Description
The gendered nature of cybersecurity is commonly observed by both scholars and practitioners, most often in calls to include/train/create more female cybersecurity professionals. Such well-meaning demands have various rationales, drawn from successive generations of feminist theory: that women have different (softer) skills to a default male cybersecurity professional, that diverse teams are more creative and robust, and so on. However, the simplicity of cybersecurity gender discourses is rarely acknowledged, and their problematic underlying assumptions – namely, a vaguely biological and non-intersectional liberal individualism - are challenged even more rarely. Although this conception of gender is not unique to cybersecurity, here it creates distinct dynamics due to the field’s growing political capital as the successor to and magnifier of deeply embedded military masculinities. This paper deconstructs prevalent concepts of gender in popular and ‘expert’ cybersecurity discourses and practices. It argues that both the meta-narrative of cybersecurity (premised on vulnerability, penetration, and leakage) and its technological ontology (from potent cyberweapons to agile detection technologies) can be read as destabilizing rather than reinforcing dominant gender hierarchies and divisions. The paper proposes a critical alternative that recognizes the co-production of gender identities through complex techno-social interactions, advocating a practical reorientation towards currently overlooked cybersecurity issues.
