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The global cybersecurity workforce remains stagnant at just 11 percent, according to the 2017 Women in Cybersecurity Report[PDF], co-authored by The Executive Women's Forum on Information Security, Risk Management and Privacy (EWF) and the Center for Cyber Safety and Education, which partnered with (ISC)2. The report is based on survey responses from over 19,000 information security professionals in 170 countries.
Report co-author and EWF founder Joyce Brocaglia says the most important finding of the report is that "it isn't just one thing" causing the persistent shortage of women in information security, but rather a "confluence of events."
The findings, says Brocaglia, show that women are underrepresented, are paid less than their male colleagues, feel undervalued, and feel discriminated against. "That's what's leading to this stagnation."
The shortage is severe in North America, with only 14 percent of the infosec workforce composed of women, but even more striking elsewhere; women only claim 7 percent of the workforce in Europe, 8 percent in Asia, and 5 percent in the Middle East, according to the report.
"Common sense should tell you we should be doing more about this," says co-author and EWF executive director Lynn Terwoerds, noting that in order to solve the cybersecurity skills shortage, the industry must do a better engaging the female population.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:51AM (12 children)
1. get together with like minded females in the field, esp. senior ones
2. found startup with high female percentage, it is not like infosec needs huge infrastructure.
3. compete
4. win
5. stop feeling undervalued
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @01:01PM (11 children)
6. Watch the Henhouse tear itself apart from infighting and backstabbing as in reality women aren't that much better at getting along then men are, especially when you concentrate them so densely.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:35PM (10 children)
Aaannnd I wonder where women's feeling of discrimination comes from....
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:12PM (4 children)
Honestly, AC isn't far wrong. One of the worst places I ever worked was a retail gig at a chain clothing store. Most of my co-workers were women too, but far from getting along well, I just got instantly shut out by most of them because they already had their little clique. I guess it didn't help that half of them were still in high school, which means I could be their mother if I had made some very very bad decisions in 7th or 8th grade, but still. Ironically, I got along better with the one guy in there who's about my age than most of the other women.
People, in general, suck.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:53PM (2 children)
People form groups. Its in our genes because we are a social species.
The fact that women also form groups doesn't negate the fact that the dominate groups in this society are primarily male and white.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday March 21 2017, @05:21PM (1 child)
Modded you up because while the "white male" thing is overblown nowadays but it isn't incorrect or trollish. However, focusing on that aspect isn't very helpful. Humans group together, you should have stopped there. If I go to Japan I can expect lots of racial bias, or so I've heard. Same for many other countries. We should focus more on breaking these barriers intellectually and culturally without playing the blame and shame game.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:34PM
> while the "white male" thing is overblown nowadays
Yeah, this article is all about how overblown it is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @05:16PM
I won't argue with "people suck" although I do think it is the vocal minority that makes it happen along with the silent ones who may not agree but don't want to rock the boat. We let the sociopaths get away with things because its a giant pain in the ass to deal with them!! However, as a guy I can clearly tell you that shit happens for men and women alike. There are differences, but cliques are not a female only thing.
(Score: 2) by sjwt on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:35PM (4 children)
Maybe its just the bar-kitchen and warehousing-sales industry but of the 5 female and 1 male HR managers I have known and talked to from a management position or post leaving company position, they have all said basically the same thing.. "Women account for causing 95% of our HR problems" now in the bar/kitchen side the split was about 70/30 female to male, in the two warehouses I worked in with office and industrial supplies the split was about 40F/60M in the warehouse and 60F/40M with about the same levels of staff in each section over all and about 40-50% female lower to mid managers, admittedly in our state we had Zero top level managers, but we only had 3 managers over all, a very small sample size all up im talking about 3-400 staff across two jobs, 17 years and three years, five roles and three different locations.
Of course this more then likely isnt typical, but the HR managers I spoke to seemed to think it was more typical than not.
But here is an interesting report about a feminists founded female feminist only workforce
https://web.archive.org/web/20090408032341/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-handbags-tears-toilets-When-producer-launched-women-TV-company-thought-shed-kissed-goodbye-conflict-.html [archive.org]
I also would love to note while there has been massive movements and slow success to get women into the glass ceiling, there has been little to no effort to get women into the much higher biased glass basement of danger and death in the workforce, you dont hear complaints about the 90% male dominated dangerous industries where pay is high due to risk to life.. if one really wanted to shift averages up, that's a better place to start.
Dont forget that single never married women who have never had kids under 30 out earn men in the same category by upto 20%, and that women now are making 60% of college graduates and are getting more and more funding to increase those numbers into fields they are not going into, it wont be long before that 60F/40M reaches 70F/30M. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-10/young-childless-women-earn-more-than-men-fact-check/5712770 [abc.net.au]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:39PM (2 children)
> "Women account for causing 95% of our HR problems"
(1) Confirmation bias. Once someone has decided that's the case, they will remember confirming incidents and forget contraindicating incidents.
(2) Even if that were true, how many problems do they have in total? If 98% of women are no problem at all and 99.9% of men are no problem at all, then is it meaningful to say that women account for 95% of the problems? If I told you that 98% of the time you would win a bet, would you decline to take that bet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:18AM
aaaaand what about the link he provided? The one with the focus on being women-only? :-)
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:02AM
Women account for 75% of our HR problems.
Our HR department has 3 women and 1 man. No confirmation bias, just simple maths.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Thursday March 23 2017, @01:29AM
She probably would've gotten a lot farther if she'd picked women she knew had the merit instead of women who just thought it'd be great to be surrounded by women and didn't tell them that's what she was doing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @11:01AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:25PM (2 children)
So where's the facts, then? Or are you just repeating your own lie?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:45AM
Diff AC here but most of the women programmer I worked with over the years made more than I did. I was not exactly making peanuts either. Some of them are doing very well too. They are usually in high paying exec positions now.
Worry not for what others make and worry about yourself and you will find life a lot easier.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @08:58AM
Progressive [theguardian.com] liar [time.com] is lazy [lmgtfy.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @11:13AM (29 children)
How many people in cybersecurity have blue eyes? How about short people? Left-handed people? What, you don't keep those statistics?
Gender is no different. Nobody should care about your plumbing. Can you do the job?
Just yesterday, I had the school administration ask me to change my grading to pass just one more student (the best "failing" grade), because she's a woman and "we need more women in IT". Needless to say, I've never had such a request for a man. Anyway, I refused, because her exam shows too little understanding of the material. She may be the best of the failing students, but she is still a failing student.
Just as a sanity check, I related the story to my wife (who has a doctorate in computer science). Her response? "Scandalous!" She doesn't want people bending the rules for women, because that leads to people questioning the competence of all women in the field, including those who are genuinely qualified.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by c0lo on Tuesday March 21 2017, @11:26AM
Oh, come on, don't be so radical. You mean... not even I should care? (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @11:52AM (18 children)
the point of affirmative action, as I understand it, is the following: society as a whole will be better off in the long term if we let members of underrepresented populations cheat a little bit, because once they pass certain barriers, they will help with communication between the two segments of the population; the resulting increase of integration leads to an easing of the social stresses.
so yes. if your employer says they apply affirmative action, you are supposed to give out extra points to girls.
I have not studied sociology, I don't know if affirmative action works or not, but unless you actually implement it and look at the results for a couple of generations, you can't really claim it doesn't work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @11:58AM (3 children)
follow-up: if I am ever personally in charge of picking people to work as fire-fighters, I will discriminate based on athletic ability and a couple of other factors, and I will actively fight attempts to apply affirmative action to the selection process. I guess the same would be true for medical professionals.
depending on how convincing future arguments will be, I may change my mind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:41PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:07PM
Because political considerations and diversity points may be important to you too, and you can offload onto the competent people what the incompetents can't handle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:56PM
In many (larger?) orgs, management hires to fill headcount positions, not to pick a pool of the most qualified candidates. After all, it is more difficult to plan replacing rockstars, when at large the available talent is average.
If the work doesn't get done, then the manager needs more headcount :).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:20PM (12 children)
"I don't know if affirmative action works or not, but unless you actually implement it and look at the results for a couple of generations"
We've been applying affirmative action for women in IT for decades. There are now fewer women in IT than when I started my career back in the early 1980s. So my personal experience goes back 35 years.
It clearly does not work.
In fact, I suspect affirmative action is counterproductive, for two reasons.
First, as my wife pointed out: People rightly question the competence of every woman, if they know that some number of them have received qualifications that they are not entitled to. If women are, in fact, disadvantaged in their later careers, look no farther for the reason.
Second, every women is in the spotlight. The women in my classes are continuously surveyed and interviewed. Are you treated fairly? Have you experienced sexism? What's it like, being such a small minority? I suspect this drives a lot of women away.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:51PM (11 children)
First, as my wife pointed out: People rightly question the competence of every woman, if they know that some number of them have received qualifications that they are not entitled to
Oh your wife said that? Lol, nice try.
The fact is that tons of men have received qualifications they were not entitled to because as men they got passes for their screw ups. And that hasn't disadvantaged men in the field.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:00PM (3 children)
"First, as my wife pointed out: People rightly question the competence of every woman, if they know that some number of them have received qualifications that they are not entitled to"
"Oh your wife said that? Lol, nice try."
In fact, my wife *did* say that. She holds a doctorate in CS from one of the top 50 universities in the world. She has been through all this crap, and has an acidic resentment for any appearance special treatment. She doesn't need it, and doesn't care to have her qualifications called into question by people who pay more attention to her gender than to her abilities. Would it be nicer to have more women in the field? She'd agree wholeheartedly - as long as they are actually capable.
I happen to agree with her, but from a different perspective: I think people should be treated as individuals. Your eye color, the length of your hair, your gender, whether you're left-handed or right-handed - none of those have anything to do with your abilities, and they should all be ignored. Paying attention to irrelevant characteristics is, imho, counterproductive to the stated goal of equal opportunity.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:06PM
According to you, she should have replied "Wouldn't it be nicer if there were more blue eyes in the field?" So, why did she wholeheartedly agree to something so inherently inane?
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:38PM (1 child)
Its revealing that your entire response was about your being offended at being called out for vaj-washing your misogyny.
And nothing at all to say about how men are swimming in boys-club affirmative action.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:50PM
You'd make everybody miserable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:01PM
Oh your wife said that? Lol, nice try.
And an AC said:
The fact is that tons of men have received qualifications they were not entitled to because as men they got passes for their screw ups. And that hasn't disadvantaged men in the field.
Quite the argument from authority there.
Also a ton of men is around 10-12 people. There are a lot more men than that. It'd help my suspension of disbelief, if you wouldn't use a metric that could describe ~2*10^-5% of men in the US and still be true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:01PM
I mean, what do you mean?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:20PM (4 children)
I don't exactly agree with GP's view of affirmative action, though I do agree with him (and his wife) that it can create a general atmosphere of suspicion over minorities in the workforce, who are often assumed to have benefitted from it, even without requisite qualifications.
Have you seriously NEVER heard somebody claim that "he got that job because he's black" or "she only got that position because she's a woman"?
The fact is that tons of men have received qualifications they were not entitled to because as men they got passes for their screw ups. And that hasn't disadvantaged men in the field.
"Screw ups" are different from a general assumption of lack of competence for an entire group. A "screw up" is generally an individual thing, overlooked by a manager or whatever, often which only a limited number of people know about. Even if it's more widely known, it can eventually be forgotten.
If you're a woman or black or whatever, you can't hide that. And if other folks suspect that most women or blacks or whatever receive special treatment, they can begin to make assumptions or be resentful when someone gets a promotion or whatever -- even when said promotion was entirely deserved. It's NOT a reason to do away with all efforts toward affirmative action, but it probably IS a good reason why many businesses did away with "quota" systems within a few years after they were implemented. Because a quota system explicitly says: "You have to have at least X percent of blacks/women/whatever, no matter what," which is basically telling every worker at your company that the blacks/women/whatever are likely less qualified for their jobs. Most companies looking for diversity today are less regimented in their hiring/promotion, etc. practices, but the legacy of quotas has definitely bred resentment in some situations.
(For what it's worth, my own experience and knowledge about job searches, promotions, etc. is that a lot of fields have an excess of qualified people looking for work these days. So the way I've seen "affirmative action" work in recent years isn't about hiring/promoting less qualified people for diversity's sake, but rather giving a slight preference to a minority group when a decision basically comes down to a "tie" among a set of equally well-qualified people. But that hasn't stopped the perception among some people that minorities who end up in these positions may be less qualified.)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:45PM (3 children)
> Have you seriously NEVER heard somebody claim that "he got that job because he's black" or "she only got that position because she's a woman"?
The point is that I have NEVER heard somebody claim that "he got that job because he's white" or that "he only got that position because he's a man."
Despite the fact that it is the case ALL THE TIME.
> "Screw ups" are different from a general assumption of lack of competence for an entire group.
No they aren't. At best you are splitting hairs. Nobody implies that a minority is incompetent when they demonstrate competence. Only when they do a mediocre job or actually screw up. But when a white man does a mediocre job nobody ever, ever blames it on their whiteness.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:54PM (2 children)
The reason nobody blames the whiteness is because whiteness was never a factor in his hiring in the first place. To borrow a phrase: Get it, yet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:50PM (1 child)
Just because it wasn't a literal checkbox on the qualifications list doesn't mean it wasn't a factor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:28PM
Get it yet?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:25PM
Its also a critical part of the divide and conqueror strategy to make sure there's a population of better skilled people being cheated out of a job for demographic reasons, because the burning hatred can be manipulated for fun and profit by those at the top.
Imagine how sad certain people were when german-americans, irish-americans, french-americans all melded in to the "fucking white male". Think of the power we could manipulate if we could divide people...
Its kinda like union-busting.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:57PM (7 children)
Affirmative action is the wrong solution for a real problem.
There is a real problem: A bias against women.
This is a real problem and has been tested multiple times byt putting a 'female' or 'male' name above identical resumes and looking at the responses. The same problem exists if you put a 'foreign' name on top of the same resumes. Humans tend to have a bias against anything different from themselves.
Where it goes wrong is when we try to fix it with affirmative action or quotas. It introduces opportunities for the less qualified and lowers the achievements of the particular group as a whole and only increases the bias.
It also does not fix the bias of those hiring.
Better solutions remove the identifiers for the bias such as name and gender and focus on merrit.
(Having a name is not an achievement)
In schools: Grade anonymized papers on their content.
In hiring: Do the first selection on anonymized resumes. (At some point you have to do a face-to-face interview, but you can still improve a lot by making sure the initial rounds are fair)
When such solutions are done properly they also prevent those turned down from playing the victim card successfully.
And those with a bias might eventually notice that more women get through the first rounds than they expected, which will slowly erode some of the bias...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 21 2017, @01:30PM
The real problem is one step out, where philosophically people can't decide if they want to be free to associate (or not) with people of their choice not depending on large scale demographics or government enforcement at the point of a gun of ratios, while simultaneously thinking it would be fun to live in a perfect meritocracy where there are no such things as likes and dislikes just commodity employment and socializing. And it sure would be nice to have both at the same time, but often enough you can't.
Fundamentally affirmative action is just arranged marriages but for the workplace, for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:08PM
It could be that unqualified individuals are over-represented among women in the various fields in question, and therefore organizations have become wary of hiring women.
After all, if all you have is a resume, affirmative action implies that the man is more qualified.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:57PM (3 children)
There is a real problem: A bias against women.
This is a real problem and has been tested multiple times by putting a 'female' or 'male' name above identical resumes and looking at the responses. The same problem exists if you put a 'foreign' name on top of the same resumes. Humans tend to have a bias against anything different from themselves.
While I tend to agree with your point, I am not sure that your argument supports it. I remember an article in Science (or Nature) about a similar setup in the context of science. Women were disadvantaged but even more so by other women. The interpretation was that there is a fundamental bias against women that cannot be evaded even by women themselves. There is another possible interpretation: women are advantaged in their scientific career and other women know this better than men. They therefore correct achievements of women downwards more strongly than men.
I personally believe that there are biases against women but also in their favor. What is certain IMO is that there are biases in all directions against all sorts of people. For example, being modest will get you punished in most situations. I agree with your proposal of making as much as possible anonymous, in as many aspects as possible, as this would help biases beyond those concerning gender.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @05:24PM
That is called cultural bias. Women and men are equally affected by the culture they are raised in. Lots of women believe in horrible stereotypes, doesn't take away from the problem of discrimination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @07:43PM (1 child)
> I personally believe that there are biases against women but also in their favor.
Yes, it is called benevolent sexism and its the scraps given to women who conform to social expectations.
But as soon as you break those norms, you become a "bad girl" and even those scraps are withheld.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 22 2017, @01:58AM
THANK YOU! This needed so badly to be said. I'm one of those "bad girls." I'm apparently scary-looking (men do *not* like a six foot woman, especially not one with permanent Grumpy Cat face and knee-length hair), opinionated, smart, and don't take shit from anyone. This is a really bad combination. I'm femme enough that it's not obvious I'm gay but that alone would throw me in the "bad girls" camp too.
You better believe those scraps get taken away pretty damn fast. It is incredible, just fucking *incredible,* how many d00dbr0s out there seem to think half the human race exists as basically mobile incubators/masturbation aids with cooking skills. It seems like my very existence is perceived as offensive by some people, and they sometimes let me know very directly.
Being a woman isn't as bad as it was even 50 years ago but damn, do you need to have a thick fucking skin. It feels like being an alien on my own home planet sometimes. You get very, very tired, mostly, and it becomes difficult not to get cynical and worn down and just go into a kind of defensive catatonia. Being poor doesn't help, either.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:12PM
there is also the problem that *outside* the work environment women are treated differently, and on average they can't be as efficient as men because they are simply more tired (cooking, cleaning, etc).
I was under the impression affirmative action aims to compensate for this; once enough women are in similar work situations as men, the hope is that things will start to balance in the home as well.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday March 22 2017, @08:34AM
People generally don't get much discrimination because they have blue eyes or are left-handed. Maybe being short does attract some abuse sometimes, which is of course something that should be addressed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:19PM
noting that in order to solve the cybersecurity skills shortage, the industry must do a better engaging the female population.
In a couple decades of dealing with "cyber security people" some competent some less so, I never identified the problem with the less competent ones as lack of female gender identification. The bad ones tended to be just low mental horsepower dumb, or unable to learn, or had no situational/systemic awareness, or were arrogant pricks on a quest for control, or were lazy and pencil whipped security patch upgrades. None of that corresponds directly with having girl-plumbing down there. The women seemed smoothly spread across the bell curve of competence although women are somewhat more intelligent than men so they tend not to take a shitty job like cyber security mall-cop and instead go into management or dev work. I worked for two women managers in my career and both were good managers, so "forcing" them out of IT and engineering management and into cyber-mall-cop roles would likely lower overall competency of the entire system. Maybe if we could inject women with something that makes them stupider (lead or mercury compounds?) then they'd be dumb enough to take cyber-mall-cop jobs instead of management or software dev or EE or math PHD or similar higher performing jobs. The only trend I noticed about incompetency in general was the more letters after someones name the more incompetent they were... so some dude I met at HOPE who dropped out of high school and cracks software for fun as a hobby is far more likely to be competent than a CCISSPPCRIPSY MFer with a PHD in CS who's never actually used a debugger or a protocol analyzer although he read a book once and even wrote a paper about it. In that way if women show up in the graph you might really be looking at a graph of "women as high school dropouts" or "women as a percentage of arrogant massively underexperienced academics" swamping the actual direct data of wimmens as cyber-mall-cops.
So the above handles the individual scale issues, where a woman uniquely destined to be a cyber-mall-cop is gonna be fine. On a larger scale, there seems no reason to assume women would be superior to men at cybersecurity. There's a shortage of African pygmy tribe members at my local NBA team but I don't think fixing that imbalance by hiring a bunch of 3 feet tall people to play pro basketball is going to improve the teams performance. Or if it does, that's very interesting. Its possible that women psychologically would be poorer cyber-mall-cops seeing as there's no reason they'd "have to be" equal. When you think of mall-cops usually you don't think of a young woman so naturally a cyber-mall-cop role is probably best held by a dude in terms of psychological expectations. Its an illogical astrological type of thinking, kinda like if my car mechanic were a girl then my car would naturally run better than if my car mechanic were a guy, its just kinda ridiculous. Now if you'll excuse me, my plumber is a Pisces so I need to find a roofing contractor who's an Aeries or a Taurus or else greek mythological sparks are gonna fly because the "ratios aren't perfect" WTF that means.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:45PM
four words: "it's a secret!" totally!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @01:32PM
women in penetration testing.
(it's a silly joke, lighten up)
(Score: 2) by rob_on_earth on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:45PM
I completed an interview with a prospective developer who happened to be a woman and was not happy with her lack of technical expertise. The head of department called me over the moment the candidate had left and asked how she did. When I explained she did not have the knowledge we needed he called over my boss and explained that the department needed "Better ratios" and that he would get HR to make her an offer.
Funny thing was, she accepted the offer and then turned the role down. Apparently she was only doing the interview to pressure her current employer to up her pay.
Makes me wonder how may times this is happening. I have worked with so truly amazing women developers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:27PM
The shortage is severe in North America, with only 14 percent of the infosec workforce composed of women, but even more striking elsewhere; women only claim 7 percent of the workforce in Europe, 8 percent in Asia, and 5 percent in the Middle East, according to the report.
Wait, you mean we're actually the BEST at this metric in the U.S.?!
"Common sense should tell you we should be doing more about this," says co-author and EWF executive director Lynn Terwoerds, noting that in order to solve the cybersecurity skills shortage, the industry must do a better engaging the female population.
Or one could interpret these figures as indicating that the rate is naturally low everywhere and we shouldn't force it higher. Funny how "common sense" looks different from different angles.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:39PM
Maybe this term of "engagement" is a part of what's causing so many problems with entitlement these days. I was not "engaged" by an advertiser to go into my field. I was not sold a bill of goods by some disingenous HR person who doesn't care if I'm satisfied at what I do, and who I do it with - they just want to meet their quota, after all.
Why should people feel like jobs need to come to them? I perfectly understand that I need a job that pays something acceptable to me, and so I went out and got one [Correction: Worked my fucking ass off to qualify for one.] Are women incapable of making this deduction? "Those poor, delicate little flowers." I wouldn't hold a 30 year old's hand to help them cross the street, nor should any company need to hold a woman's hand to turn in an application.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:01PM
Women are underrepresented in lawn care and landscaping, but for some reason nobody gives a shit about that. Gee, I wonder why?
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:09PM (2 children)
I just think women don't tend to gravitate towards this kind of environment. I just don't think there are a lot of women who want to sit alone, quietly, interacting with a machine and avoiding human contact for hours and hours at a time.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:23PM (1 child)
You described most of my first job :D Though I'd go nuts if I weren't allowed IRC, that much is true, and I do end up doing a fair amount of customer-facing stuff.
But nothing's nicer than sitting or standing at an SSH prompt, logged into someone's XenServer across the nation that I personally built, set up, and shipped to them, adding VMs and messing with storage repos and tweaking things, good music coming through the headphones, irssi in a spare terminal...ahh, bliss 3 It's like the intellectual equivalent of a runner's high, everything whizzing along smooth and cool in your mind...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Friday March 24 2017, @02:17PM
I was speaking in generalities, of course. There will always be women who enjoy the kind of work you describe, and that's great.
A woman where I work and I have been friends for several years now. She's probably been coding even longer than I have. She works as a DBA and you will always find her, sitting quietly at her desk, headphones on, tapping away on her keyboard. She loves it. But like many of her male colleagues she does not have much of a social life, and in fact has never been married; never had children; considers romantic liasons to be more trouble than they're worth. And she would be the first to admit that she is not like most women, and to be honest, I get the feeling she likes that distinction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:41AM
Cybersecurity is not really a mainstream profession (e.g. accountant, doctor, lawyer, engineer). Guys are more likely to do non-mainstream stuff.
The same confidence/overconfidence and urges that make guys more likely to do stupid crazy stuff on youtube are what make more guys pioneers, CEOs, inventors, serial killers, dictators, nutjobs, etc.
And that's by design/evolution. Guys are more expendable. Fewer men are required to repopulate the human species.
So it's good for the species if guys try all sorts of stuff and some/many die. Those that survive or succeed are more likely to have some useful genes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @02:27PM
One of the frustrating things about articles like this -- particularly in a forum like this where one assumes the majority of readers can do basic math -- is that it is mathematically impossible for there to be equal parity between the sexes in every line of work.
If the population is roughly equally distributed between male and female (49% male; 51% female), and 75% of males are in the work force, but only 60% of women are in the work force; then it is mathematically IMPOSSIBLE for every field to be split 50/50.