Gillian Moody discusses how the IT sector is ‘moving in the right direction’ when it comes to gender equality and the challenges the sector faces when it comes to upcoming regulation.
There is inequality when it comes to the amount of men and women in various industries, with the tech sector being a clear example.
Women make up roughly 35pc of STEM employees in the US, according to the Women Tech Network. Statista data from 2021 showed the percentage of women working in major tech companies, ranging from 29pc at Microsoft to 45pc for Amazon – though these figures go down for both leadership and tech roles. While these figures are not where they should be, this still represents a massive improvement from the past, when it was estimated that women made up only 9pc of the tech workforce in the early 2000s.
This figure is even lower in the ICT sector, as the European Institute for Gender Equality reports only around 17pc of the almost 8m ICT specialists in Europe are women.
One woman who has thrived in this male-dominated industry and witnessed its change is Gillian Moody, the MD of cybersecurity firm Stryve. The Carlow-headquartered company is one of Ireland’s leading cybersecurity start-ups, with clients ranging from SMEs to governments and large multinationals multiple countries.
Moody has had an impressive IT career spanning more than 20 years, being in multiple leadership positions, running her own business and working with major brands around the world.
Her achievements were also recognised in this year’s CIO & IT Leaders Awards, where she received the Outstanding Female Leader of the Year in ICT award. Speaking to SiliconRepublic.com, the Wicklow native said she was used to working in areas that predominantly had men, being a farmer’s daughter.
“It wasn’t like a challenge going, ‘oh, I want to go in the male-dominated industry”, Moody said. “It was just, I like this line of work and it doesn’t bother me or I don’t think twice about it that the majority of people I’m working alongside are males. That was never a problem.”
A changing industry
Moody said the first real job she had that was related to “what was going to be my future career” was with Gateway 2000, where customers could order custom-built PCs.
“I moved from there into plenty of other support roles,” she said. “I went travelling, so I went to Australia. My visa at the time [meant] you could only work with any one company for three months. So I chose to go through a kind of a contractor route with recruitment agencies.”
Moody noted that in all of the roles she worked in during those travels, she was the only woman “in any of the IT departments”. She eventually founded her own business called Moody Computers, which she ran for five years, but she sold it as she couldn’t find engineers.
This period also marked a change in the industry from Moody’s perspective, as it employed a woman technician and said that was the “first time” she’d come across another woman technician.
“So I really saw that change from about 2006 where there were female engineers coming into the market from my perspective,” Moody said. “Maybe there was others in other sectors, but I didn’t come across it.
“I noticed a gradual change, maybe up until 2018, 2019, and then I saw a huge change there. It nearly became where every company, what they were trying to do was make sure that they had the gender balance right.”
Moody believes the sector is “moving in the right direction” when it comes gender balance, but she also thinks it is important that the best person gets an available job, regardless of gender.
“I think someone should get a role based on their experience and based on the qualifications and what they’re bringing to the table,” Moody said. “Here in Stryve, we try to get the gender balance right. But if we have two candidates and one has more experience and is more qualified than the other, then we’ll choose them because it would be in the best interest of the team here in terms of what they can bring to the table and in terms of our customers, in terms of the knowledge and expertise.”
A new era of regulation
Moody has also witnessed changes in the IT sector as a whole throughout her impressive career and believes the landscape is very different now. She said being an IT manager in the past involved “the lifting and shifting of servers” and supporting users.
“Now when it comes to IT, it’s all about red tape, it’s all about regulation, like security is a massive…it’s such a headache for so many businesses,” Moody said.
“A lot of IT-responsible people, when they entered into this career, it was about bare metal devices, it was about servers, then it moved to virtualisation, but now it’s all regulations and they don’t really see any support issues. How their career originally started out has taken a completely different journey through no fault of their own.”
Moody noted some big upcoming regulation that is set to shake up the IT sector, such as DORA that will impact the financial sector in particular. She feels many in the industry “aren’t ready for that”.
“They’re starting, they’re aware of it, but that they haven’t started the work that’s required,” she said.
“Then there’s the NIS2, which is another upcoming challenge for a lot of businesses to make sure that they have alleviated the associated risk and are ready. Then there’s still a lot of businesses that are dealing with the fallout of GDPR.”
Many experts in the sector have been discussing the changes these pieces of regulation will bring to the IT sector. In a video with SiliconRepublic.com, Kyndryl’s Kris Lovejoy discussed cyber resilience, what DORA will mean for businesses and how to improve diversity in the sector. Earlier this year, Rob Hayes of Sia Partners discussed how Irish businesses can prepare for NIS2 and DORA.
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