Why Mary Can Hack: Effectively Introducing High School Girls to Cybersecurity

The gender gap is one of the main concerns in the IT sector, in general, and in cybersecurity, in particular. Although well known, the problem is multifaceted and some of its root causes may be found in the education system. In the last years, many initiatives have been proposed targeting high-school students that might be interested in cybersecurity. Many of these programs rely on capture-the-flag (CTF) competitions to gradually form technical skills in an entertaining way. Despite these efforts, however, the number of girls that attend and complete these programs is still often unsatisfactory. In this work, we present the most significant outcomes of CyberTrials, a CTF-based cybersecurity program for Italian high school girls that this year enrolled 941 students. The two main features of CyberTrials are its peculiar organization and its gaming platform, which introduces some crucial novelties w.r.t. other similar initiatives. Both these aspects are presented and discussed in this paper. The results show that our methodology could effectively engage the participants and that when properly organized, CTF-based events have the potential to catalyze the learning process.