Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons Malicious Life. I love going to cyber security conferences and no it's not because of the talks or the

coffee stands or the fake Minecraft swords some vendors give away for free.

Okay, maybe the swords are part of the reason,

but really I love going to cyber security conferences

because I usually get to meet a lot of really cool and smart people.

But here's the catch.

You don't see a lot of women in such conferences, and if you've worked in cyber security for a while, that's probably not a huge surprise.

According to the American Association of University Women,

women make up just 28% of the workforce in technology, engineering and math fields.

Still, I always imagined that among the various STEM professions, cyber security, with its high concentration of intelligent

and often forward-thinking individuals, would probably lead the pack in terms of gender equality. But the reality it turns out is vastly different.

Not only does cyber security not lead the pack in terms of women participation in the workforce, it actually has the lowest percentage of women

among the different stem fields, only about 20 to 24 percent.

Why is that? That's the question we'll try to answer in this episode of malicious life. Hi everybody I'm

I'm Karen Elazari also known as K3 R3 and 3 so I use the number 3 instead of the letter

E that's my handle.

I'm known as the friendly hacker.

I'm a security researcher, author, and analyst.

Karen Elazari is a 20-year veteran of the Israeli cybersecurity sector and worked for some major international vendors.

So first of all, I want to preface this by saying that throughout my career in my hacking days and my military

servants days in my time with AT&T and after that with a bunch a whole bunch of

...