Microsoft pushes for more women in cybersecurity Microsoft has partnered with organizations around the globe to bring more women into infosec roles, though the devil is in the details. The move aims to help close the security skills gap, as the demand for people to defend against cyberattacks continues to outpace the supply of trained professionals. And it also addresses the …
I work in cyber security and have done for over 20 years.
What the industry needs is more PEOPLE who deeply understand the fundamentals of technologies such as networking, actual programming from experimentation and appreciation of the hardware level.
The industry is diluted with well meaning folk who have gotten an interest in the field and gone on some irrelevant hopelessly outdated and light touch-ethical hacking course or hold a wordy nonsense like CISSP that HR departments then see as a requirement. Ask any of these people to analyse a packet trace, troubleshoot a complex routing problem or write a piece of code to exploit a weakness- hell, even ask some of them to install an operating system (I have direct experience of 'ethical hackers' who couldn't even install windows) and they're stuffed.
For the most part they are running tools that someone else has written with no understanding of what the tool is doing. We have cloud networking engineers who don't understand the infrastructure on which their virtual network runs and the day right clicking and selecting new router instance doesn't work they will be stuffed.
Automation and abstraction has allowed a lot of progress but that progress is going to come to a halt when the folk who develop and understand what the virtual environments work on are gone.
From my experience cybersecurity is emotionally hard. There is a lot of repetition. Also seeing bad things every day makes you feel the World as corrupted and people are bad. This is when you realize that antiviruses are mostly useless. Then seeing phishing in private inbox freaks you out.
Good for Microsoft, if they manage to attract talent. Sometimes the whole area feels like a lost battle. It makes you more compassionate with police, medical personnel, and active military.
Maybe to keep talent, cybersecurity specialists should get additional social benefits. Yes: government funded.
It is not a gender thing. It is mindset.
When it comes to security, no matter how many times you win, it only takes one loss.
You constantly have to study, test, be on call 24/7, be blamed for when vendors don’t know how to write software or even know what it needs to function and do this without funding. It is hard to justify for something that has not happened yet or when funded that it did save their butts.
Maybe women are the smarter side of the species.
Perhaps, to some extend, the field of infosec is not that attractive to the average female sensibility. Infosec is a sweaty forever battle of gotchas and bugs - a unending forever war of secretive stabs in the back. Whereas someone like Barbara Liskov (an example of a woman in software), who's been around since before 1980, has spent her career researching and building new positive and constructive topics within Computer Science.
I certainly wouldn't deny that Women in general face clubby obstacles and glass ceilings. However, that might not be the only factor involved keeping women away from infosec. Female participation in biotech is much greater, although the numbers do drop for the higher leadership positions.
At some point, you're arguing that businesses in this ruthless capitalist system we live in are deliberately forgoing profits and risking being out maneuvered by more inclusive competitors.
That's not to say that inclusion is without benefit or desirability but there's a balance between the two extremes.
"At some point, you're arguing that businesses in this ruthless capitalist system we live in are deliberately forgoing profits and risking being out maneuvered by more inclusive competitors."
Yes, pretty much.
How many articles/comment threads have been full of stories of "Higher ups" not understanding the details of things they were making decisions on? How many "We told you so"s?
The competent little people often only get listened to if we're telling the boss something they want to hear. Look at Twitter...
Gender is an *extra* degree of separation away from those in the proverbial golf club.
"When I sued Microsoft for gender discrimination in pay and promotions, it was because women are historically hired at lower levels and salaries than men and are promoted at a much slower rate," Luta Security founder and CEO Katie Moussouris told The Register. "Our careers languish despite better education, experience, and performance compared to our male peers. This is still true across every industry."
Yikes. Suing for something historic doesn't make sense. I can't sue you for treating me badly because 30 years ago you treated people like me badly.
Likewise, interesting how women suffer despite being *better* than men. Like this whole time, the industry has been suffering due to using, according to her, the inferior gender (men).
The article also neglects to mention that her lawsuit failed. So to assert those things as correct after losing in court trying to prove them to be true, is another yikes from me.
Google did an internal pay review to address the gender pay imbalance and found that actually it was favouring anyone that wasn't a man.
Food for thought.
> But sadly that number drops to 24 percent between the ages of 30 and 38, then down to 13 percent among 39 to 49-year-olds, 12 percent for 50 to 59-year-olds, and 14 percent for the over-60s.
Honestly, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know why that is.
I really wish that we wouldn't diss motherhood so much these days.
If I was super cynical, I would suggest that Microsoft et al are hoping that like a lot of our "industries" we should out-source child rearing to 3rd world countries and instead have women filling their coffers instead of dropping sprogs.
It's not like we aren't seeing a drop in indigenous childbirth, for us to supplement the loss by immigration. So it's kinda happening anyway.
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