Every year on March 8th (for over a century), organizations from around the world come together to celebrate International Women’s Day. It’s a day to celebrate the accomplishments of our female colleagues, mentors, and heroes’. Even more importantly, the day represents a call to action for the continued goal of gender equality and parity. I am privileged as a DomainTools employee to be surrounded by an astounding number of female role models: marketing and account management leadership, our CFO, associated general council, scrum master, PMM, engineers, HR/operations, marketers, security researchers, account managers, and sales people. There are many women I admire here in our office.
This year’s campaign for International Women’s Day is #BalanceforBetter. According to their website the intention behind this particular campaign is that “a balanced world is a better world”. They pose an important questions which is: how can you help forge a more gender-balanced world? The answer, is simple. We must celebrate the achievements of those we work with on a daily basis, raise awareness against bias, and most importantly, take action for equality.
I’d like to take a second to call out an issue we face in the infosecurity space: according to a study by Frost & Sullivan, Women make up only 11% of the information security workforce, a figure that has not experienced growth in the past 5 years. Additionally, as many as 85% of women have experienced some level of discrimination at professional security conferences, and over half have experienced harassment at the same events. As an industry, we need to do better and create more inclusive spaces for women. And with that, I want to do my duty and relay some cybersecurity superstars that inspire me, and thank them for being a force to be reckoned with in the industry:
Tarah M. Wheeler (Head of Data Trust & Red Team at Splunk)
Emili Evripidou (Information security manager at Deloitte)
Lesley Carhart (Principal Threat Hunter at Dragos)
Window Snyder (CSO at Fastly and co-author of Threat Modeling)
Wendy Nather (Research Director at the Retail Cyber Intelligence Sharing Center)
Eve Adams (Team Lead of HALOCK’s Information Security Recruiting Function)
Virtual Girl Marion (Microsoft)
Cecily Joseph (VP of Corporate Responsibility at Symantec)
Thank you for your dedication and talent, and also to the unsung female heroes. Finally, to my fellow DomainTools teammates, it’s a pleasure working with you, and I look forward to seeing what we all accomplish together. Oh, and don’t forget to tune into Breaking Badness every Wednesday at 9 AM PT to hear the one, the only, Emily Hacker.
