There is a paper in the SANS Reading Room titled “Women in IT Security Project Management” by Gurdeep Kaur that I came across this morning thanks to a friend of mine. After reading this paper it is clear why I get together with some of the most wonderful women in security to do the gender panels. This piece is actually written by a women, which is surprising as some of the rhetoric could likely be found in a piece from the late 1960′s when gender equality in the workforce in the United States was just in its fetal state.

The paper is written in such a way that the author questions if women possess the critical leadership skills to be successful in IT Security and Project Management, she brushes upon the decline of women entering the IT field, then the paper just gets all kinds of messy! She speaks to ‘Building a strong foundation’ and encouraging girls to stay engaged in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. YET, she then digresses into a generalization about parents influence in their children’s behavior. WOW! Really? My parents bought me my first computer when I was 7, I have a friend who’s parents were government intelligence and she played with crypto when she was young. Both my friend and I were cheerleaders but somehow managed to still love science and math despite this author’s claim that during puberty that we would need additional encouragement. I call hogwash! This is where the paper just starts to spin down and where it becomes easily identifiable that the author is not using as much data to create a fair representation, but rather to justify her position and behavior.

I would like to formally invite the author to be part of our panel in March at BSidesSF during RSA Conference if she would like to defend her points, especially those in the 3 section of her paper. You all will just have to read it to understand that I don’t have enough time to pick apart all that I disagree with.

I am absolutely confused as to why SANS would actually post this to the reading room, this type of rhetoric belongs only in blogs.

Most asinine quote from the paper:   “It’s important to prove expertise with an industry certification.”