Empowering Cybersecurity: ESET Expands Canadian Scholarships for Women 2025

At a glance:

• ESET’s Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship turns ten in 2025.
• The Canadian program gets more awards and larger ones this year.
• New Future Leader awards recognize students early in their studies.
• Women still make up a small share of the security workforce.

Ten years of ESET’s scholarship

ESET launched its Women in Cybersecurity North American Scholarship in 2016. This year it turns ten. Celeste Blodgett, Vice President of Human Resources at ESET North America, started the program at the company’s San Diego headquarters to help women heading into technology fields, and it has since made awards to more than 25 recipients in the U.S. and Canada and spread to Australia, the United Kingdom and Singapore.

What changes in Canada for 2025

On March 7, 2025, ESET said it would expand the Canadian awards. Canadian students can apply for two $5,000 Cybersecurity Trailblazer awards for applicants with strong technical skills and a clear focus on security. Five new $1,000 Future Leader Awards mark the anniversary. Across North America, ESET plans to award $45,000 in scholarships this year.

The gap ESET wants to close

Women are badly underrepresented in security jobs, well under 25% of the workforce. The 2024 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study put the figure at 14.4%. ESET says the expanded program is meant to bring more women into the field from different backgrounds and to recognize both proven technical skill and early promise.

What ESET says

“Around the world, ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship recipients are showcasing a passion for protecting digital citizens, yet with women only accounting for less than one-fifth of the cybersecurity workforce there is much work to be done,” Blodgett said when announcing the expansion.

What past recipients went on to do

Past winners show what the money can do. Anushka Khare, a Canadian recipient in 2022, is now a Security Program Manager at Microsoft. She has said the award gave her the financial freedom to focus on her studies, take advanced security courses and get hands-on experience.

Who should apply

Ten years in, the program is a small but steady pipeline into a field that still struggles to hire women. Applications for the 2025 round closed on April 8, 2025. Students in Canada who plan to study security should watch for the next round, and employers looking for ways to widen their own hiring could borrow the model.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.