Women in cybersecurity are the outliers, and that’s a problem. Here are five reasons we need more women in this field.
A new Netflix scam is making the rounds, and it’s convincing enough that even the cautious might fall for it. It starts with a simple email, an innocuous survey, and a promise of a reward. The branding looks right. The wording is just bland enough to be believable. And the next thing you know, someone’s walking off with your credit card details.
The security world calls it phishing. Most people just call it getting scammed. And it happens every day, partly because criminals have gotten better thanks to AI. But mostly because cybersecurity is still stuck playing defense. It’s a field built on knowing what to look for, but somehow, it keeps overlooking the same thing: itself.
The teams tracking these threats tend to look alike, think alike, and miss the same blind spots. More women in cybersecurity won’t fix everything, but it will fix something.
1. Because the Future is Probably a Phishing Email
Cybersecurity threats are getting smarter. Malware hides in resume attachments. Scammers deepfake CEOs. And yet, the people fighting these threats are still mostly men.
Women in cybersecurity are the outliers, and that’s a problem. It’s not about filling quotas or making hiring panels look progressive. It’s about survival. A security system built by one type of person will have the same type of blind spots. Cybercriminals don’t care about gender. They care about weak points. If the industry keeps pretending half the population doesn’t belong here, the real vulnerability isn’t the code. It’s the people writing it.
2. Because the Industry is Still a Boys’ Club
Only about 25% of the cybersecurity workforce is female. That’s an improvement from past years when the percentage was closer to a statistical error. But it’s still a room overwhelmingly filled with men who, at some point, will joke about how their wives can’t figure out Wi-Fi. The assumption is always the same: women don’t do technical. Women do marketing. Women do HR. Women send emails reminding the real cybersecurity experts about their mandatory phishing awareness training.
This is nonsense, of course. Women have been hacking things since hacking was a thing. Take Katie Moussouris, who helped shape the concept of bug bounty programs. Or Parisa Tabriz, Google’s self-proclaimed “Security Princess.” These aren’t outliers. They’re just the few who made it through a system that still treats them as anomalies. The industry doesn’t need more women for diversity reports. It needs them because a security field built entirely by one demographic has never worked out well for anyone.
3. Because the Hacker Bro Aesthetic is Getting Old
Women in cybersecurity exist, of course, but they’re rarely in the picture. The entertainment industry has spent decades building this mythology—brilliant but socially inept men protecting the digital world with sheer brainpower and an ungodly amount of caffeine. It’s a neat story, except it isn’t true. Cybersecurity isn’t just about typing furiously into a command line; it’s about human behavior, crisis response, and risk analysis. And yet, women are still asked if they’re “a fit.”
Other fields have done this before. Law, medicine, aviation. The same skepticism, the same excuses. Too emotional. Too soft. Not wired for the pressure. And yet, no one asks if men are “a fit” for nursing. Somehow, the ability to insert a catheter isn’t questioned, but securing critical infrastructure is. It’s almost like the issue was never skill to begin with.
4. Because the Field Pretends Biology Doesn’t Exist
There’s an article about menopause making the rounds, and it reads like a public service announcement for half the population and a horror story for the rest. Hot flashes, brain fog, anxiety—things that will, at some point, hit most women in cybersecurity. Most workplaces act like none of this is happening. The same way they act like pregnancy isn’t a nine-month reality, or that women aren’t routinely calculating the safest route to the parking lot after a late shift.
Cybersecurity loves to say that the human element in cybersecurity is the biggest vulnerability. Yet the field—so obsessed with risk assessments and threat mitigation—somehow fails to consider its own blind spots. Women make up 42% of the global workforce and 31.7% of senior leaders, yet they’re still scarce in cybersecurity’s upper ranks. Half the workforce starts at entry level, but by the time they get to the C-suite, only 25% remain. Maybe it’s the glass ceiling. Maybe it’s the chronic lack of bathroom stalls at tech conferences.
The industry treats women’s needs as an afterthought—until someone files a complaint. But if the goal is stronger security, wouldn’t it help to have people who actually understand half the world’s population?
5. Because Cybersecurity is More Than Just Coding
The problem with cybersecurity is that it’s obsessed with code. Not security, not risk, not the small, inconvenient fact that most data breaches don’t happen because someone forgot to update a firewall, but because someone—usually a very human, very fallible someone—clicked the wrong link. Yet hiring managers continue to act like the only qualification that matters is whether you can reverse-engineer malware in your sleep.
Which is why women in cybersecurity remain a statistical anomaly. Not because they can’t code, but because the industry keeps pretending that coding is the only thing that matters. The real threats are psychological. Social engineering scams don’t rely on bad code; they rely on people being predictable. Who better to understand that than women, who have spent their entire lives performing risk assessments? Walking alone at night? Risk assessment. Rejecting a man’s advances without bruising his ego? Crisis management. Navigating online spaces where harassment is one password reset away? Human behavior analysis.
A firewall won’t suddenly work better if a man installs it. A phishing scam won’t feel less convincing if a woman spots the trick. The industry is too busy patching software vulnerabilities to notice its own.
Parting Thoughts
So, if you hire people, consider hiring more women. If you mentor, pull someone up who wasn’t handed the shortcut. If you’re in the room where decisions happen, ask why it still looks the same as it did ten years ago.
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