What is the best way to bring more women into cybersecurity?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Bringing more women into cybersecurity works best when organisations stop treating the field as a single, narrow pipeline and start treating it as a career family with many entry points. That matters because teams are still missing talent in operations, analysis, governance, and technical support, even as the attack surface keeps expanding. NHI Management Group research shows that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which is a reminder that security work is often about process, investigation, and control design, not just deep engineering.

The practical lesson is that hiring criteria should match the real job, not a historical stereotype of who belongs in security. Current guidance suggests that teams improve both inclusion and retention when they recognise adjacent experience such as IT support, audit, risk, cloud operations, and software testing as valid security foundations. That approach also helps remove unnecessary barriers created by degree-only or penetration-testing-only hiring filters. See the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Why NHI Security Matters Now and the CISA cyber threat advisories for the kind of operational complexity modern security teams face.

In practice, many security teams discover their talent gap only after burnout, turnover, or repeated incidents force them to rethink who can do the work.

How It Works in Practice

Effective recruitment is only the first step. To bring more women into cybersecurity, organisations need a clear pathway from entry role to advancement, with mentoring, sponsorship, and skills-based progression built in. That means defining multiple on-ramps: security operations, IAM, governance, risk, compliance, cloud administration, detection engineering, and third-party risk. It also means using interviews and assessments that measure practical problem-solving rather than confidence theatre or jargon fluency.

When security leaders map jobs this way, they make room for people who already understand incident handling, access reviews, asset inventory, or customer support workflows. Those experiences translate directly into security operations, where precision and communication often matter as much as tooling. For broader context on why identity work is increasingly operational rather than purely technical, the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks shows how visibility and lifecycle management shape security outcomes.

• Create apprenticeships and return-to-work programmes that do not require a traditional security background.
• Use salary transparency and level-setting to reduce hidden bias in job design and promotion.
• Pair new hires with mentors who can explain both technical context and team norms.
• Promote from adjacent roles where candidate performance is already observable.
• Track promotion rates, retention, and pay equity, not just headcount.

Independent threat reporting reinforces why this matters: modern security teams need people who can analyse complex campaigns, not only people who fit a single archetype. The Anthropic report on the first AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign and the MITRE ATLAS adversarial AI threat matrix both illustrate how quickly the work is becoming more cross-functional. These programmes tend to break down in organisations that rely on informal hiring, have no structured manager training, and expect underrepresented hires to navigate advancement without sponsorship.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter hiring standards often increase short-term recruiting effort, requiring organisations to balance speed-to-fill against long-term workforce diversity and resilience. That tradeoff is real, especially in small teams that want immediate operational coverage. Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests avoiding rigid “must have cybersecurity experience” language unless the role truly requires it.

There is also no universal standard for the right mix of technical depth and career mobility. Some teams need heavy engineering; others need analysts, coordinators, or governance specialists. The strongest programmes match the path to the role and give women visible progression beyond entry-level work. When discussing capability-building, the The 52 NHI breaches Report is a useful reminder that security failures often come from process gaps, not from lack of raw technical talent alone.

Another edge case is remote and hybrid work. These models can widen access, but only if teams avoid promotion-by-presence bias and ensure meeting access, authorship credit, and incident ownership are distributed fairly. Inclusion efforts also fail when women are hired into visible roles but excluded from technical decision-making. In those environments, the problem is not recruitment alone, but organisational design.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should security teams make NHI best practices usable across the business?
• Should organisations start NHI governance in the same way for production, development, and vendor access?
• Risk-Based Cybersecurity Programme
• Proactive cybersecurity