Women in Cyber

How Many Cybersecurity Vendors Have Female CEOs?

I am publishing this in celebration of the UN’s International Women’s Day, which is March 8th.

Having a data base of 3,309 cybersecurity vendors opens up a lot of avenues for research. Just having the company names and URLs means you can, for instance, fine tune a large language model using data on just cybersecurity vendors.

The most frequently posed question I get on LinkedIn is: “How may of those vendors have women as their CEOs?” The answer is 72. That’s 2.1%. In total, they have taken in 1.2 billion dollars of investment.

The United States is home to 44 cybersecurity companies with women at their helm. Israel is second with 7.

Here are a few views of the data we collect on these 70 vendors. First sorted by head count, leaving out Accenture because while it has managed security offering, it tips the scale at 540K people. It is led by Julie Sweet.

Eva Chen is CEO and co-founder of Trend Micro. Wendy Thomas is President and CEO of Secureworks. Poppy Gustafsson is CEO of Darktrace. Pam Murphy heads up Imperva. Christy Wyatt is CEO of Absolute Software. All four companies are publicly traded.

Another view below. See the entire list of female CEOs in this Google Sheet.

And here are the fastest growing cybersecurity vendors led by women, by percent growth in head count in 2022 .

Only fifteen of the vendors saw a decrease in head count in 2022. Here is the growth chart for Dazz, one of the new generation of vulnerability management solutions.

I look forward to seeing many more female-led cybersecurity vendors next March 8th.