Diversity & Belonging at Detectify: Challenging the traditional way to do security

At Detectify, we made the decision early on to build a diverse team of individuals from different backgrounds, nationalities, and life experiences. There are a number of studies that demonstrate the value diverse teams bring to companies, so we got right to work.  Building a diverse team meant we would have to approach things differently, from attracting and hiring diverse talent to fostering a culture where each individual feels they belong. 

This year, we launched our first Diversity & Belonging Survey to evaluate how we can improve and share our incremental success. Our survey was completely voluntary and anonymous. We hope that by sharing this report will encourage more companies to invest in building diverse and inclusive teams.

We believe cybersecurity companies are not for some, but for all.

Security is often positioned as an organizational challenge that only a select group of individuals with the right experience and knowledge can combat. This results in cybersecurity companies being less approachable as a place to work for most people. We believe people from all backgrounds can achieve remarkable things. Role-modelling this value in reality meant we needed to do things differently, from searching for people outside of the security industry to opening our doors to people from all over the world. 

Diversity doesn’t automatically bring inclusion, and we invested in creating spaces – online and offline – for our teams to share their knowledge, passions, and even bring their canine companions to our offices in efforts to help everyone embrace diversity and feel welcomed. We have a lot more to do, but early indicators are promising. 

So how are we doing?

Women represent 45% of Detectify employees globally.

We have included some information below that we collect during onboarding of new Detectifyers. Technical roles refer to teammates who are in a software engineering/ developer and/ or security researcher role.

• Women represent 45% of Detectify employees globally. In comparison, women are reported to represent 24% of the cybersecurity workforce overall.  
• Women represent 72% of the Detectify executive leadership team. 
• Women are less represented in technical roles (35%), and this is a focal area for improvement in gender parity at Detectify.
• We have over 30 different nationalities in our workforce. Attracting and hiring talent from outside of Sweden has contributed new perspectives and ideas to how we work.
• 20% of our employees are parents or caretakers. This is an important acknowledgement that we strive to build a fast-growing tech company that recognises and celebrates personal milestones as well.

We know we cannot go at this alone, so our team has found ways to make an impact through community-driven events to co-hosting panels to raise awareness to the lacking representation of women in security. Representation of women at Detectify is comparatively better than most global companies, however it remained flat in 2020. We plan to keep leading the way to get more women into security, and aim for a lift in 2021.

All backgrounds can achieve remarkable things at Detectify.

We were pleased to learn that ninety percent (90%) of our teammates who participated believe people from all backgrounds can achieve remarkable things at Detectify. We are motivated and inspired by these results to do even better. That is why we are working with every teammate – from new grad to executive leadership – to ensure our systems that support and enable inclusive hiring, career development, and access to advancement opportunities are equitable. We are also working to identify how we can create more visibility for diversity that may not exist and/ or underrepresented at Detectify.

Next steps

We are excited to share what we accomplished and hope more companies share how they are doing at building diverse and inclusive teams. We will share our next Diversity & Belonging report later this year. Until then, if you are interested in learning more about our open roles, please check out our careers page!