What do Haredi women in Israel do? This one works in cyber security. 

Tikvah Katz works for Intel, as part of a team making sure that Intel’s computer chips are not hackable. Quite important, given that these chips are in nearly every PC in the world.

If that doesn’t strike you as a typical career for a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) woman in Israel to be doing, you’d be right. In fact, in Israel, the jobs in cyber are almost exclusively occupied by graduates from the Army’s elite cyber units. How would a religious woman (who, of course, hasn’t been in the Army), break into that club?

For Tikvah, it was through Cyber Elite, a JCT program that provides intensive cyber training to outstanding graduates of the college’s degrees in software engineering and computer science, while placing them in cyber startups as well as in cyber departments of multinational, aerospace, and defense companies.

Tikvah’s story is not atypical for JCT, a trailblazer in providing high-quality science and technology education to Israel’s religious men and women, preparing them to enter the workforce and shattering the stereotype about their lagging contributions to Israeli society.

The challenges for Haredi women aren’t just educational. Tikvah says: “I’m actually working right now in a group that’s all men – I’m the only woman. And I was used to being in school with only girls. JCT gave me the tools and support to integrate into what was a very different environment for me.”