Red Hot Cyber
Cybersecurity is about sharing. Recognize the risk, combat it, share your experiences, and encourage others to do better than you.
Ada Spinelli : 15 December 2025 08:01
The scene is always the same: monitors lit, dashboards full of alerts, logs scrolling too quickly, an anxious customer on the other end of the call. You sit down, look around, and realize that, once again, you’re the only woman in the room. When I mention that I work as a Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst , the reaction is often a mix of amazement and curiosity:
“So is it like being a hacker?”, “Isn’t it a bit too technical a job?”, “Isn’t this world scary?”
It’s 2025, and some of these questions are almost laughable, but they clearly illustrate the reality: cybersecurity is still perceived as a male domain, where women are seen as statistical exceptions, anomalies . And the numbers, unfortunately, don’t entirely contradict this feeling.
Globally, women still represent a distinct minority in the cybersecurity workforce, and it’s not uncommon for teams to lack a single female professional. To bridge this gap, Red Hot Cyber created RHC Cyber Angels, an all-female group created to strengthen connections among women in the cyber sector and promote a more inclusive culture.
In 2025, the cybersecurity sector is growing but under pressure due to increased attacks and an expanding attack surface. Despite the growth in the number of professionals, demand exceeds supply, resulting in a deficit of nearly five million roles . Women are still a minority in the sector, with a pay gap compared to men. It’s not just a question of numbers: it’s a question of missed opportunities and structural inefficiency. A digital war is being fought using half the available army.
Italy, historically lagging behind in terms of female presence in the digital world, shows a surprising fact: it is among the countries with the highest percentage of women in cybersecurity, almost a third of professionals in the sector , a significant increase compared to the past.
What does it mean?
It means that Italy is catching up, perhaps precisely because it started so far back. The women who have managed to enter this world have often had to forge their own path step by step, swimming against the current, inventing alternative paths. This wasn’t a spontaneous change: it was driven by courageous individual choices and a few collective initiatives.
At the same time, if we broaden our view to the entire digital world, the picture remains fragile. In Italy , less than half of people between the ages of 16 and 74 have even basic digital skills, below the European average . This means the pool of potential talent is already limited to begin with, and within this pool, women are the ones most frequently steered toward other career paths, often far removed from IT and security.
In practice: on the one hand, positive signs are emerging, on the other, cultural, scholastic, and social barriers remain that weigh particularly heavily on girls.
When we talk about gender discrimination, we tend to think of extreme cases: openly misogynistic comments, deliberate exclusions, and cases of harassment. Unfortunately, these exist in our industry, too, but they’re not the only form of inequality. What often wears us down are the silent, daily wounds.
The first is the stereotype: if you’re a woman in a technical context, you constantly have to prove yourself. The goal, marked by an implicit judgment, is to check whether your competence is genuine . A male colleague, with the same level of experience, much more often takes the benefit of the doubt: if she makes a mistake, “it happens.” If the female colleague makes a mistake, it confirms the prejudice.
The second is wordless understatement: a detailed analysis of an incident is presented, linking IoCs, attack techniques, business impacts, and recommendations. No one objects. Then, later, a colleague repeats a previously stated concept, using slightly different words, and suddenly that same thing is perceived as brilliant. It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens often enough that it can’t be considered a simple coincidence.
The third is the questioning of one’s own merit. When a woman is invited to speak at a conference, or offered a prominent role or promotion, she wonders whether she was chosen for her skills or because they were looking for a woman to feature in their photos to demonstrate inclusivity. The line between genuine valorization and tokenism is thin. And sometimes it’s the woman who internalizes this doubt, even when it has no reason to exist.
Then there are the less visible but equally concrete inequalities: those in salary, access to certain projects, and opportunities for vertical growth. In many cases, for the same role and responsibilities, women earn less than their male colleagues.
The European Union has recognized the systemic problem and has launched a directive on pay transparency that member states, including Italy, must implement by 2026.
It won’t be the magic wand that solves everything, but it’s a step.
And every step toward transparency, in a still underregulated sector like cyber, counts for a lot.
There’s another piece of reality we can’t ignore: in Italy, digital skills among the population are still low.
Less than half of people have basic skills, and the gap with the European average is significant. This translates into an ecosystem where companies struggle to find technical professionals, many people feel unfit to pursue IT careers, and digital culture is perceived as being for the few.
When combined with decades of gender stereotypes (“girls are more suited to linguistics, humanities, and social sciences” ), the result is a very narrow funnel: few students choose the IT field, and among these, women are still a minority.
In such a fragile context, every woman who decides to enter cybersecurity commits a break with expectations.
It’s not just about individual careers, but about collective impact : every path opened by someone makes the ground a little easier to walk on for those who come after.
And, above all, the industry cannot afford to continue to draw from the same narrow pool of male profiles, often with the same backgrounds. It’s inefficient, risky, and shortsighted.
Sometimes the argument is simplified: “We need more women to get to 50/50.” But the point isn’t just the aesthetics of percentages. Modern cybersecurity is complex. It requires the ability to see connections between technology, people, processes, the geopolitical context, and economic dynamics. It’s no longer just ” closing doors and configuring firewalls,” but managing risk, communicating crises, and building long-term strategies.
In this type of scenario, diverse perspectives aren’t an afterthought: they’re a form of intelligent redundancy . A team made up of similar people will tend to see the same problems, always from the same perspective, and ignore others.
A team that is diverse in terms of gender, age, educational background, and life experience is much more likely to pick up on weak signals, interpret human behaviors related to threats, and understand the implications of a technical choice on the people who will be affected.
In all of this, women aren’t “better by definition,” but they often bring valuable skills and insights: attention to business communication, interpersonal conflict management skills, sensitivity to the human implications of security crises, and a systemic approach that transcends single tools. More women in cybersecurity means more diverse ways to defend, not just more statistics to display in corporate reports.
In recent years, several communities have supported the presence of women in cybersecurity. Among these, Cyber Angels, part of Red Hot Cyber, offers an informal space to share experiences and build a support network.
At the European level, the Women4Cyber Foundation promotes female participation through mentorship and networking programs, while Women4Cyber Italia organizes events and mentoring programs.
The CINI National Cybersecurity Laboratory coordinates training projects such as CyberChallenge.IT, also aimed at female students.
Globally, WiCyS offers similar programs.
These communities offer concrete opportunities and, above all, the message that you are never alone on this journey. The value of these communities lies not only in the concrete opportunities (scholarships, workshops, career contacts), but in the implicit message they convey: you are never alone. Someone else has already faced those same doubts, the same fears, the same frustrations. And they made it!
Cyber Threat Intelligence is one of those areas that straddles the hyper-technical and strategic worlds. It’s a job that requires getting inside the minds of attackers, studying campaigns, analyzing infrastructure, correlating technical indicators and the geopolitical context, and then translating all of this into understandable information for business.
Being a woman in this field means experiencing this “borderline” dimension in an amplified way.
On one side, there are colleagues who love to talk about TTPs, logs, sandboxes, and volatile memory. On the other, there are managers, boards, and customers who ask: “What does all this mean for us? How much risk do we run? What should we do tomorrow?”
Being in the middle means training both technical and human language.
It means learning to change register depending on the interlocutor, without losing precision.
Above all, it means developing a great ability to listen: to the organization you’re defending, to the context you’re operating in, to the people around you.
Being a woman in a role like this sometimes means being instinctively seen as “the person who knows how to communicate well” rather than ” the person who knows how to analyze a C2 infrastructure .” This can be annoying at first, because it seems to reduce a skill to a soft one. Over time, however, if you combine communication skills with a solid technical foundation, that perception transforms: you become the person who can bridge two worlds that often don’t communicate.
It’s not always easy. There will be times when you might feel undervalued, situations where your contribution will be taken for granted, roles where raising your voice (even metaphorically) to avoid being pushed to the margins might become a necessity.
But there will also be moments when the realization that your own perspective made a difference will prevail: a risk no one had seen, a weak signal recognized, a strategic recommendation that prevented a company from having a serious impact. And those moments are incredibly rewarding.
What must be kept in mind is that no one is born a technician.
Those who today seem to move naturally between protocols, exploits and logs once had no idea what a TCP packet or a SIEM was.
Everything can be learned, there is no secret cybersecurity gene.
Above all, there’s no “right age” or “perfect” path. There are people who have come to security through backgrounds in languages, psychology, law, and international relations. They’ve brought with them essential skills for areas such as governance, risk management, privacy, awareness, social engineering, and policy.
Cybersecurity isn’t just about exploits and reverse engineering: it’s also about processes, regulations, people, education, and corporate culture. If trust is lacking, the important thing is to never look at the entire ladder you’ll have to climb, but to start tackling it one step at a time.
The truth is, no one feels truly ready when they start. You enter hesitantly, and stay out of conviction. Fear isn’t a sign of inadequacy; it’s a sign that you’re crossing a boundary. The difference lies in what happens immediately afterward: stepping back or taking a step forward.
Cybersecurity is the invisible infrastructure that keeps businesses large and small afloat, and even some of the simplest parts of everyday life.
Every time an attack is stopped, an incident is handled, a vulnerability is closed, there is someone who has chosen to be on the other side of the screen.
That “someone” has neither a face nor a predetermined gender. It can be anyone who decides to be there.
Saying it’s not a world for women actually means silently accepting that everyone’s security is planned and managed by a single eye. It’s a renunciation. It’s a form of cultural surrender. It’s leaving half the voices out of the room where important decisions are made. Every woman who chooses cybersecurity sends a powerful message, even if she doesn’t realize it right away:
“This space belongs to me as much as to anyone else.”
It’s not a statement against anyone, it’s not a gender war. It’s an act of rebalancing.
It’s saying out loud what should be obvious: competence, talent, analytical skills, crisis management skills, and risk assessment skills are genderless. The sector today needs clear minds, diverse perspectives, and people who can stand tall amidst the chaos.
Every cultural barrier that discourages a girl from trying isn’t just an individual injustice, it’s one less piece of defense for everyone.
In a country where digital technology is still struggling to gain traction, every woman who decides to invest in technical skills breaks a thread of the old narrative: the one that keeps women away from consoles, alerts, logs, and strategic decisions. Each entry makes the next a little easier; that’s how industries change: not with a sudden revolution, but with a succession of people who, one after the other, refuse to be left out.
It’s not about being “better than men.” It’s about being yourself in a field that, for too long, has pretended there’s only one “right” way to be an IT professional.
The place at that desk, in front of those monitors, in those meetings, is not reserved for someone else.
It’s there, waiting for whoever decides to occupy it. This isn’t the time to make ourselves small to fit into existing spaces; it’s time to expand those spaces until no one feels like they’re in the way.
Anyone who decides to embark on a cybersecurity career today is choosing to stand with those who defend, protect, and build security where before there was only vulnerability, and there is no more powerful role, neither for a male professional nor for a woman.
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Ada Spinelli