In 2020, cybersecurity startups raised $8.9 billion and in 2021, that number increased to more than $21 billion.
A recent report by risk-based vulnerability management firm NopSec investigated how much of that funding went to companies led by women. They collected and analyzed 654 cybersecurity startups that raised more than $1,000,000 in funding in 2020 and 2021.
The findings: of the 654 startups analyzed, only 22 — or 3.3% — were led by female CEOs.
Lisa Xu, CEO of NopSec, commented on the report: “As a female CEO of a cybersecurity company myself, I was curious to know the answer to this question. There are dozens of articles that talk about the need to bring more women into cybersecurity and plenty of these companies celebrated International Women’s Day on social media. But I didn’t see any hard numbers that showed just how many of the industry’s startups raising capital are led by women. With just 3% of companies being led by women, do we really wonder why we have a gender diversity problem in cybersecurity? What’s actually being done to address this problem? Is there any real progress being made to fix it?”
Lisa is championing that in order to get more women in cyber, not only do we need to increase recruiting at every stage, but put an emphasis on women in leadership roles, especially CEOs.
