Demystifying Cybersecurity: How Mari Galloway and Other Women Are Creating Their Own Careers in Cyber

It will take a paradigm shift to defend our national security moving forward. Women and people of color should be at the forefront of this effort. Demystifying Cybersecurity, a #ShareTheMicInCyber and Ms. magazine monthly series, spotlights women from the #ShareTheMicInCyber movement—highlighting the experiences of Black practitioners, driving a critical conversation on race in the cybersecurity industry, and shining a light on Black experts in their fields.

This month, here’s everything you need to know about the field of cybersecurity and how to create your own career in it, courtesy of Mari Galloway, CEO and a founding board member for the Women’s Society of Cyberjutsu.

‘Vagina Obscura’ Author Rachel E. Gross Takes Us on a Daring Anatomical Voyage

Rachel E. Gross, in her debut book Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage, takes us on a journey around “the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making―the uterus, ovaries and vagina,” elaborating both on what science knows, and what it doesn’t. (Did you know it wasn’t until 1993 that a federal mandate required researchers to include women and minorities in clinical research?)

Gross recently spoke to Carli Cutchin by phone from her home in Brooklyn. Thoughtful and erudite, she talked about the female and LGBT researchers who’ve made scientific inroads against the odds, the myth that the “clitoral” and “vaginal” orgasms are distinct from each other, a princess who relocated her clitoris, koala vaginas and much more.

Demystifying Cybersecurity: Women and Marginalized Groups Must Be at the Forefront of the Digital Revolution

It will take a paradigm shift to defend our national security moving forward. And we know women and people of color should be at the forefront of this effort. The #ShareTheMicInCyber, campaign highlights the experiences of Black practitioners in the field of cybersecurity, driving a critical conversation on race in the industry.

Women Data Scientists of the World, Unite!

The Women in Data Science Conference (WiDS) was born of a problem: How can we remove the barriers to success that traditionally bar women from accessing the increasingly critical field of data science? To Margot Gerritsen, professor at Stanford University and co-founder and co-director of WiDS Worldwide, ensuring women can see other women in the field will help them destroy the myth that data science is a field exclusively for men

The WiDS conference will be held on March 7, 2022—the day before International Women’s Day. Tune into WiDS Worldwide Livestream throughout the day to watch keynotes, tech talks, panel discussions and meet-the-speaker interviews.

Harriet Tubman’s Disability and Why it Matters

Most 19th-century writers focused on Tubman’s bravery and strength. Her supporters praised her for her successful solo journeys into the slave-holding South to free dozens of enslaved people.

Yet, as an enslaved woman who lived in a patriarchal and anti-Black America, Harriet Tubman’s freedom dream and fugitive activism demonstrated something else: She offered up a version of freedom where a disabled Black woman sat at the center of it, where Black women were liberators, and where liberation was communal and democratic.  

Harriet Tubman, Astronomer Extraordinaire

Polaris, the North Star, is so named because it always points toward true north. Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman used the North Star to liberate herself—then went South over and over again, using it to liberate both family and strangers. 

I cannot imagine a more noble use of astronomical knowledge than to liberate people from the violent horror of chattel slavery. There is a great cosmos beyond the horrors of slavery and its wake. We have always been a part of it, and it has always been a part of us.