Diversity, Don't Read the Comments

Pedro Marcano at BSides Boston 2016

We tend to know diversity is important. There’s evidence that diverse teams are smarter and more creative. Furthermore, there’s also a lot of evidence that diversity matters for the bottom line. Based on the evidence, it seems like diversity would be important to an industry based on innovation and creativity. However, IT and specializations with the field like IT Security continues to be plagued by a diversity problem. And it doesn’t matter how you define diversity. No matter how you slice it, lack of diversity continues to be an issue. Recently, there’s been an increased focus on the issue with many tech firms publishing their stats and stating goals on improving diversity in their workforce, which leads to new stories being published, which invariably leads to comments on the story. If you think diversity matters, don’t read the comments. By engaging the audience throughout our talk, we will hit on the highlights of why diversity matters, what the current state of affairs look like, ideas on how to change it, and the importance of supporting a diverse culture. We want to start conversations about what each member of the InfoSec community can do to support diversity and ignore the comments.

Pedro Marcano is the CEO of Vernance. He has founded three information security startups. Lately he has been working with critical infrastructure organizations and utilizing different frameworks as a base to help solidify organizations’ security postures. Most of his career has been invested in consultancies where he has been a part of or managed many diverse and multicultural teams.