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Jelena Zelenovic Matone, who also serves as CISO at the European Investment Bank, is the president of the W4C Luxembourg chapter and a founding member of Women Cyber Force Handout photo  

Established as part of the European Cybersecurity Organisation’s Women4Cyber Foundation, Women4Cyber’s aim is to boost women’s participation in the field of cybersecurity. 

“In Luxembourg, the female workforce's distribution is still very concentrated towards specific sectors (e.g., health sectors and education), and overall, women represent only 38% of employees,” Zelenovic Matone says. “Less than a quarter of employees in ICT are women.”

Zelenovic Matone, who also serves as CISO at the European Investment Bank, says that she was encouraged to set up the WCF to help bridge a gap and find concrete solutions to the shortage of women in cybersecurity. She worked hard--and was encouraged by her role models--in the fields of STEM and mathematics, which she excelled at. But she recognises this may not be the case for every young woman. 

“Globally girls account for only 35% of STEM students, and women represent only 20% of all tech workers,” she says. Even in her first 10 years in her career in Canada, “there were almost no women in our field.” She adds that she’s often the only woman in a room of cybersecurity experts, and when she attends conferences there are only “a handful” of women. 

So why the gap? 

“The job is very demanding,” Zelenovic Matone explains. In her own case, she studied IT engineering as an undergrad no fewer than 4.5 years. Later she worked towards an executive MBA at the University of Toronto and received her CISA and CRISC certifications. 

At the start of her undergrad, she says there were two women in a group of around 1,000. By the end there were only 11 people to make it through the entire programme--and she’s fairly certain she is the only woman of that class to be working in cybersecurity today. 

In order to keep up her qualifications, she needs to get an additional 40 hours of training per year, given the rapidly changing nature of the field. But the fact that the work is constantly changing, dependent on so many functions, is part of why she thinks the work is so engaging, and she wants to encourage other women to consider it.

Her work has clearly paid off: she was awarded as CISO of the year in Luxembourg in 2019 and CISO Sentinel Global in December 2020.

“Some of us have been blessed to have had either role models from an early age or throughout our careers, but we should not discount women who have not had this chance and who need others' support to get to where they need to be,” she explains. “We are capable of unlimited potential, but we need help, and we need support from time to time.”

Addressing the shortage 

Zelenovic Matone says there is a growing need for cybersecurity professionals, but “we’re not catching up enough.” In addition to the shortage of females in the field, she adds: “The gender imbalance and pay grade variance in cybersecurity is evident across the globe, and it should not come as a surprise that Luxembourg would be dealing with the same matter at hand.”

Through the WCF--with 11 female founding members working in a range of fields from  ICT to legal--“we want to create long-lasting career choices for women, either via mentoring and empowering or via keeping a network for future work opportunities within the field and helping each other.”

The group aims to make more urgent the goal of getting girls and women interested in cybersecurity. Mixed partnerships will help allow the initiative to run training courses, and the team is hoping as well to launch its first hackathon, more information about which should be forthcoming. 

Online launch event

The Luxembourg chapter of Women4Cyber, launched simultaneously as the Serbian chapter, takes place starting at noon on 8 March via Zoom and will focus on career development of women in the field of cybersecurity.

Representatives from both countries will be involved, including keynotes speeches by François Thill, director for cybersecurity of Luxembourg’s economy ministry, and Tatjana Matić, minister of trade, tourism and telecommunications for the Republic of Serbia. 

For more information, visit womencyberforce.lu