As someone who has spent decades in the technology industry, I’ve seen the landscape transform dramatically. However, one issue remains persistent: the lack of gender diversity in cybersecurity. In this current landscape, enterprises require diversity to ensure they are robust, sustainable and future-driven. Yet despite efforts to improve gender equality, women in professional and technology jobs are still underrepresented in the Middle East, with the UAE’s female workforce growing by only 6 per cent in the past decade. Fixing the gender gap should be top of mind so that the industry is not negatively impacted.
As a sector, cybersecurity is growing at an accelerated pace, with revenue expected to touch $4.07 billion in the MENA region by the end of 2024. This can be attributed to a growing need for protecting cloud-based enterprise infrastructure due to increasingly complex and sophisticated cyber threats. In response to the ever-evolving threat landscape, the region has introduced several initiatives. These initiatives, however, aren’t enough if we lack the skills to enforce them. A report from ISACA in 2021 highlighted the then-deficit of 300,000 cybersecurity workers in the region. As a result, only four per cent of MEA business leaders are highly confident in their ability to ward off cyberattacks and defend their data.
The lack of adequate talent and the slow onboarding are compounded by the fact that the few women who work in cybersecurity are leaving their careers at an alarming rate. The State of Inclusion of Women in Cybersecurity report found that women frequently experience situations that impact their ability to grow and advance in their careers, and this experience is strongly linked to poor retention rates. Experiences include men accusing women of only being hired to fill diversity quotas rather than based on skills and experience. Women disprove this time and again by showing their competency once they are hired. But sometimes, these accusations are enough to make the women leave.
The talent and gender gap are two sides of the same coin. Fix one and the other takes care of itself. How, you may ask? If we fix the issue of gender diversity in the workplace, and empower more women to join, maintain and advance in their careers, we’ll naturally solve the talent shortage problem. With such a talent shortage, hiring more women is not about replacing a man with a woman, but rather about adding women to the total workforce. So, the more important question is – how do we approach this?
Diverse cultures, parallel challenges
There is a common, irritating theory that there is a lack of women in cybertech because few have STEM educational backgrounds. On the contrary, more women than men in the MENA region graduate with degrees in STEM related fields. This is especially prominent in the Gulf States, where about 60% of all engineering students are women. As cultural mindsets around working behaviour expectations shift, we can see a slow but steady increase in representation, for example, an unprecedented standard was set by the 2021 Emirates Mars Mission in the UAE, where 34% of the overall team and 80% of the science team was made up of women.
Making it work at every level
A successful diverse workforce requires building a community. It shows others, “Hey, there is someone like me doing security. Yes, I am technical, but I can do other things.”It’s no surprise that cybersecurity is a tough industry, as teams grapple with serial alerts of potential breaches and suspicious activity and face the risk of creating serious damage with any wrong move. We need to make real changes to encourage more women to make lasting careers in this space, and we’re not doing enough at the moment. We need to take risks and pursue new opportunities to encourage a more diverse workforce and become more successful as a result.
The lack of diversity at board level has a real impact on how diversity is reflected in the breadth of a business. Avoiding this issue has real adverse consequences: according to Mckinsey, the most diverse companies are significantly more likely to outperform less diverse peers on profitability. In today’s macroeconomic climate, it’s more important than ever to make sure women have a seat in
the boardroom to drive real change across their business and the wider industry. The silver lining in the UAE is that we’re moving in a slow but positive direction. Last year the share of board seats given to women increased from 17% to 23% according to a study by Heidrick & Struggles.
Address diversity as a whole
All in all, cybersecurity is an important and exhilarating place to work. The industry must evolve and grow rapidly to defend against continuous and sophisticated global threats, and we need a strong, diverse talent group to get there. While International Women’s Day is the ideal time of year for enterprise and security leaders to consider how to make cybersecurity a more inclusive place for everyone to meet that need, it will take awareness and investment all year round to start to solve the problem.
