Hacking Diversity with Selena Templeton
While in Las Vegas for DefCon 26, I had the pleasure to give a one hour talk about ‘How to Fix the Diversity Gap in Cybersecurity’ at Hacking Diversity. The talk shared how to retain underrepresented persons in cybersecurity, as well as, it examined human behaviour patterns that stem from the actions due to the prefrontal cortex and amygdala communicating on conscious and unconscious biases when viewing others. The Hacking Diversity conference was the first of its own kind to try to bring representation and inclusion to cybersecurity. It was through this thought provoking conference that I met the lovely Selena Templeton.
When connecting with Selena, we discovered quite a bit of similarities. She as well never planned on going into the cybersecurity space but somehow was recruited into it. Her passion started from being an editor, which led her to connecting with Marco Ciappelli and Sean Martin, the co-founders of ITSPmagazine. They saw something and because they believed in her, they asked her to cover the Black Hat conference a few years ago. At first, she doubted herself because she never did any prior work in the field, but they encouraged her. So, she agreed to attend the conference. It piqued her interest. In return, she attended AppSec Cali where she did several on-camera interviews with conference speakers. She soon realised that cybersecurity is a field of primarily white men. Three years later, she has remained in the cybersecurity space, but the lack of women and minorities forced her to speak up through ITSPmagazine’s newly created podcast “DiverseIT”.
Chatting with Selena, it was obvious we both didn’t expect the industry to be so intolerant to women. It was as if we entered into the 1940s by seeing rooms at Black Hat and RSA full of white men, and hardly representing the world’s population. It was from the experience that brought out a sudden drive to want to do whatever it takes to make a difference in the lack of diversity and equality through awareness of biases.
Selena’s approach to hacking unconscious biases started long ago when she noticed how language often contains sexist and racist words that slip by unnoticed, like “mankind” instead of “humankind,” “gyp” instead of “cheated”, and “wife beater” instead of “white undershirt”. She also discusses that most people, when hearing someone say something like ‘wife beater’ will respond in one of two ways: call the person a misogynist or brush it off and say you’re too sensitive. The majority of people are not in any blanketed group, but rather individuals who learned a stereotype and are unaware of their unconscious biases, until challenged or pointed out. Then it turns into a conscious bias. However, the only way to bridge that middle is by others pointing out, speaking up, questioning ourselves, and through conversations. Even though many persons are now talking about diversity, many are still not aware of what their unconscious biases are until they get outside of their comfort bubble.
Diversity is a beast of its own when approaching cybersecurity. 11% of the workforce are women and less than 12% are minorities. While we are approaching the largest shortage of cybersecurity workforce, it’s time to get serious. Companies and persons need to learn how to work together and start questioning the lack of diversity in the office space, as well as, become open to getting uncomfortable when examining and questioning ourselves on our own biases.
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