During the Gartner IT Symposium 2022 held in Orlando this month, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said in a keynote that training employees and investing in training and hiring technologies that bring value to business is the right approach to strengthening workforce resilience and inclusive hiring practices.

Part of the company’s latest investment in training from top to bottom comes with its recent research, Rising to the Top, exploring the inclusive hiring practices needed to strengthen workforce resilience and promote female leadership in the cybersecurity field.

Two Accenture leaders – Cyber Strategy Lead Valerie Abend and Global R&D Lead for Security Lisa O’Connor – sat down with SDxCentral to discuss how report findings suggest internal advancement for female workers in is a shortcoming within many organizations.

“I would argue it was never an asset being a female in any of my prior roles. It was a despite-the-fact. And [Accenture] was the first place that I ever realized that this was actually an asset, and that we should lean into it,” Abend said.

When Abend first came to present to the Accenture Cybersecurity Forum (ACF) – an external facing forum with CISOs from all over the world – there were no women. So Abend and O’Conner partnered to form the ACF Women’s Council, with all members being a part of the full council as well.

“There is such a mandate for innovative thinking in cybersecurity, period. There is an even bigger mandate when you're trying to be tip-of-spear in a research lab and really disrupt the thinking,” O’Connor explained, and Abend added that this disruption won’t happen without tapping into the entire population to approach cybersecurity’s demands.

“I'm very focused on getting women from the midpoint of their career to the top. It's not enough to get them in, burn them out, and let them go. I want them to stay and see how fruitful and interesting and different and diverse the career of cyber is itself. And so you have to invest in that,” Abend explained.

In rising the ranks to senior-level positions, more women have to leave their company rather than get promoted from within, according to the report.

“Women tend to wait longer and are quieter about their candidacy, when they should be very loud about it,” O’Connor explained.

“We found women were getting to the senior positions but were much more likely to do that outside at another firm and not at the company they were at. Men – they're more likely to be right in their firm and roll right through to that position,” she continued.

And yet, the report also revealed that once women did declare candidacy for a role, they moved much faster than male counterparts.

While men typically took around 12 months from declaring candidacy to closing the position, Women did so in three to six. "So that might argue that they're quietly overqualified, and they're not getting in early enough or they're not getting themselves out there,” O’Connor said.

She explained part of this problem comes from the lack of gender-neutral questions and qualifications, and how that approach can stave off promising candidates.

“We should be very careful about how we're writing those, the language we're using, and also the criteria on: what's enough? Because we've found many successful women cross over from other tech careers, other policy careers, and come into cybersecurity and be [a] great impact,” she said.

Another important distinction for climbing the leadership ladder was that between mentorship and sponsorship, O’Connor and Abend explained. While both are incredibly important, the latter may be essential in landing higher positions.

“One of the things that we found in the research was that women underestimated how important sponsorship was for some of these roles and really making sure you have line-of-sight to that network,” O’Connor explained.

“There is a confusion around the difference between mentorship and sponsorship and certainly somebody who is your sponsor may have wisdom to share,” Abend added. “But sponsorship is really giving voice to those women and visibility around those women in rooms that generally that person doesn't have access to.”

In Abend’s past experience of being put up for a senior managing director position, her boss at the time had to play a huge role in getting her name and skill sets out to the right network of people.

“We sent out on a process whereby he not only sponsored me, but he helped me find other sponsors who then were able to talk about me when I was put up – which essentially is an appointment by our CEO to actually attain that senior managing director … That's very different than mentorship,” Abend explained.

“Now I have the opportunity to do that for other women – which is awesome,” she noted.

Whether it’s in investment decisions or crisis management, O’Connor and Abend explained that this advocacy is essential to making sure that women have widely felt visibility in their organizations.

“Humans will not get it right 100% of the time ...  So we have to be supportive of our people and create psychologically safe environments for anyone to rise. And I think we could do more there in showing women that we're willing to take risks on them,” Abend added.