Based on the book Women Know Cyber: 100 Fascinating Females Fighting Cybercrime, this 2021 documentary from Cybercrime Magazine meets women working in cybersecurity, and explains why the field needs many more of them.
A field that needs women
The film quotes predictions from Cybersecurity Ventures: women would hold about a quarter of cybersecurity jobs worldwide by the end of 2021, nearly double the 2013 figure but still far too low; there would be 3.5 million unfilled positions; and cybercrime would cost the world $6 trillion a year. The digital age is rewriting the world around us, one speaker says, and women, half the population, are not at the table.
Several women argue that diversity of thought makes teams stronger against attackers who constantly invent new methods, and that the field is not only for coders: it needs strategists, communicators, data experts and people who understand human behaviour. One explains that she came from advertising and public relations, became a technical recruiter, then moved into cybersecurity.
Many paths in
The documentary profiles very different careers: the head of the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic School; a Mastercard executive leading digital identity; a chief executive of a security company; a professor at Tennessee Tech, Ambareen Siraj, who arrived from Bangladesh and built the university’s cybersecurity programme; an administrative assistant who became a certified forensic examiner after her manager gave her a chance. The former head of the Girl Scouts explains how girls asked for badges about online privacy, leading to a cybersecurity programme with Palo Alto Networks.
The Israeli hacker Keren Elazari describes how a teenage hacker girl in a film changed her life, and founded the Leading Cyber Ladies network. Other young women cite the character Felicity Smoak in Arrow, or summer camps that turned curiosity into a vocation. The message is the same throughout: girls need to see women in these jobs to imagine themselves there.