On November 2, 1988, the Morris worm became one of the first large-scale attacks on the then-nascent internet. It was also an attack that happened to catalyze Michele Guel into a career in cybersecurity.
Michele Guel has worked in the field of cybersecurity for virtually as long as the industry has existed. Today, Guel is a 21-year veteran of Cisco, a Distinguished Engineer (one of less than 100 at the company, and only one of several women to hold the company’s panel-nominated distinction) and Chief Security Architect in Cisco’s Security and Trust Organization, focusing on the Internet of Things and connected cities.
In 1988, however, Guel was a college student and a lab administrator at NASA Ames. While the virus forever shaped the path of her career, Guel told me that the day the virus struck, there were “zero women working in cybersecurity.” During a recent conversation, she also filled me in on her career path, why she cofounded Cisco’s Women in Cybersecurity Community, and the kinds of initiatives she believes will move the needle to increase gender diversity in the cybersecurity field.
For starters, Guel believes that cybersecurity is a field that simply does not attract enough women. By her estimates, approximately 10% of the field is comprised by women, a figure she believes partially results from the fact that girls aren’t exposed to this kind of career early enough in their education, despite approximately one million unfilled jobs worldwide within the industry.
How early does this exposure and education need to begin? Guel believes that middle school is the time to start educating women on STEM and computer science careers. She says that biases and views about what you want to become when you grow up start forming in middle school, whereas by high school you might already be thinking about colleges and majors — if cybersecurity isn’t on a girl’s radar by then, it may be already too late.
I asked Guel about whether there was a point within a woman’s career when it actually does become too late to turn to cybersecurity. She explained that the field of cybersecurity is quite broad and includes many diverse jobs, so those with a software engineering or systems administration background can easily change their careers at entry-level and can make lateral moves even as they progress into the middle or later parts of their careers. She believes cybersecurity careers encompass far more than a deadline-driven emergency-mode job where the objective is to locate or disable a bad actor after a digital attack. There is a lot of problem-solving, multi-tasking and collaboration in the field that she believes women would bring great natural flair to.
That said, Guel admits that women still haven’t picked up on cybersecurity as a career field of interest. In addition to early education, Guel thinks that one reason women are dissuaded from the field is the fact that they are so dramatically outnumbered by men. It becomes self-fulfilling if women decide to avoid a field for that reason.
How to Change the Face of Cybersecurity
To help make the world of cybersecurity more diverse and welcoming to women, Guel co-founded Cisco’s Women in Cybersecurity Community with her colleague Cypriane Palma. Established in 2014, the organization’s overall goal is to create a pipeline of women in cybersecurity by focusing on four pillars: (1) education; (2) outreach beyond Cisco (e.g. conferences, corporate sponsorships); (3) a leadership program that imparts training on leadership skills and coaching; and (4) community events that build and support internal inclusion.
Guel suggests that Cisco’s culture and support of inclusion and diversity has been instrumental in the success of Cisco’s Women in Cybersecurity Community, which is a Business Initiated Network (which exist alongside employee resource organizations such as Cisco’s Women Impact Network). In addition to providing executive-level sponsorship and support of the programs, Cisco also has an office of Inclusion and Collaboration led by Shari Slate; ongoing executive shadowing and sponsorship programs; diverse interview panels for recruiting prospective employees; a group of executives called “Men For Inclusion; "and company-wide training for unconscious bias.
Guel is sanguine about the future. After all, she’s gone from being the only woman in the room (and commonly assumed to be “Michael” prior to in-person meetings) to finally having to stand in line to use the women’s bathroom at SANS Institute (an industry research and educational organization supporting over 165,000 international security professionals) events. Having to wait in a bathroom line at all was her “litmus” test.
While Guel believes more work needs to be done (for instance, she would like to see the percentage of women in cybersecurity grow to at least 30%), she’s also seen the industry shift in positive ways. She says that in addition to noticing a growing recognition among women in the cybersecurity community that they are no longer so alone, she’s also noticed these relationships become “more collaboration than competition,” something that was harder when women saw each other as fighting for limited numbers of jobs and seats at the table.
One way this collaboration manifests itself is through sponsorship and coaching. Guel admits she’s been the lucky beneficiary of mentorship (both inside and outside of Cisco) and that coaching is an important way she and other executives at the company are helping to increase gender diversity now and in the future. If other women in the cybersecurity field are anything like Guel, expect to see more gender diversity resulting from women paying it forward to help advance each other and lift up the next generation.
