Rashi Foundation and Start-Up Nation Central. It identifies high school girls with aptitude, desire and natural curiosity to learn IT and and helps them develop those skills.

The girls participate in hackathons and training programs, and get advice, guidance and support from female mentors. Some of the mentors are from elite technology units of the country’s military. The participants learn hacking skills, network analysis and the Python programming language. They also practice simulating cyber-attacks to find potential vulnerabilities. By 2018, about 2,000 girls participated in the CyberGirlz Club and the CyberGirlz Community.

In 2017, cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks teamed up with the Girl Scouts of the USA to develop cybersecurity badges. The goal is to foster cybersecurity knowledge and develop interest in the profession. The curriculum includes the basics of computer networks, cyberattacks and online safety.

Professional associations can also foster interest in cybersecurity and help women develop relevant knowledge. For example, Women in Cybersecurity of Spain has started a mentoring program that supports female cybersecurity professionals early in their careers.

Some industry groups have collaborated with big companies. In 2018, Microsoft India and the Data Security Council of India launched the CyberShikshaa program in order to create a pool of skilled female cybersecurity professionals.

Some technology companies have launched programs to foster women’s interest in and confidence to pursue internet security careers. One example is IBM Security’s Women in Security Excelling program, formed in 2015.

Attracting more women to the cybersecurity field requires a range of efforts. Cybersecurity job ads should be written so that female professionals feel welcome to apply. Recruitment efforts should focus on academic institutions with high female enrollment. Corporations should ensure that female employees see cybersecurity as a good option for internal career changes. And governments should work with the private sector and academic institutions to get young girls interested in cybersecurity.

Increasing women’s participation in cybersecurity is good for women, good for business and good for society.

[Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter.]

Nir Kshetri, Professor of Management, University of North Carolina – Greensboro

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.