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Women Still Underrepresented in Information Security (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the what's-happening dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Women make up only 11 percent of the cyber security workforce according to the latest report from the Center for Cyber Safety and Education and the Executive Women's Forum (EWF). The survey of more than 19,000 participants around the world finds that women have higher levels of education than men, with 51 percent holding a master's degree or higher, compared to 45 percent of men. Yet despite out qualifying them, women in cybersecurity earned less than men at every level and the wage gap shows very little signs of improvement. Men are four times more likely to hold C and executive level positions, and nine times more likely to hold managerial positions than women, globally. More worrying is that 51 percent of women report encountering one or more forms of discrimination in the cybersecurity workforce. In the Western world, discrimination becomes far more prevalent the higher a woman rises in an organization.

4 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...garbage disposal and off-shore drilling too! Come on women, WTF!

    1. Re:Yeah... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well.. in the early days of computing, it was a field dominated by women. So it's not that they can't do the job; we know, intellectually, women are more than adequate for IT. The question becomes: why did women fall out of IT/Programming roles?

      Or maybe the question is, why do women tend to choose other careers, and how can we force them to choose things they don't want to choose just so things will be "equal"?

    2. Re:Yeah... by meta-monkey · · Score: 5, Informative

      why did women fall out of IT/Programming roles?

      Because the "programming" most women did was laboriously transcribing algorithms written by men onto the punch cards. Those women were replaced by compilers.

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    3. Re:Yeah... by Jodka · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ...garbage disposal and off-shore drilling too! Come on women, WTF!

      Good point, much like one in a Camille Paglia interview published yesterday.

      It is an absolute outrage how so many pampered, affluent, upper-middle-class professional women chronically spout snide anti-male feminist rhetoric, while they remain completely blind to the constant labor and sacrifices going on all around them as working-class men create and maintain the fabulous infrastructure that makes modern life possible in the Western world. Only a tiny number of women want to enter the trades where most of the nitty-gritty physical work is actually going on—plumbing, electricity, construction. Women have played virtually no role in the erection of those magnificent towers in every major city in the world. It's men who operate the cranes or set the foundations or wash windows on the 85th floor. It's men who troop out at 2:00 AM during an ice storm to restore power to neighborhoods where falling trees have brought down live wires. It's men who mix the stinking, toxic cauldrons to spread steaming hot tar on city roofs. Last year in a nearby town, I drove by a huge, chaotic scene where emergency workers in hazmat suits were struggling with a giant pipe break, as raw sewage was pouring into the street. Of course all those workers up to their knees in a torrent of thick brown water were men! I've seen figures indicating that 92 per cent of people killed on the job are men—and it's precisely because men are heroically doing most of the dangerous jobs in modern society...

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