The technology skills gap isn’t a mere gender issue, but an educational challenge as well. Women are racing to fill those positions, seeing the opportunity to catch up to the number of men employed in computer science. Federal data shows that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College awarded over half of their engineering degrees to women. Additionally, Harvey Mudd College boasts over half of its computer science students are women, and Carnegie Mellon University is catching up to that, at 48 percent.

Leading the efforts to educate all people about computer science is Alison Derbenwick, vice president of Oracle Academy at Oracle. She sat down this week with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle OpenWorld to explain her mission and Oracle’s commitment to educating tomorrow’s future computer scientists, as well as the rise of women in computer science.

This week, theCUBE features Derbenwick as our “Guest of the Week.”

Teaching teachers: It’s mission critical

Derbenwick began the interview by explaining what Oracle Academy’s mission is.

“Oracle is actually committed to supporting education in a lot of different ways. … Oracle Academy is actually our flagship program in education philanthropy. We’re focused on supporting computer science education around the world,” she said. “We currently support 3.1 million students in 110 countries every single year, and we’ve grown the program by 300 percent, basically in the past five years, which is really fabulous. It’s an exciting place to be.”

Derbenwick  added: “We focus on teaching teachers how to teach computer science as part of our Oracle Academy mission so that we can reach as many students as possible over a very long time period. A teacher is in the classroom and teaches students year after year. So if we can teach a teacher once, that teacher can carry that forward for years.”

The computer science gender gap

Furrier spoke about the rise of women obtaining engineering and computer science degrees and asked what is driving the increased numbers of women studying computer science. Derbenwick offered her opinion on what is causing the shift.

“There are a number of factors at play. … They have done some studies that show that women are more focused on what they are going to do when they get out of school then men tend to be. … Women are smart; they look where the jobs are, and there are a lot of jobs that are going unfilled in computer science,” she said.

“We all hear about the digital skills gap. I think that’s true. I also think that there’s just a difference in the way that girls are brought up these days. There is an expectation that you can go out and you can do anything. We are really starting to see things shift, and honestly in places like Carnegie Mellon, Harvey Mudd, Stanford and Berkeley, they have done some amazing work to really revolutionize their curriculum in computer science so that it is friendly to women as well as men.”

How to learn unknown skills

Noting that future technology is still unknown, Furrier wanted to know what the strategy is for training the trainer. Derbenwick feels there are two necessary skills.

“There are two things we need students to know. They need to understand computational thinking, which means they need to be able to take hard problems, break them down into parts and solve them in logical ways. So that’s basically what we are teaching,” she said.

“The other thing students need to learn is how to learn and how to love learning, because what they are going to be doing 20 years from now … they [will] need to be able to figure out how to make it happen. They are the innovators of tomorrow, and that’s really what we are trying to teach them to be.”

Business sense vs. tech skills

Burris talked about a conversation he had with a CEO about breaking down the barriers between the tech people and the business people, mentioning that women are at the top of his list of collaborators. Derbenwick thinks it is a more inclusive and pervasive need.

“I think there is a very broad interest in everyone developing soft skills. I think we risk reinforcing stereotypes when we say … women are collaborators. I think men can be just as collaborative. … Technology has really become ubiquitous in our world and this is what’s driving this need for every student everywhere to have access to computer science education,” she said. “You will use a computer in the course of your daily life going forward, and so this need to understand how to integrate computers effectively into what we do, every day, is definitely a growing need.”

Derbenwick also talked about social justice for everyone and the need for all to have computers, as well as her biggest takeaways from working with Oracle Academy, one of which is an immense respect for teachers.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld.

Photo by SiliconANGLE