Women in Cybersecurity

A little girl always fiddled with her mother’s smartphone and tried to crack the passcode or the pattern on it. She knew exactly what her mother would use as passcode or pattern as she knew her mother inside out!! 🙂 She will try and most of the times, she can crack the passcode within three tries!! How? she will use the concept of social engineering. She was always glued to her mother’s cybersecurity’s posts(whether she understood them fully or not)  – and she was constantly wondering if this can be “hacked” or if “biometrics” can indeed work!! 🙂 Do you think this little girl will be a budding “white hat” hacker in the future and “another woman to reckon with in the cybersecurity domain”? Only time will tell and this mother is eager to know that… 🙂
Now moving on from that little story to the real women who are rocking the InfoSec domain today… 🙂
Introduction:
Women have stepped into all professions today. There were always women in engineering, medicine, marketing, art, management, research and more. But ‘Women in Cybersecurity’ has become a movement towards empowering women and trusting their inherent capabilities to beat the newer threats arising everyday. There are twitter handles like ‘Infosec Girls’, ‘Sec-girl TH’, ‘WomenKnowCyber’ and more. There are similarly several profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

Statistics about ‘Women in Cybersecurity’:

1. The total number of cybersecurity openings is expected to be close to 3.5 million by the year 2021. However, the total number of women in the cybersecurity domain today stands at only 24% of the total workforce.
2. However, more and more women are entering the cybersecurity workforce. 
3. Pay disparity between women InfoSec professionals and their male counterparts is present as in the other professions(my guess, this is due to “family” breaks that most women end up taking)
4. Men and women do identical cybersecurity duties in the industry(as an example, “threat detection/remediation”, “data security”, “network security architecture”)
5. Women are getting a higher education in cybersecurity along with most sought after certifications(CISSP, CISM, CISA etc) too!

Who are some of the women leading the cybersecurity domain?
This is a list of some of the top women in the field in no particular order:

1. Ann Barron-DiCamillo  – is the Vice President Cyber Threat Intelligence and Incident Response at American Express.
2. Niloofar Howe – is the Chief Strategy Officer at RSA
3. Eleanor Dallaway – is the Editor of Infosecurity Magazine

Why should women enter the cybersecurity domain?
Apart from the cliched reason, that there is a huge gender gap and the profession needs more women to join the field, from a personal perspective, it is truly amazing to be in the field! 🙂 When most people are just enjoying on the Internet, we can see the things underneath the Internet with a “magical lens” and we take it as a moral responsibility to catch the threats early.
Women also bring a totally new perspective to the field, thus motivating everyone in the board room to include them more!
Information security is not just programming, hunting for bugs, building firewalls – it encompasses all this and even more! And with the field constantly churning out new hacker avatars – there is never a dull moment!
So, what are you waiting for, ladies? 🙂 Hop onto the InfoSec domain today…:) 
This post is for alphabet ‘W’ of the #Blogchatter challenge. The previous post can be found here.