The wisdom on why it is difficult to recruit and retain women in the industry has changed over the past decade; the speaker will share the latest information about the most successful approaches and results from a recent working group on acquiring and retaining female technology leaders. The speaker will also discuss how the methodologies used in studies affect the trustworthiness of the conclusions and how to get insight into your workforce using readily-available tools. Participants will leave with a core understanding of why the gender gap in cyber security exists, how to collect information from systems and people in your organization to gain valuable insights, and how a scorecard methodology created by diverse cyber security engineers working in the industry can help identify areas for improvement.
Ashley Holtz is a programmer and researcher specializing in security and digital forensics. She is currently the Services Engineering Manager at CrowdStrike where her team solves a variety of challenges from endpoint forensic data collection to big data analysis. She is a long-time advocate for women, minorities, and veterans in tech. She has developed and open-sourced curriculum for several university and workforce development programs in the DC area and teaches at free or low-cost programs in her spare time.