The Cyber Butterfly Effect

The butterfly effect might evoke images of Ashton Kutcher’s 2004 physiological thriller, or perhaps mathematical chaos theory, depending on whom you ask. The basic premise: Small differences in initial conditions lead to huge changes overtime.

As it turns out, the butterfly effect has a powerful lesson for anyone who cares about building a more robust and diverse pipeline to feed into the cybersecurity industry: sometimes the smallest actions you might take can have the biggest impacts.

Take, for instance, a seemingly small decision that helps to explain why the pipeline problem is so dire to begin with — and why women comprise only 10–12 percent of today’s cybersecurity field. In the 1980s, computer companies decided to market products their products boys. NPR has suggested that this decision helps to explain why the numbers of female coders dropped so dramatically after 1984.

Today, the lack of women in cybersecurity is just one of the field’s big problems. The other is that men often aren’t aware of any problems related to gender inequality.

In an anonymous survey of Harvard college undergraduates involved in computer science (a common cybersecurity feeder program) conducted this fall, there was a clear gender difference in attitudes about the impact of the program’s gender gap.

“I don’t always feel completely a part of the CS community, or sometimes even taken seriously by others in the community,” one woman responded on a survey.

“[The gender gap does] Not [have] a huge impact, since some of my best friends who take CS are girls,” a male respondent told us.

These responses paint a familiar picture: Both groups are enrolled in a highly demanding, rigorous program. However, women fight feelings of alienation, and men aren’t aware that any gender-related problem exists.

This disconnect in understanding has significant implications for retention in the cybersecurity pipeline. Why is that? When most of the people in a field don’t recognize that there’s a problem, they likely aren’t aware of the ways that they may be unconsciously contributing to another person’s relative comfort or discomfort in the field.

And here’s where we come back to the butterfly effect. Because it only takes one seemingly inconsequential comment or phrase from a well-meaning teacher or peer to send a budding computer science major running.

For instance, I taught myself HTML at 12, but was not encouraged to take a computer science course though I told my advisor I loved it. Despite having the credentials and interest in taking a cryptology class my freshman year of college, I was told that it would be ‘too hard’ to jump into that my first semester. Finally, in grad school, I finally made my entry into the cybersecurity field, this time from a public policy perspective.

It’s impossible to say whether my gender prompted these small nudges (which I was still able to circumvent). But regardless, my experience and research offers two key lessons for anyone — peers, parents, teachers and influencers (including the media) who want to encourage women to take opportunities in male-dominated fields: 1) It’s never too late to support women looking to make lateral moves into the field, and 2) a multitude of micro-level misfires and missed opportunities can add up to big, macro-level differences.

To be sure, there’s now a growing industry to encourage people to confront their biases in workplaces around the world.

But in some ways, the more difficult problem lies behind that starting line. How are girls’ (and boys’) conceptions of what interests are ‘appropriate’ for them shaped by their parents, teachers, influencers, and advisors? With the cybersecurity field facing a shortfall of 1.5 million workers by 2020, it’s time that we start seriously addressing that question…and paying attention to the small things we do everyday that have big impacts on the future.