Executive Summary and Community Scan

Women make up less than one-quarter of the cybersecurity workforce, which can lead to less innovation, inferior design, seriously underutilized human potential, and needlessly unfilled jobs in a growing field. In short, this lack of gender diversity means poorer security. Existing efforts to address the issue have begun to create networks among women in the field, but other solutions, particularly those intended to create systemic change in order to help women permeate cybersecurity fields at all levels, have had limited success.

This project convened a diverse group of experts from corporate, academic, nonprofit, and government backgrounds to consider new ideas and implementable strategies to bring women into and up through cybersecurity careers. The participants identified three major opportunities to create scalable change: 1) Empower coordinators to build connectivity among existing efforts and cultivate additional resources, 2) Engage and collaborate with businesses to develop new programs and systems to improve recruitment and retention of women, and 3) Use marketing, entertainment, and media platforms to change the narrative and raise awareness of women in cybersecurity careers.

To meet these opportunities, an actor—or many—must be able to incubate new solutions and implement new ways to utilize existing resources. Making this vision a reality will require resources and a coalition of supporters from both within the cybersecurity and with a broad array of external partners.

This tool is intended to share information on existing efforts supporting women in cybersecurity. In determining the criteria for inclusion in this scan, the authors generally erred on the side of including new efforts. However, there is a balance. Too much content that is not directly relevant makes it harder for users to find what they need.

While we defined "cybersecurity" loosely for this purpose, we did omit efforts that were very tangential. We did not include efforts that are available only to a single, closed population (for example, a student group that exists only at a particular university). We also did not include efforts that were a single news article, slides from a particular presentation, an op-ed piece, or similarly self-contained product.

Do you know of a resource that meets the criteria, but is not listed? Please share with us by emailing bate@newamerica.org.