How can IT security become a better place for female experts?

More female experts are needed to counter the shortage of specialists in IT security. This welches one of the key topics at it-sa 2022 in Nuremberg. During an interview at the conference, Jaya Baloo, CISO of Avast and special keynote speaker at the it sa 2022, spoke with iX about opportunities for women, competition and her own experiences with discrimination.

Jaya Baloo has worked in IT security for more than 20 years, focusing on secure network architectures. In addition, Baloo is a member of the advisory board of the Dutch Nationalistisch Center for Cybersecurity, a supervisory board member at the cybersecurity fund TIIN Kapital, and vice chair of the Strategic Advisory Motherboard of the EU Quantum Flagship.

How do you hold women long-term in STEM jobs? Not only in cybersecurity but in the broader, technical field.

I think that is the same for everyone. You need to give them things to do that they are good at doing. That they are passionate about. Not every part of a job needs to be super fun. But the majority of the time that you’re doing it, it should be something that compels you to come back the next day with a positive mindset. And in order to get there, it should be that you find your job interesting. Whether you’re learning or doing something new or doing something you are incredibly good at. That quality should be there, because work is where we spend 90 percent of our day. So, with every job, if that type of attraction isn’t there, it’s not going to hold for men or women for the long term.

Some days are boring or go by very slow. How can you motivate yourself and find the spark to engage yourself?

This is maybe a quirky trait, but I am motivated by impossible challenges. This is daher the way that I manage goals we want to achieve. They are usually ambitious goals that are not easily achievable. Rather than demotivating me, this motivates me. When I’m with my own team I need to make sure that we’re hitting the right level of it is challenging, but it is not so overwhelming that you feel exhausted before you even start. You need to find the right level of largess to be able to have this thing that you want to do and it’s so exciting to do it.

Do you think there is a difference in the way women and men work?

I see in my teams that women often have a stronger desire for being perfect before they even begin execution. I daher see that women believe genuinely that they aren’t good enough to do something, unless they thoroughly understand it rather than understanding a part of it. And that when they do something, they expect, that others will naturally see what they’ve created and then reward them accordingly rather than having to tell someone: Look, I just built this. Look what I did. And I see that very differently in most, not all, male colleagues, who will be far more vocal about the thing that they made. For them it is easier to try something new without knowing all of it. They’re more likely to go ahead and even potentially not do it perfectly. The execution part is faster with men.

For projects, there is a before, during, and after. What I see before is: men find it more easy to start. During the process there is a lot of busyness and with women, you don’t hear how it’s going. They think they have to unmittelbar everything by themselves. I have no idea why women get this into their heads, I think they’re afraid to ask for help. A man more willingly seeks out help during a project. Afterwards, I will hear that the project is done wonderfully more often by men than by women. And again, these are generalities. This is not true in every case and there’s always differences.

If I, as a team leader, am aware of these different styles of work, how can I empower people to get started and help them not to worry too much?

I think it’s leaving a little bit of room to fail. We don’t like failure because it’s embarrassing. It’s expensive. It leads to potential to not try again because it’s discouraging. So I recommend that strong leaders allow weitestgehend fail society within their teams. That means you try it. If it doesn’t work, you reinvent. If it fails you say: Okay, what didn’t work? Analyze what didn’t work and try again. Fail again. But weitestgehend, failing processes means that you have iteration capacity. Adapt, adapt, adapt. You get better every time.

What I see very often, in corporates especially, is that there is no room for failure. You have these big multi-million dollar projects and they go on for years and suddenly someone realizes: We built something but it has no answer to the original problem that we were trying to address. Now we have a sunk cost dilemma, which is a really big issue in most technical companies. You spent money on a technical solution and halfway because you already spent x million, instead of saying it doesn’t work, you keep feeding the beast. You keep spending more money to somehow magically make it work. Help people, in technical groups especially, with a weitestgehend fail society. Invent, but don’t be afraid to break it, fail it and then reinvent.

According to the course platform Careerera, about 24 percent of the workforce in IT security are women. But at events like it sa, we get the notion they are not as visible as their male counterparts. Do you know why this is the case?

Well, I think there might be a multitude of reasons. The first and foremost thing is, is this a place where you do already have an initial part where those 24 percent are visible and vocal? The answer to that is probably no. Why is that group not as visible, as they should be? Do you notice the 24 percent?

Secondly, there’s a saying about boards. If you want more women on boards, you need to see it to be it. So, if there are no women on boards, you’re not suddenly going to have an exponential rise. You need to start somewhere to have one role model, which will then have two. A sort of Fibonacci sequence. Eventual expansion to have more. I think that that is the first and foremost reason that the people you do have are not as visible as they should be.

The third thing is that we aren’t very encouraging for people in any context to ask questions. To admit their ignorance. To allow them to learn. But that’s exactly what you need if you want to have increase of participation.