For Allie Mellen her formative moment came during her first experience at Black Hat.
She was a student at Boston University in 2015, where there was only a single course dedicated to cybersecurity across the entire program. That was all it took for her to get hooked. The class was “really hands on” with students expected to hack a server for their mid-term and final exams.
It also included a research presentation, and she was part of a team that chose to hack a Square reader. Her professor was impressed and encouraged the group to submit the research for Black Hat. When their project was accepted, she jumped on a plane to Las Vegas where she gave her first cybersecurity presentation in front of a live audience, went on CNN and CNBC for interviews and made a host of new connections in her field.
Years later, that experience still sticks out in her head for influencing her decision to pursue a full-time cybersecurity career. But there were also other, less pleasant memories and encounters.
“I had people tell me that I didn’t look like a hacker. I had people tell me I was only getting on CNN because they wanted a token woman on the show,” said Mellen, now a senior analyst at Forrester. “Those kinds of comments … don’t feel great. It was very common, actually.”
It is, of course, no secret that the cybersecurity industry has a woman problem. Despite making up nearly half the overall workforce, women compose just under one-quarter of the cybersecurity workforce and slightly more than a quarter of the STEM workforce.
But recent research as well as interviews with women in the field underscore how a handful of early or formative moments can heavily shape or influence their decision to remain on their career path in cybersecurity or pursue other kinds of work entirely. Together they reveal insights into where the industry has gone right — or wrong — in attempting to foster and develop female talent.
Continue reading: https://www.scmagazine.com/feature/careers/the-formative-moments-women-share-what-kept-them-in-cyber-or-drove-them-away
She was a student at Boston University in 2015, where there was only a single course dedicated to cybersecurity across the entire program. That was all it took for her to get hooked. The class was “really hands on” with students expected to hack a server for their mid-term and final exams.
It also included a research presentation, and she was part of a team that chose to hack a Square reader. Her professor was impressed and encouraged the group to submit the research for Black Hat. When their project was accepted, she jumped on a plane to Las Vegas where she gave her first cybersecurity presentation in front of a live audience, went on CNN and CNBC for interviews and made a host of new connections in her field.
Years later, that experience still sticks out in her head for influencing her decision to pursue a full-time cybersecurity career. But there were also other, less pleasant memories and encounters.
“I had people tell me that I didn’t look like a hacker. I had people tell me I was only getting on CNN because they wanted a token woman on the show,” said Mellen, now a senior analyst at Forrester. “Those kinds of comments … don’t feel great. It was very common, actually.”
It is, of course, no secret that the cybersecurity industry has a woman problem. Despite making up nearly half the overall workforce, women compose just under one-quarter of the cybersecurity workforce and slightly more than a quarter of the STEM workforce.
But recent research as well as interviews with women in the field underscore how a handful of early or formative moments can heavily shape or influence their decision to remain on their career path in cybersecurity or pursue other kinds of work entirely. Together they reveal insights into where the industry has gone right — or wrong — in attempting to foster and develop female talent.
Continue reading: https://www.scmagazine.com/feature/careers/the-formative-moments-women-share-what-kept-them-in-cyber-or-drove-them-away
