Investigating Gender Disparity within Cyber Security : Analysis of Possible Factors Through a Mixed- Method Qualitative Study and a Self- Implemented Testing Program

Abstract: The importance of cyber security is rapidly increasing. At the same time, too few cyber security professionals are educated in order to fulfill industrial needs. Women are a minority within information technology and account for an even smaller number of people within cyber security itself. A skewed gender disparity can lead to reduced productivity and missing out on wider perspectives. This project intends to investigate what different factors and reasons could be behind why women are a minority within cyber security. This study examines possible reasons for the gender disparity, using a survey study, directed towards university students, mostly within information technology and similar subjects. The study also included a ‘cyber security exercise’ where interviewees through a mixed- method qualitative study tested a practical example of a cyber security task, in this case an artificial website, with predetermined security flaws, programmed by the authors. None of the factors that were examined could be proven to cause the gender disparity, since this would have required more detailed experimentation. Support was found for there being a lack of female role models within cyber security, that women to a greater degree feel that they are treated differently on account of their gender, and that the environment in the workplace generally is more important to women than to men. There were also derivatives from some hypotheses that correlated with the low number of women in cyber security, but were not supported to the same extent: women’s lesser interest in working with software development or programming, that the popular image of cyber security may be highly focused on hacking, that there are so few women, and that women may have lower self- confidence than men when it comes to information technology. The results of this study shed a light on factors influencing women’s underrepresentation in cyber security, and can serve as a foundation for aspects that may be relevant to investigate further. Some cyber security programmes in Sweden have a more even gender distribution than the norm, but no clear reasons for this could be determined with certainty, meaning that they too can serve as a clear foundation for future research in this area.