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Cybersecurity research firm HackerOne, which specializes in crowd-sourcing vulnerability detection, will have a new CEO at the beginning of November: Kara Sprague, currently chief product officer at F5.
Sprague told IT Brew that she looks forward to expanding platform capabilities and growing the team of researchers that HackerOne works with. The company has paid out over $300 million in bounties to hackers.
“[Investing in] programs that enhance the knowledge and capabilities of the broader pool of folks so that they, too, are able to be more effective in our cyber defense is critical,” Sprague said. “And so is enlisting them into this community of security researchers that we have.”
One of Sprague’s passions is gender equity in tech, an issue she discussed during a recent interview with IT Brew.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
As a woman in tech who’s about to be the CEO of a prominent cybersecurity company, I’m sure you have some opinions on the gender breakdown in the tech industry. Can you talk about your interest in narrowing the gap?
Gender parity in tech…it’s a personal passion. It’s something that is of professional importance to me as a woman in tech. I also have a passion to grow the community of women and underrepresented minorities in tech, because I think that’s a social good.
More importantly, I think it’s imperative for the successful use of our technology to solve society’s most challenging problems.
Can you explain that idea of how women and other underrepresented groups can add to the successful use of technology?
You need to have representation from people that look like society. We are missing solutions on a whole class of problems because we don’t have the right level of representation from women and other underrepresented minorities.
So, that’s an area that I have a huge passion for. I lived that passion as a member of the board of Girls Who Code for six years and continue to live that passion as a senior leader in terms of intentional investments and mentorship sponsorship and other organizations that are pushing for more diversity in tech.
Do you think we’re closer, in terms of equity, than in the past? It does seem like things are getting better on the diversity front for the industry, however incrementally that change is coming.
It is moving in the right direction—at a glacial pace. You see stats. And one stat I saw recently…[said] that at the current course we will achieve gender parity in 2100, which is infuriating and crazy. More needs to be done on this dimension, more quickly.
For my part, I will continue to focus on finding opportunities to give more tech-related opportunities and bring more women and underrepresented minorities—both into knowing about technology and being in having the skill set around it, but also having them be successful in serving in organizations.