By Ray Hayes
By 2022, there will be approximately 1.8 million positions in the cybersecurity industry. Salary reports indicate that, “cybersecurity salary in United States according to pay scale ranges from $44,860 to $98,284 with the median taking home around $53,000.” Due to the uptick in jobs, the cybersecurity industry is looking to expand its pipeline by creating a diverse pool of applicants.
The Denver Post spoke with Robb Reck, the chief information security officer at Ping Identity to learn more about the need for gender diversity in cybersecurity. According to Reck, “Different skill sets are becoming more valued in security instead of just having highly technical employees. Anytime you can get diversity, you expand the overall perspective of a group.”
Currently the industry is male dominated with only 11 percent of the information security workers being women. There has been a positive to this as some companies have become more aware of the identity biases, pay inequality and discrimination women are facing within the industry and have introduced methods to combat the problem. Joyce Brocagila, CEO of Alta Associates and founder of the Executive Women’s Forum, said it best. “A diverse workforce extends beyond gender. People from different ethnic, cultural, financial and educational backgrounds and experiences bring different insight to problem solving. You don’t need a science, technology, engineering or math background to succeed in cybersecurity.”
As always the problem can and will be fixed once companies begin to understand that problem solving does not have a face or gender, therefore we must move past those things in order to achieve success.