By being an organization of change, executives can not only diversify the talent within security, cybersecurity and IT teams, but they can improve the quality of their hires and set their enterprise organizations up to thrive in the future.

Women make up only 24% of the cybersecurity field, according to an ISC² study. Cybersecurity leaders Sharon Smith, Lori Ross O'Neil, Aanchal Gupta and Meg West discussed how to solve the problem of underrepresentation in the industry at the ISC² Security Congress 2021.

In this year’s Security Leadership: 2021 Women in Security report, we take you through the professional journeys of 13 enterprise security leaders that have risen the ranks during their careers with their skills, forward-thinking mindsets, and a passion for the job they do.

Ariel Weintraub has been appointed CISO at MassMutual.

We asked several Women Security Leaders to tell us what drew them into the profession, along with their thoughts on continued diversification of the industry.

Meet Stephanie Benoit-Kurtz, lead of cybersecurity faculty at the University of Phoenix – Las Vegas. She is also director of cybersecurity for Station Casinos in Las Vegas. She has spent three decades in the IT industry, working for a variety of large and small organizations and as a consultant. In the early days of her career, despite being part of the team responsible for implementing decisions at the IT company where she was employed, she “was routinely left out of the decision-making process. Here, we talk to Benoit-Kurtz about how the cybersecurity space has changed over time, and how the industry can embrace more individuals to meet demand and close the cybersecurity gap.