Women represent 14% of the workspace in cyber security in the US and under 10% in Europe. This low representation is a fairly well-known statistic. Some countries have this better like Australia that has around 25% cyber-security professionals being women. There is a lot of ongoing debate as to why that is, but this is not the question we are asking here.  We want to know what this ratio is for using digital security or privacy products. Is this low representation only in a cyber-security career choice, or would women similarly not be pursuing products in digital security and privacy even though they can make these decisions in anonymity?

To answer this, we look at the distribution of people who install a consumer security software that is clearly marked for improving personal security and digital privacy. We do not disclose what specific product or service, but it is a version of consumer-targeted service that we investigated where we had information (with a user base of more than 10K users). Interestingly, we found that only around 15-20% of women sign up vs. men. This is a worldwide statistic – we do not have a precise country-specific statistic but from the variations we could project that the US has a way better ratio than India for example but still in the low 20%. Also, we found that this 15-20% ratio is pretty much preserved across various age groups with relatively small variations. While there are differences between countries and how they were exposed to this product (that also likely impacted our findings), it seems that the fairly low ratio is consistent everywhere and across age groups. One possibility is that these products are catering to men and are not marketed well to capture the attention of women.

Be tuned as we try to answer why this may be the case in the future.