Navigating Gendered Cybersecurity Culture Through Women’s Networks

This paper explores the experiences and perceptions of women working in cybersecurity with a specific interested in the role that so far underexplored women’s networks play. Situated at the intersection of feminist security studies and feminist technoscience, it conceptualizes cybersecurity culture as structured by gendered power logics embedded in Western technostrategic and masculine norms. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with members of women’s networks across cybersecurity communities, the study examines how women interpret the meanings and functions of their networks. It explores how networks (fail to) facilitate solidarity, professional legitimacy, mediate belonging, negotiate power, and how they constrain or enable resistance to dominant cybersecurity cultures, gendered hierarchies and power relations. I argue that while women’s networks can challenge those norms and build alternative forms of solidarity, trust and care, they also operate within and might reinforce the masculine and technostrategic norms that shape cybersecurity. By centering the knowledge, experiences and voices of women working across cybersecurity, it highlights the complexity and ambivalences that lie within attempts to make the field more inclusive and gender just and contributes to the growing feminist-informed literature on cybersecurity.