Women students in the School of Information Studies launch new student organization

Women students in the School of Information Studies launch new student organizationMarch 28, 2002Judy Holmesjlholmes@syr.edu

Women in Technology (WIT), a new student group at Syracuse University, will hold a kick-off event, “Women in Technology: A Dialogue Among Alumni, Students and Faculty,” from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. April 5 in the Center for Science and Technology, Room 4-201. The event is open to the campus community.

Panelists include Sunday Gulbicki ’00, a system associate with Fidelity Investments in Merrimack, N.H.; Jennifer Sodha ’98, a project manager with IBM in Poughkeepsie; and Cinthya Aguilar ’00 of GE in Schnectady.

WIT was founded by a group of women students in the School of Information Studies who were searching for a forum in which they could address issues that surround the lack of female role models in the information technology field both in academia and in the corporate world.

Women now comprise less than 25 percent of the student body in the School of Information Studies, according to Elizabeth Liddy, professor and director of the Center for Natural Language Processing. “We need to even the playing field early on in women’s academic careers,” Liddy says. “Socialization is a key factor.”

WIT president Dana Tivary, a senior in the School of Information Studies, says that women tend not to participate in class as much as their male counterparts. “By offering women a forum for discussing their concerns, we hope that women students will begin to feel more comfortable in courses that their male counterparts are statistically more assertive,” she says.

The group plans to work cooperatively with other campus organizations and to extend invitations to women in technical majors in the University’s other schools and colleges. More information about the organization can be obtained from its Web site, which is linked off of the School of Information Studies site at http://istweb.syr.edu.