Stepping Down (But Not Away) From the Day of Shecurity Conference

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It’s with great excitement that I’m stepping down from the foundational board for the Day of Shecurity conference. As the saying goes, if you love something, set it free. So that’s what I’m doing.

Day of Shecurity is in great shape:

• Lookout Security and CyberSN have provided excellent financial and operational support as owners of the non-for-profit conference. DOS operates with all the excitement of an airport escalator. This wouldn’t have happened without their corporate support.
• Our most recent conference had 47 sponsors, 85 different talks, 117 speakers, and over 1700 registrants. Reread that sentence. It blows me away that finding speakers and hoping enough people will show up to eat the food is no longer an issue anyone considers during planning. We built it and the people came.
• There is now a Customer Advisory Board comprised of a diverse group of folks. There are executives at mega-size corporations who have consistently provided financial support, startup security leaders who have taken a risk by hiring an entry-level person they met via the conference, and people who got into security in part by attending the conference. All of us care deeply about the future of the conference as paying consumers of it.
• Our virtual communities are thriving. The Day of Shecurity YouTube channel has dozens of talks from previous conferences, the LinkedIn Group has more than 2,000 followers, the Twitter account has 2,400+ followers and the Slack space used during the conferences is a thriving community that comes to life during each event.
• There is no way to quantify the gut feeling when you realize something you started will keep going whether you’re involved or not. I had that feeling about a year ago. It was amazing. And I realized it was time to go.

I got involved when my friend Matt Torbin told me he’d hosted a Burp Suite workshop (or something like that) at Lookout one Saturday for 10 entry-level women and wound up hiring one. I told him that sounded amazing. We should try that for 200. He laughed like I was an idiot… but we couldn’t quit talking about it.

It’s hard to overstate how scared we all felt. None of us had ever put something like this on. Hundreds of people, a full day, curriculum tracks, etc. Thankfully, that first one went off without a hitch. It was obvious by 10 am that morning that we were onto something. There were so many people there teaching, learning and making it successful without those of us who’d organized it. The participants were the real stars, as if they just needed a venue to make this happen. Justifying another was a no brainer.

I want to thank Matt Torbin, Launa Rich, Kelly Thibault, Lisa Kendall, Deidre Diamond, Brenley Brotman, Kyle Kennedy, and everyone else who put in a ridiculous amount of time on this effort. There were times it felt like this had taken over my life. I’m sure it felt that way for them too.

Me after five hours of trying to organize dozens of speakers into coherent conference tracks with themes, making sure people who speak aren’t booked in two rooms at the same time, they aren’t booked before their flight lands/departs and… omg I still experience PTSD at the memory. Gosh bless anyone who voluntarily does this at conferences.

My work isn’t done in this space, though.

While we have an amazing number of professional cybersecurity speakers involved and literally thousands of women attending with the goal of getting into the industry, a huge gap exists between those two. Getting that first security job is too hard. Those of us inside these hallowed walls with the high pay and epic job security have an obligation to break down the barriers. Doing so will make the world a better place, a more equitable place and, yes, a more secure place.

I went on a rant a few months ago against Microsoft when it received a tremendous amount of social media praise for a blog post of theirs announcing funding for community college cybersecurity programs. Microsoft was the largest company in the world (by market cap) and it literally had zero entry-level security jobs open on LinkedIn. And they even own LinkedIn. Just ask any community college graduate how easy it is to get a security job. That’s the problem to solve.

No one is born with two years of experience. We need to figure out how to make that requirement obsolete. It’s not working for anyone. Please connect with my on LinkedIn and shoot me a direct message if you’d like to help work on that.