>If there are substantially fewer women in tech, why is it unreasonable to think there are practically no skilled female hackers? It is true that there are few

>If there are substantially fewer women in tech, why is it unreasonable to think there are practically no skilled female hackers? It is true that there are few women in tech in the US and the UK, but this is not a general rule and may not hold in the area of network exploitation (breaking into peoples networks and computers without permission). For instance in India "15.8% of engineering and technology undergraduates in the UK are female.(4) Compare with India: where over 30% of engineering students are women on engineering courses account for over 30% of the students.(5)"[0]. and China "In China, 40% of engineers are women and in the USSR of the 1980s, women accounted for 58% of the engineering workforce." [1] >(And note that when I use the term 'hacker' I'm referring to the illegal, blackhat variety, not the 'I turned my oven into a WiFi hotspot!' kind) Given the enormous government investment in network intrusion capabilities I would guess many of the more skilled hackers work in intelligence and military orgs. Israel, which have a fairly gender balanced military, is a leader in the area of network exploitation. Given that 65% of Israeli women serve in the military and only 3% of combat roles in the IDF are filled by women it is likely that women constitute a large percentage of intelligence roles. For instance the IDF's Unit8200 (tasked with SIGINT and likely "cyberwar" duties) and thought to be responsible for Stuxnet has a large number of women[2]. I would imagine that some of them are quite skilled at breaking into networks. GCHQ which is also considered quite good at network exploitation is more gender balanced than the tech community in the US. It is hard to determine from public sources how many women are involved in "hackish" activities at GCHQ. "[women] comprise only 29% of new entrants to GCHQ" [3] Mathematics is a big feeder to the Cryptologic world (as much of cryptography is math) and within the US math is much more gender balanced than engineering (between 40-50%[4]). It is often said that: "In particular, the National Security Agency (NSA) is the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States, and perhaps the world. Among other things, the NSA needs mathematicians to help create and break codes, analyze intelligence data, and perform signal analysis"[5]. Anecdotally many academic cryptographers are female. The Snowden documents show that at the NSA people move between jobs and duties learning new skills and sharing their current expertise. I would expect there are quite a few female cryptoanalysts who got interested in network exploitation especially given the enormous utility that mathematics and cryptanalysis can bring to the table. [0]: http://www.wes.org.uk/statistics http://www.wes.org.uk/statistics [1]: http://www.paristechreview.com/2010/09/29/why-more-women-engineers/ http://www.paristechreview.com/2010/09/29/why-more-women-eng... [2]: http://fortune.com/2015/06/25/women-israeli-army-tech-training/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/25/women-israeli-army-tech-traini... [3]: WOMEN IN THE UK INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: A report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament [4]: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/columns/launchings/launchings_09_09.html https://www.maa.org/external_archive/columns/launchings/laun... [5]: https://www.math.uh.edu/~tomforde/Web/Jobs.html https://www.math.uh.edu/~tomforde/Web/Jobs.html