Tech conferences like RSA still have a diversity problem

They may be trying, but that doesn't mean it's enough. The RSA Conference still has a diversity problem.

The lack of gender diversity in the tech industry as a whole has been highly criticized and making headlines for some time, ahem CES. And yet the 40,000-plus person yearly cybersecurity event taking place this week in San Francisco has been particularly adept at tripping over its own feet when it comes to including women. This, perhaps, was one factor contributing to the front and center acknowledgement Wednesday morning by Cisco Chief Security and Trust Officer John Stewart that the industry needs to do better.

Stewart, who helped kick off Wednesday's keynote, told the crowd gathered in Moscone Center that diversity in tech is "not about this politically correct thing.” Rather, he insisted, the industry as a whole would benefit from more equal representation in its ranks.

“It’s actually strategy,” he observed. “Diverse inputs to teams make them better.”

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

This is a message that the RSA Conference could have used, and acted upon, substantially earlier. Conference organizers faced intense criticism when they first announced that 19 of the event's 20 keynote speakers were to be men.

Those same organizers soon backtracked and released a new lineup, this time including seven women in the 23 keynote speaker spots, but not before their initial blunder had spawned a rival conference called OURSA that billed itself as highlighting "a diverse set of experts from across information security, safety, trust, and other related fields."

And, let's be real here: It's not like scheduling seven women keynote speakers out of 23 represents some beacon of enlightenment anyway.

Importantly, this obviously isn't a problem limited to tech conferences. With a 2017 industry report finding that women make up only 11 percent of the cybersecurity workforce, there is still clearly a lot of work left to do — both for the industry as a whole and conferences like RSA.

Stewart, along with the thousands of people who attended his keynote, hopefully realizes this.

The question remains as to just how hard they're all going to work to improve the situation — something we shouldn't have to wait until RSA's 2019 keynote lineup is announced to find out.