Ever since I can remember I have supported diversity and inclusion. I feel the more diverse our backgrounds, sex, and culture the better decisions we can make together. It gives a true ability to look at problems differently and can help to solve some extremely complicated problems. Just because we have done something one way for as long as you can remember that doesn’t make it right. We need to challenge the status quo in security or we will fail it is that simple.
In Australia female participation in the cybersecurity industry is less than 20%, we as an industry and a country need to do better. I have been a contributor to the Women in Security magazine and the awards in Australia since its inception because I could see a problem but I wanted to do more. How could I, a middle-aged man help improve this?
I have the drive and the passion to help. I decided to create a hacker fantasy series, creating a lead female character called Samantha who was smart, skilled and just a badass, confident woman to give young girls a character to look up to, to read about and go. ‘I want to be like her’.
To sit back and think, wow, maybe cyber isn’t such a boys club, maybe it’s a place for me and my friends to make an amazing career. Let’s break the confines of what society thinks or even what industry thinks is normal. Let us forge our way into an amazing industry, not follow the beaten path before us.
Since its release, I have donated almost as many copies as I have sold to as many STEM programs for girls as I could find. The feedback has been amazing, the girls and their parents who read it are loving it but it is not getting into enough girls hands. To truly make a difference it needs to be read by the right audience, to be loved and to create that spark, the one that I found in 2013 when I found myself doing some digital forensics and cyber units.
I knew then and there that cyber was the place for me. I want to create that same feeling, that knowledge that this is their place, where they belong. If Foresight can do that for one person, then in my eyes it is successful but imagine what a difference if it could do that for one million young women around the world.
Just think about that for a minute.
Just imagine the difference these amazing young women could make for this virtual battle we are all fighting. Even an additional one hundred thousand young women joining the cyber industry will help tip the balance and help us be better, be smarter in what we do because we will have diversity of thought, an increased workforce getting in and solving the problems that are facing us as an industry or even just society as a whole.
So do us all a favour if you know a teenage girl who you think might benefit from reading Foresight and creating that spark. Give them a copy of the book, make them the new present you give to all teenage girls you know, and help change the industry for the better.
I would do it myself if I could (donate copies to every teenage girl in the world I mean) but I don’t have the means to pull off such a feat just yet, so we will need to do it together.
