Case Study: SENAC

Overview
SENAC is a private tertiary education institution that offers a wide range of continuing education courses in subjects including hotel management, technology, fashion design, tourism, languages, business, and health care. It is based in Sao Paulo with branches throughout Brazil. Most students are 18-25 years old, middle-class, and with a high school education. The backgrounds of students within the Cisco Networking Academy Program include a mix of high school and university degrees.

The Cisco Networking Academy Program began at SENAC in Sao Paulo in the fall of 2000. There are four Cisco Networking Academy classes with 20 students in each. One class consists of recent secondary school graduates who will continue onto university, following the Cisco course. The other 3 classes consist of technicians. Students with the highest grades in secondary school were selected for the pre-university class and the technicians were selected based on previous experience in computers. Enrollment in the Cisco Networking Academy Program is 90% male and 10% female. There are no female Cisco instructors, but 50% of IT instructors at SENAC are female.

Current Strategies for Encouraging Female Participation:

• Encourage a mix of males and females in the classroom. All women who submitted applications to the Cisco Networking Academy Program were accepted based upon their qualifications.
• Provide in-class support to female students to assist them with lab components. Instructors said they give more attention to women in the lab components of the curriculum to help them "use the tools, hardware." They make "handling equipment obligatory" in the class and "do not want women to feel they are different, so women must handle equipment just like men."
  
• Assign Equality of Assignments
  Instructors are trained to give male and female students the same duties or roles within the labs and have them work together. "We try to put men and women together in groups, so we never isolate them."

Possible Constraints & Issues Raised:

Recruitment

• IT jobs are not typical for women. While women work with software and operational systems, they are not found in hardware and maintenance type jobs.
• Female instructors are sometimes scarce. Instructors did feel that having more female Cisco Network Academy instructors would help attract more females.

Job Placement

• In keeping with other research on women's lower salaries in Brazil, instructors at SENAC confirmed that women do not earn the same salaries in the IT sector. They find "there is some discrimination in networking careers, but it depends on the company."

Suggested Actions:

• Adopting institutional policies to encourage female participation in the program
• Showing media and advertisements of women working with hardware
• Providing young females more "hand-on" access to technology starting in secondary school
• Raising awareness among IT sector employees to understand the real economic benefits of hiring women. In the US, companies that hire equal numbers of women are more competitive.
• Raising awareness of women on their legal rights for benefits and equal pay.