International Women’s Day: Brexit, Skills-Gap and #BalanceforBetter in the Cybersecurity Industry

This year’s International Women’s Day 2019 theme of #BalanceforBetter is a positive call-to-action to drive gender balance across the world. This year’s campaign states that “the race is on” for a gender-balanced boardroom and gender balance amongst employees. I admire the #IWD2019’s rallying call to put on our running shoes. With the economic uncertainty of Brexit looming, we certainly need to get going.

How bad is the skills gap? Why does it matter?

Balance is not a women’s issue; it’s a business issue, and it’s nothing new. In recent years, gender parity has been identified as critical to reducing the skills shortage within STEM and the cybersecurity industry specifically. The recent (ISC) ²Cybersecurity Workforce study found that the global cybersecurity skills gap has grown to almost three million. This issue is only getting worse, according to ESG, with over half of organizations reporting a problematic shortage in skills year after year. As the skills gap widens and the cybercrime epidemic worsens ($6 trillion annually by 2021), there’s a critical need to attract and retain talent.

So, have we gone the extra mile to get more women into cybersecurity? Have we picked up the pace in recent years? According to Frost & Sullivan, women make up only 11% of the cybersecurity workforce, and Forrester predicts that in 2019 20% of Fortune 500 CISOs will be women. There’s still a clear opportunity for women to fill both the talent and gender gaps.

Why is it important to close the gender gap?

It’s about more than just improving the percentages. It’s about economics and productivity. The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report estimates that gender parity could add an additional US$250 billion to UK GDP, US$1,750 billion to U.S. GDP and increase global GDP by US$5. (Read more...)