Gender diversity in Tech
Why Women Are Underrepresented in Cybersecurity
Sourced from Women in Tech Africa. One of the industries struggling with significant bias and gender stereotypes is cybersecurity. This field plays an increasingly crucial role in our digital world and, as a result, offers many fulfilling career paths and opportunities. However, there are still significant barriers and misperceptions driving the belief that a career in cybersecurity is not for women. While women have been disproportionately impacted by pandemic-driven unemployment (for example, one in four women reported job loss due to a lack of childcare—twice the rate of men), the technology sector was less affected. This was mainly due to their being better prepared to pivot to remote work and flexible work models. As a result, according to a report by Deloitte Global, l...
The Key to Boosting Women in Tech in South Africa
Sourced from Women in Tech Africa. /* custom css */ .tdi_4_365.td-a-rec-img{ text-align: left; }.tdi_4_365.td-a-rec-img img{ margin: 0 auto 0 0; } Women remain a largely untapped resource in the technology talent pool in South Africa. The statistics don’t lie: there are only 56000 women filling 236 000 Information and Communications Technology (ICT) roles in the country. That is 23%. Women fare even worse in emerging technology roles, such as cloud computing, and data and AI, with only 14% female participation in professional cloud computing and 28% in data and AI. Perhaps even more concerning is the lack of female talent filtering into the pipeline. For every two women who graduate with a STEM-related (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degree in South Africa, there are fiv...
Only 20% of the Cybersecurity Workforce is Represented by Women
Women represent around 20% of the global cybersecurity workforce, according to a report released by Cybersecurity Ventures. This comes a mere two years after Frost & Sullivan pointed a menacing finger at the 1.8 million vacant cybersecurity seats by 2020 and the dearth of skills and people within an incredibly critical industry. There is a lack of female representation within this industry and a lack of actual skills needed to populate the growing number of requirements from organisations facing a rising cyber threat. The answer, according to Anna Collard, MD of KnowBe4 Africa, is to encourage women to cross-skill and expand into cybersecurity roles and to make the industry more welcoming as a whole. “Cybersecurity isn’t just ones and zeros, it’s the people factor, it’s understanding t...
