In today’s digital-first world, cybersecurity is more than a technical requirement; it is a fundamental aspect of business resilience, trust, and innovation. However, as cyber threats become more sophisticated, organizations need diverse and innovative approaches to tackle these challenges effectively. Women Business Collaborative (WBC) is committed to advocating for gender diversity across industries, and cybersecurity is no exception. For National Cybersecurity Month, we’re exploring why diversity, especially the inclusion of women, is essential for cybersecurity innovation.

Why Gender Diversity Matters in Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity thrives on varied perspectives. With an estimated 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs globally, according to Cybersecurity Ventures, the field needs new talent and ideas to keep up with evolving threats. Women currently make up only about 24% of the cybersecurity workforce, and that gap represents missed opportunities for unique insights and creative problem-solving. Studies show that diverse teams are more innovative, bringing distinct viewpoints that foster fresh solutions to complex problems. In cybersecurity, this diversity of thought is particularly important. Diverse teams are often better at identifying vulnerabilities and developing forward-thinking defenses.

How Women in Cybersecurity Drive Innovation

Women in cybersecurity often bring new ideas that lead to impactful changes and solutions. They add to the diversity of thought and approach problems from different perspectives, which can lead to breakthrough strategies in threat prevention and response. For instance, women-led teams are known for emphasizing collaborative problem-solving and adopting a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity, which can enhance an organization’s overall resilience.

One example is Diana Kelley, co-founder and CTO of Security Curve, who has contributed innovative ideas to cybersecurity risk management and threat detection. Women like Kelley bring fresh perspectives that drive the industry forward, proving that including women in cybersecurity isn’t just about fairness—it’s about creating stronger, more adaptable defenses.

The Role of WBC in Advancing Women in Cybersecurity

Women’s Business Collaborative (WBC) believes that gender diversity in all areas, especially cybersecurity, is vital for industry advancement. WBC supports gender equity in leadership and promotes initiatives to empower women in business through collaboration, education, and advocacy. By working with partners in the cybersecurity field, WBC seeks to close the gender gap and drive the growth of innovative solutions to cybersecurity challenges.

Some of the ways WBC helps bridge the gender gap in cybersecurity include:

• Supporting Mentorship Programs – By promoting mentorship and sponsorship, WBC helps women find and leverage resources to grow their cybersecurity careers, learn critical skills, and gain leadership opportunities.
• Encouraging STEM Education – WBC advocates for young girls and women to be exposed to early STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) to foster interest and competence in cybersecurity-related fields.
• Championing Women Leaders – WBC highlights women’s achievements in cybersecurity, offering visibility to women leaders and encouraging others to enter and excel in the field.

The Call to Action: Building a More Inclusive Cybersecurity Future

Organizations need to recognize that gender diversity isn’t just a matter of representation; it’s a strategic advantage. Diverse teams are essential to crafting resilient, innovative solutions that withstand today’s complex cyber threats. Companies can actively contribute by creating an inclusive environment that values diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

Now, more than ever, companies and industry leaders must work together to ensure women have equal opportunities to contribute to and shape the future of cybersecurity. As WBC continues to advocate for gender parity across business sectors, we invite all organizations to join us in supporting women in cybersecurity.

We must work together to build a more secure and innovative future.** Embracing diversity, particularly gender diversity, isn’t just a step toward equity—it’s a necessary strategy for success in today’s digital landscape. By fostering an inclusive, diverse workforce, we can drive the innovation needed to face and overcome tomorrow’s cybersecurity challenges.

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The need for diversity in technology is well understood and is now a foundational component of recruitment, retention, and talent management for all organizations at all levels. Technology teams with strong gender and racial diversity, while advancing equality and economic opportunity, also ensure businesses develop products and services that reflect the needs of the customers and communities they serve.

The case for advancing women in technology, in particular, is clear: 

• According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, technology jobs are among the fastest-growing in the U.S. economy. 
• These technology jobs often pay more than double the average U.S. salary and are key drivers of economic growth and socioeconomic mobility. 
• By increasing the number of women in technology, we will increase women’s cumulative earnings and their influence on the global economy and, ultimately, on society.

The Much-Needed Involvement of Women In Telling the Data Story

Leaders in technology must evaluate not only how gender diverse our technology organizations are overall but how diverse we are in specializations, from application development to information security. Nowhere is inclusivity more important than in data science and data analytics.

Women play a critical role in data science and analytics. Hillary Mason, a data scientist and founder of Fast Forward Labs, was quoted as saying, “Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.” Individuals and businesses now create and collect more data than ever before, and advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have accelerated our ability to process vast amounts of data. But the data and tools alone cannot provide true business insights without the human aspect of data analytics. 

It is the people leading data analytics who have an intuition for the stories the data might be telling us. They develop the data sets and questions that bring data insights to life. Women bring unique perspectives and benefits to this data “storytelling” against the rapidly increasing volume and variety of data that organizations are now managing in big data environments:

• A 2020 NCWIT Scorecard found that women graduating with computer and information science (CIS) degrees are more racially and ethnically diverse than men graduating with CIS degrees.
• To the extent that women pursue careers in data science or predictive analytics,  their diversity plays a role in reducing data bias and improving the quality of work. According to a 2020 Boston Consulting Group study, “Interpreting causal relationships and correlations in large data sets requires subtlety, and both humans and machine learning algorithms can occasionally ‘see’ patterns that lead to spurious, biased, or  even downright dangerous conclusions.”
• Data teams with diverse resources in gender and ethnicity ensure that data projects benefit from a variety of opinions and experiences that mitigate data bias, reduce data prediction errors and provide more balanced results.

Growing the Pipeline of Women Data Scientists

For women in data, there is some good news. A 2020 Burtch Works Executive Recruiting study found that the number of women in data science and predictive analytics jobs was slowly increasing. The most notable increases are coming at the individual contributor level 1 category, followed by the managerial level 1 category. While these numbers signal an increase in women in data science and analytics, much more needs to be done to encourage women in the early talent pipeline, middle management, and the senior leadership level in a space still largely dominated by men. BCG found that women pursuing STEM careers are disproportionately deterred from choosing careers in data by the negative image of data science as being overly abstract and competitive.

To attract more women to careers in data science and analytics, organizations must clearly communicate the purpose, the importance, and the tangible benefits that these roles bring to critical business decision-making. Then, organizations must actively develop and promote those women to senior data leadership roles. That change will foster a more inclusive and collaborative data community that produces data-driven business insights and innovations, leading to business process improvements, risk reduction, and, ultimately, revenue growth.

Summing up

While advancing equality and economic opportunity, diverse technology teams make sure that companies create goods and services that meet the needs of the clients and communities they serve.

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In several foreign countries there are office buildings filled with intelligent, highly trained people whose jobs it is to infiltrate, disrupt, and extort western businesses. Cybercrime is an organized global threat that operates across the dark web, with sophisticated tools and even franchise opportunities. With a more political bent, hostile government cyber agencies have become highly sophisticated, focusing on disinformation, propaganda, espionage, and destructive attacks.

Whatever you do, you’re using tech in so many ways. This brings cybersecurity challenges and responsibilities that most organizations are simply not equipped to address adequately.

Technical hacking is only part of the challenge. According to “Cybersecurity for Dummies,” 80% of all attacks involve compromising an employee’s credentials. Sometimes contact is simply over the phone. Almost always these intrusions involve an employee who thinks they’re doing the right thing or being helpful. It takes just a single response to a phishing email for an attack to be successful. No amount of technical security will keep your business safe if you don’t train your people to recognize all the ways an actor might trick them into sharing their login credentials.

Whatever your size or type of business, if your security isn’t good enough, you risk compromising your customers and vendors. If you don’t know how to verify the practices of your partner firms, you risk letting them compromise you.

Recommendations

Be prepared and increase organizational vigilance

• Create, maintain, and exercise cyber incident response, resilience, and business continuity planning.
• Create disaster recovery plans and rehearse them.
• Engage experts to hold a tabletop simulation with your leaders about individual responsibilities and actions in the event of a ransomware attack.
• Don’t think it can’t happen to you; expect that it will, and don’t plan to figure it out on the fly when it does.

Talk about it

• Start and maintain an open dialog with your customers and vendors about their systems, products, standards, and training.
• Think through the supply chains you are part of. Discuss. Learn from each partner’s evolving needs, requirements, and cyber efforts.

Enhance your cyber posture and implement cyber best practices

• Identity and access management.
• Protective controls and zero trust architecture.
• Vulnerability and configuration management.
• Utilize strong passwords, MFA, and password managers.
• Install software updates regularly; prioritize known vulnerabilities.
• Stay current on Russian, Chinese, and Eastern European threat updates.

Increase cybersecurity awareness for employees and standardize

• Integrate cybersecurity training and awareness internally until it’s part of your everyday culture, not something that’s reserved for occasional meetings.
• At board meetings, the first thing discussed should be Cyber Risk & Readiness, especially in public companies.
• Apply the same security standards, training, product choices, and behaviors everywhere across your business. A weakness anywhere is a weakness for the whole company.

Pace your effort, plan your pace and track your performance

• Think of a marathon, not a sprint, only more so: you’re never going to be done working on this.
• Think through what to measure that will drive improvements.

Suspect you have already been compromised

• Invaders usually don’t act right away; they wait for a more destructive moment.
• An example is when you, or your customer who has been compromised through you, announces an acquisition or intent to be acquired. A ransomware attack at that moment on any party usually kills the deal altogether.

Maintain backup systems that are not available online

• Literally anything connected to the internet can be hacked.
• Since an intrusion can go undetected for months or years, there’s also a risk of backing up the intrusion, then restoring it in a crisis and immediately letting the hackers back in.
• Make sure your online backups have versions going back in time.

Avoid thinking any solution element is the final answer

• Next month may be different, and next year surely will. Keep learning and keep thinking.

Schedule regular external reviews and engage the right security partner or master service provider

• Even smart people can create an internal echo chamber and miss important things.
• Enlarging existing job descriptions to fully cover this complex and constantly changing topic is a non-starter. Even a large company can’t cost effectively maintain in-house all the kinds of expertise that are needed. The right service partner would operate a (SOC) Security Operations Center 7×24 to manage, detect, and respond to threats.

Summing up

Think of cybersecurity awareness and readiness as an ongoing investment to PROTECT. You’re protecting your people, your operations, your data, and your reputation. It’s hard to price the value of that.

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Women have made an extraordinary impact on technology. Unfortunately, many of their contributions and inventions were not attributed to them during their lifetimes. Although a few women in the mid-nineteenth century were allowed to submit their ideas for a patent, the United States didn’t grant women full rights until 1920. Prior to that, women were viewed as chattel, rather than individuals, with no freedom to own anything or make decisions. This limitation led to the common practice of women submitting inventions under their father, husband, or a male partner’s name.

Credit Not Given Where Credit Was Due

Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr  were two women notably not given credit for their truly advanced technology. Although Ada Lovelace is now known as the first computer programmer, she was not originally credited for her contribution to the Analytical Engine. She served as the key interpreter for Charles Babbage, and published notes in 1843 on how the machine could be used to follow a program to calculate Bernoulli numbers. For many years, historians debated who was the real author of the program, believing a woman was incapable of such logic.

During World War II, Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil developed “frequency hopping” to set radio-guided torpedoes off course during the war and prevent military radios from being bugged. Their idea received a patent in 1942. Unfortunately, the patent expired in 1959 and the US Navy didn’t adopt the technology until 1960. Not until the late 1990s, when a researcher found the original patent, did Lamarr receive credit. The secret communications technology Lamarr and Antheil created was used to inspire the development of Wi-Fi and subsequently Bluetooth and GPS.

Women have been responsible, without attribution, for many inventions that improved our quality of life. For example:

• Maria E. Beasley designed an improved life raft with guard rails, patented in 1880. She went on to invent a foot warmer, a steam generator and a barrel-hooping machine. She received 15 U.S. patents.
• To protect her fine china and prevent washing dishes by hand, Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher in 1850.
• In 1893, Margaret A. Wilcox invented the first car heater using heat from the car’s engine.
• Marie Van Brittan Brown and her husband invented the first video home security system in 1966.
• Dr. Patricia Bath was the first African American female doctor to receive a medical patent for her invention of the Laserphaco Probe to remove cataracts.

Unsung Heroines in Space and Technology

Grace Hopper began her computer career in 1944. She became known as “The Mother of Computing.” She brought speed and accuracy to military initiatives with the Mark 1 computer, developed the first business-oriented machine and was the inventor of the COBOL programming language.

The appropriately named movie, Hidden Figures, introduced remarkable, unacclaimed African American women and their impact on NASA in the race to space.

• Katherine Johnson was instrumental in plotting the flight paths of some of America’s earliest space expeditions and was most famous for providing the calculations that helped synchronize Project Apollo’s Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module.
• In 1949, Dorothy Vaughan became NASA’s first black supervisor. She was proactive in learning Fortran and other concepts to prepare for the transformation to IBM digital computers while teaching her co-workers, a group of African American women. Vaughan is credited with successfully starting the IBM 7090. She was promoted to supervisor of the Programming Department on the condition that her colleagues join her in the new Analysis and Computation Division (ACD).
• Mary Jackson was a mathematician and an aerospace engineer. She performed complex computations and analyzed data for aerospace engineers. In 1958, she became NASA’s first black female engineer. She also invented a miniature wind tunnel for testing airplanes.

Acknowledging Past Contributions to Spark Future Innovation

There are many more legendary women waiting for us to discover. Let us allow their contributions to be our inspiration for tomorrow. Begin by examining women’s impact within your company. For example, IBM has been supporting women’s advancement in technology since 1899 when the first two women, Lillie Philip and Nettie Moore, were hired. In 1943, Ruth Leach became the first female executive. In 1953, Lois Haibt was one of the programmers that invented Fortran. Jeannette Kilttredge Watson was the first woman appointed to the board of directors in 1956. Dagmar Arnold was the first woman at IBM to receive a patent for the external design of the 1301 Disk Storage Unit in 1963.

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Technology is one of the defining strategic issues of our time. It influences every decision an organization makes. And yet, organizations still struggle to advance digital transformation as many leaders are tempted to chase “shiny objects” in the form of new technologies. It is imperative for organizations to resist such distractions and lead efforts with an integrated strategy rooted in business goals and enabled by technology capabilities.

Many C-Suite leaders still have a knowledge gap in understanding how and what technology can achieve. On the flip side, within the technology function, there are tech leaders with proven technical expertise, but little understanding of how technology creates business value. Therein lies both the mandate and the opportunity for organizations to increase the overall tech leadership and tech savviness of the C-Suite.

Parameters for Tech-Fluent Leadership in the C-Suite

Tech leadership in the C-Suite cultivates an environment where executives know how to advise their stakeholders, teams, and peers on the “so what?” and “now what?” of new technologies, regardless of where these executives sit within the organization. Tech-savvy leaders across an organization are better able to address critical questions such as “What is our business strategy and what technologies will support our business goals? Why should we invest? Are we ready? What would we have to do to get ready?”

A tech-fluent leader ultimately can converse strategically on the use and impact of key technologies to create better business outcomes and lead their teams to think along the same lines. The baseline goal of tech fluency and tech upskilling programs is to develop a depth of understanding of today and tomorrow’s technologies and how they can be applied across the organization.

The Benefits of Having BOTH Tech-Savvy Boards and Tech-Savvy C-Suites

Early findings from Deloitte’s 2023 Global Technology Leadership survey shows that roughly three-quarters of CxOs indicated their organization’s board of directors encourages C-Suite leaders to aggressively pursue technology enabled opportunities for competitive advantage. Additionally, 64% indicated that technology is a key agenda item at most or all board meetings.

Having a tech-savvy board, in addition to a tech-savvy C-Suite, helps to facilitate a common language between the board and management, helping drive more productive engagement and improved company performance. Specifically, such companies experienced, on average, 5% greater revenue growth over a three-year period, and 8% better stock performance year over year, over three-, five-, and 10-year periods, than companies with non-tech-savvy boards.

Specific to C-Suite tech leadership, a recent CMO survey found that 62% of CMOs recognize that marketers could improve impact by effectively leveraging technology to pursue growth opportunities and using data insights across channels. CFOs also recognize that technology investments are critical. According to Deloitte’s 2022 Q1 CFO Signals Report, 40% of CFOs indicated that the most important enterprise transformation their company was undertaking or planning to undertake was technology related or included IT systems upgrades. Many CFOs noted challenges related to legacy systems, a lack of business acumen among IT professionals, and a lack of tech savviness within the finance organization.

Resolving the Organization-Wide Tech Savvy Gap

Beyond the C-Suite, many organizations are looking to develop a workforce who can address business challenges and opportunities through tech solutions. However, most businesses are facing a highly competitive environment for tech talent as growing demand—particularly in AI and cybersecurity—increasingly outpaces the number of qualified candidates to fill such roles.

To address this challenge, tech fluency programs can help fill such critical high-demand tech and business roles. For example, Deloitte’s Cloud Institute, reskills and upskills professionals from other functional areas and across varying levels to build a diverse pipeline of non-traditional IT candidates with in-house skills to fill tech roles. The Institute has created one of the most skilled cloud technology workforces in the professional services industry.

As the pace of technology innovation and the demand for technology services accelerate, organizations are trying to realize as much value as possible from their technology functions. C-Suite leaders have an important role in enabling such a future cultivating a tech fluent organization. The tech-savvy business can drive forward their stalled digital transformation efforts and achieve more successful outcomes through a unified technology strategy that aligns transformation needs and investments to business goals.

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