Welcome back to another episode of The Cyber Queens. We are your hosts, Maril, Erika, and Nathalie. I'm Maril Vernon, ethical hacker and resident red team expert. I'm Erika Eakins, your technical salesperson. I'm Nathalie Baker, all-things blue team. And today we have a very special guest, Amber DeVilbiss. I'm so excited to have her on this episode. Amber, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about yourself. Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here. Amber DeVilbiss. I'm a security advisor at Guidepoint Security and I do a lot of other things as well. So I have a book and a nonprofit and all the fun stuff that goes with all that. We have been so excited for this episode for so long. We're like, it's Amber Day. Amber Day's here. Yay. We're all big fans. Big fans of your content, big fans of your book. My children have a copy. We read it at nighttime. So, yes, love loving everything you do. We will plug all of Amber's social channels and places where you can find her in the notes. Today's topic we're talking about something that is just so fun and so near and dear to our little black hearts, which is, as females in cyber and in tech, typically navigating being the diversity hire, right? Diversity is a big initiative. It's all sexy right now. Lots of companies are trying to catch up with their DNI initiatives and boards and stuff, and we as females, often find ourselves as the only female in the room, which is why we started the podcast. Talking about that and how it works, how it feels, how you can navigate if you do find yourself in the situation where you're the token diversity hire on your team. All right, spicy. So how many teams have you guys worked on where you're the only female? Every team, all of them. Every team, until I built my own. And then after that it's just been like uphill from there. There you go. If you don't like the way your team looks, build your own. I love it. How about you Amber? Yeah, exactly. I would say, I got a little bit luckier. I think there's only been one or two teams where I was the only female, so.. Wow. Yeah, it's been lucky for sure. It depends, like if you would consider. Team the same like Erika, you and I had worked together previously, right? So I was an SE so a sales engineer, and you were an account executive. Still are an awesome one. Nonetheless, I mean we technically were a team, but my team, yeah, even then it still had female engineers. So I've been pretty lucky. Yeah. There was another female, there was another female engineer. Cause sales is one team and then the SEs are the other team. But you did actually have another female. Oh yeah, we actually had three or four. Oh. So yeah, at Zoom we we had like two OpSec teams. We had the proper red team, and then we had like the AppSec team who does most of the fuzzing and the testing the client and everything like that. That team was huge. It was like 40 people, 40 pen testers. And there were a lot of girls on that team. I think there were like 30% females, so that was really nice to see. But on the red team, which was much smaller, only eight people, I was the only female. And the most junior, of course. That's awesome. It was awesome In sales for the last 12 years in cyber sales, I've been the only female on every team. Well, I think now at the level you're at, right? You're a territory manager, it just goes to show how small the pool of females is at the top, in higher echelons of management and of the organization. Like you get to a level where you find that most of your peers, the other team leads or the other territory managers are just mostly dudes. It's true. It's very true. There's no, there's not a lot of female sales management in frontline management. So I'm an enterprise account executive. I manage large accounts. For those of you that don't know what that is, but there's literally not a lot of women in sales management. And if there are other women on the enterprise teams they're in other regions of the country. So how has typically being the only female that you find yourself surrounded with, how has that influenced your working style or how you prepare for your roles or just challenges that you've met? Tell us how you've navigated that. Let's start with Amber. I come from a military family, right? So there's a lot of thick skin building when you're young. My dad was always very realistic and was like, I want you to, when you get into IT, stay in it, because you'll be a unicorn and there's gonna be tons of people that have different terrible motives. Sometimes it's about navigating that and using it to your advantage. But not in like a weird way, not in the way that people assume. So there's a lot of times where folks will come in. How many times? I don't think as much with Erika, but I had another rep where I would show up right before she got there and the clients would be like, "oh, are you bringing your engineer today?" I'm like, "I'm the engineer." They'd be like, "oh, great. We're gonna totally just like rake her over the coals, right?" And I would sit there and go like, We can't wait for this. Yeah. I'm like a magnet for that, but I would always just play dumb, because it's funny how many people wanna, especially in security, how many people wanna brag about like, the things that they've built and how awesome their program is. And I'm just like, "oh, really? That's so interesting. How does that work?"And they just are like, "oh, really? Like I get to feel amazing." And then I'm like, thank you. As I'm like walking away. So it's like people don't realize like how much information they give up when they think they're like boasting. And for me, I kind of use that to my advantage mostly because people like I said, assume I'm the dumb girl in the room, right? That just doesn't know. And how do I become an engineer? There's no way I could possibly be one that whole thing. So I think navigating that is not only understanding like that you're gonna run into that so you can like mentally prepare to kinda route that as you go. But also finding a strong network of other women and that's why I love what you guys are doing here too. Erika and I kinda latched onto each other when we first met, and we've been besties ever since. She's had my back. I've had hers and we just power through it together. We have tons of fun war stories. From all this. Yeah, we do. I remember a particular instance when it was when we met and she was, my SE, my sales engineer, the company we worked at, I covered Nevada and we went to a customer in Nevada and it was about six or seven guys. It was a government account. I know you're laughing because you remember this Amber. We walk in and they looked really dumbfounded. So they knew who I was because I had been talking to them. They knew I was, you know who I was, but they didn't realize that my engineer was a female. They were really confused when she started rattling off all these questions and technical things and just being awesome that they were like, "oh my gosh, we need to get our crap together." Do you remember that? That was one of our first meetings. Yeah, I sure do. Yeah. I will say sometimes it does require that low key flex you're like, just so we're all on the same page, just so we can get this out of our systems, let me drop a bunch of bombs and demonstrate how much I know so we can just move forward from the fact that I'm a girl sitting at this table with you guys. I've been there. By the way, I swear to God females in Cyber are talking smack at happy hour. We have way more fun than you gentlemen do. I'm not gonna lie. Our stories are better and our revenge is better. Okay. All around. What about you? Nathalie? Nathalie, miss, female team, SOC leader. What about you? So coming from the SOC side of things coming up through, I had a lot of times where like guys were questioning my technical opinion, and I'm just like, "all right. Why do you need to be questioning my technical opinion?" I obviously know what I'm talking about. A couple episodes ago, or in a few episodes I will be talking about this where like I had a software engineer on a client call with me. And they were literally like asking me to go line through line, through my script, what my script did. And I was like, "well, my script fixes your script in this way." Like I will just bring facts at them and be like, yeah, now if you wanna question my technical opinion, I'm going to make you feel like an idiot for doing that. And that's really how I've navigated through it is just being like, "oh yeah, you wanna question my technical opinion? Okay, well here you go. Here are the facts." Yeah, the first time I really encountered genuine opposition, not just like veneer just being a jerk about it, but like legitimate work related, performance related opposition. Especially on my technical experience. Cause I'm new, right? By all considered factors, I'm new. At this time I was only six months new to pen testing. And I go in to deliver a report. I literally walk into the room, sit down at the table, and the guy goes, "all of these findings are false positive. This doesn't reflect the environment at all." And I'm like, "oh, why is that?" And he's like, "because we gave you a misconfigured image to test." And I'm like, "oh, okay." So they literally set me up for failure and then they just, rather than tell me that in a meeting, like, "oh, we realized we gave you the wrong base image, or we linked you the wrong thing, or whatever." They chose to have the meeting anyway, to embarrass me in front of everybody. I was like, "well, going based on what you gave me and assuming that you follow your own documentation, this is actually the image that you're using to roll out to new assets. And these are all the things I found that are wrong with them." And they actually started calling me the Boppy Millennial Chick in Security in emails, which was stupid cuz I admin the DLP tool, like I can see all these emails and it was just one of those things where they started like questioning my experience so bad, and specifically around AWS and the cloud, they're like, we don't know if but the cloud is the internet. And I'm like "oh, oh no." So just to shut them up, I went and I started volunteering with the CIS group, the Center for Internet Security, who writes the benchmarks for various minimal levels of security for various platforms and technologies. And I joined the AWS community and I helped author the benchmark for AWS foundational security. And the next time we went into one of those meetings, I was like, "I would like you to pull up the benchmark for cloud security, and I would like for you to tell me whose name is on it. Is it yours? No, it's mine." Yeah. That's crazy. The low key revenge that I saw at that time. Well and it's nuts cuz then it's and I've actually it, I would say one thing to add to that really quick to the last thing I was mentioning was like having like female colleagues and people to help you out or whatever. But there were also like a lot when I was in a SOC, right? I had some of the SOC managers prior to me took me under their wing and they were like, "you're always gonna get people that are just throwing out red herrings, right? To throw you off. And it absolutely has nothing to do with what we're talking about." So eventually over time, you need to start getting better at picking that out and then just saying, "we'll get to that later. Right now we're talking about this, or we're here to discuss this." So it's a good one too, right? So there's like pluses and minuses for every side, but I feel like just like you, right? This is why I'm terrified of public speaking. This story right here, you heard it first. So basically one day I was in the war room, right? And this incident happened, blah, blah, blah. And this is kinda like right when I first started working there as a security analyst. One of the guys writes up on the board, he's like, "okay, source address is this, destination address is this, how can you tell which one is which though?" And I was like, I was listening. He's like, "no, how can you, see she doesn't even know, she shouldn't even be working here. Blah, blah, blah." And just publicly shamed me. And I was like, "oh my God, now I have to be the smartest person in the room." So I spent like all these years pretending to do that and then realized, "That's dumb." There's gonna be people like this everywhere and it's just like you said, those guys that set you up, it's like, "what was the point of that? How much time did we waste?" So good for you for calling that out too. Yeah. Those guys would've been gone outta my SOC. Yeah. I did not put up with that. Cause I had, I brought in three women on my team and I was like, you need to treat them just like you treat me. If you're not gonna treat them with the same level of respect that you expect to be treated with, expect the disrespect that's gonna come your way. And every guy I hired knew that. It just speaks to how women are over preparers, right? Like we already think we're inadequate. Like we already won't apply for the job if we're missing even one thing on the job description. But then once we get there, like Amber said, "I have to be the smartest person's room now, I have to learn it all." But you're never gonna know it all in every audience that you encounter. My 20 year architect, my very first job, he didn't even know some of the things that I knew. He was like, "you teach me new things every day." I was like, "you teach me new things every day." He was like, "this is why it's beautiful, this is how it's supposed to work." I was like, "you're right. I can relax." Even if I am the smartest person in the room, I don't feel the need to flex that anymore. I don't care what you think of me, I know I'm capable of doing my job and we're just here to get a job done. Now my question for you, Amber, is have you had guys that have thrown out acronyms and used them completely incorrectly and then like literally you called them out on that? Like you had to call them out on that? Cause I've had that happen. Yeah, I don't know if it was, well, actually that has happened. Yeah. I think my parents always just taught me, like my mom's number one thing, cuz she's also in IT, and she's been in it for about 30 years. She's like, "I hate when people use acronyms. The best thing you can do for everybody you know, is to never use acronyms." Especially because then there will be people in the room, you silo out and make feel stupid unknowingly like, "oh, CASB," or whatever. I never do that. Now I'm like, "CASB, what does that mean? Let's talk about what that means." So even if people know it, you're not leaving out people that are way too shy, like me, to answer their hand and say, "I'm too dumb. I don't know what that means." I used to be like really fiery and spicier when I was younger, and I would just call people stuff. And for some reason now that I'm older, I'm like, "ok, let's be like really approachable in our delivery here." Hmmm you're still spicy. I am spicy, but usually not when people are wrong. Cause I spent a decade always being wrong about things and having it called out. So now I know. Yeah. You're not rude like that. I did try to give people grace and like I will say being a mom has made me much more inclusive, but I used to be that little Alpha Ravenclaw just trying to outsmart you at every turn. I was like, that was so obnoxious. Why did I used to be like that? I'm so grateful I'm not like that anymore, but I definitely, I can relate on multiple levels. So I wanna share about how I navigated this because this is spread out wrong. In sales, it is different. And the technical side in sales, very different. I'm actually told that I'm being hired because they wanna hire a woman and they don't say it exactly like that, but it comes out in the interview processes. So when I hear that, first of all, I really start looking into the company and I wanna see if they're worth it because sometimes you will use that you're a woman to get into a career. That doesn't mean that you're gonna sleep your way to the top. That just means you are a gender and you're using that to get one step ahead. And that's not a problem. But when you blatantly tell me, "yeah, we need some diversity," like why? It doesn't just mean that it's a woman. The way that I navigate this is I interview them back and I make sure that I'm not being hired just because I'm a female. I make sure I'm being hired for my skills. Now, how have I gotten as far as I've gotten? So a salesperson is just to go sell ice to an Eskimo, but that's not true. In cyber, most of the time you pick up some technical pieces. The way that I've gotten so far and so successful is when I'm hired into a company, I go right to my technical teams, my professional services, my customer experience teams, and I say, "tell me everything like I'm a five year old." Amber and I went through this a couple times when she became my SE, and I would tell her. I'd tell her, "explain this to me." And she'd be like, "you don't need me to explain it to you because you already know what you're talking about." So I learn the tech, because when I get in front of a customer, I'm really good at reading a room so I can tell if they think I'm serious or not. I learn things so when I sit down I sound like I know what I'm talking about. That's how I've navigated it. Because 100% of the time they think I'm stupid. And I do play that role sometimes, and that's just unfortunate because cyber is just, that's how it is. So from somebody who's just not going right into a technical role, that's how I've gotten through it because I'm able to talk the talk and that's how I negotiate. Well, and I think that's so important because even with things like offensive security, it's not cookie cutter, it's not like one size fits all. Just cuz I know how one org does, it doesn't mean another org won't do it differently. So every time I come in, like the worst thing you can do for your career in cyber, and this is a PSA to all of you out there, is to be the fricking know it all and to be like, "I've already done this. I already know how it works. I already have all the answers." Don't do it. It's to come in and say, "I know a lot about this, but let's pretend I don't, and I don't know what it means for you. Tell me how you would implement it so I can aid in that effort." That's our job at the end of the day. Finally, Erika, you mean you used to your brain and you didn't just use your blonde hair and your big boobs to sleep your way to the top? No but that's what people assume of me. I know people have assumed that of Amber and I, that we've gotten to where we are because we can't be smart cuz we're women. It is pretty brutal because customers treat salespeople differently than they would treat the three of you being on the technical side, they respect you a lot more. When I sit down and talk shop, they're like, "oh my gosh, I can't be a jerk." Women are really good at sales because we get to a point where we learn like their whole entire life in the first meeting, first 10 minutes. Whereas guys, they try to talk shop and bull crap around it, we have a very different style, so we need to use that, but that doesn't mean we're sleeping our way to the top or flirting. It's just a different type of relationship. Here's the thing I will say, coming from the technical side of it, the sales people who really took the time to get to know the tech that they were selling, they were way more successful. They were pulling in the right customers. They knew how to market to those customers better. Like they knew how to go out and build those relationships that were longstanding and then pull them in and say, "oh, well, here's an upsell, how we can help you here and here. And here's where we won't help you at because you don't need our help here." Those are always the sales people that I've always respected the most because they're the ones that have always come to me, ask me question after question. They're like, "I'm so sorry, I'm being annoying." And I'm like, "no, I love to give you the information so that you don't always need to pull me into that meeting and I can actually do what I need to do while you do what you need to do." Yeah. Don't make yourself a bottleneck for expertise either. Like information share, for sure. Yes. And you didn't sleep your way to the top. You know what, with my career, cuz I'm like still three years new, people automatically assume I like went to a con, slept with somebody, flirted with somebody, and that's how I got my next promotion or job offer. They're like, "there's no way you made it this far, this fast, unless you were doing that." Did they ever say that to you though? Did they ever. Oh yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Mine's out there for everyone to see cuz it's on my TikToks. I actually respond to them now cause you can take somebody's comment and make a video about the comment and respond to it. So I do that all the time. But yeah, there's so many people that will literally just say that. I had one, one of the gals who runs the Lift Women in Security, she was . Her and I were together one night and she was like, "no way they say that." I showed her and she's like,"I'm so pissed right now." And she's like, "I'm gonna create a TikTok just to get on there and just like, whatever." It's kinda crazy, but again, it's like something I've been dealing with a for a long time. I know a lot of us have, so at some point you become desensitized to it somewhat and that, it's not the best thing ever. It's like taking Tylenol when your leg is broken, like yeah, you should probably go get it fixed, but for now, that works. I think knowing that it happens and finding other people that can help you navigate it. I think that's a big part of this. Yeah. It was the kind of thing I always thought was like an inherent bias, like just built into how people think and act. It was never something I had been bluntly had presented to me until I was stopped at Def Con in a lobby of the Mandalay Bay and I was wearing a hot pink suit because it's Vegas. Where else are we gonna wear a hot pink suit? I was fully covered, it was a business suit and someone literally said the words out loud to me and I was like, "is this actually happening? Do you really go to other people and say those words to their face?" I just couldn't believe that people still say this in real life in 2022. It blew my mind a bit. I thought overflowed. I was like, "you're almost too stupid for me to address your comments." So yeah, it definitely does happen to me in real life. Absolutely. And it's sad. Let's bring it full circle, so we do encounter these things. Unfortunately, sometimes you will be the diversity hire and sometimes they don't even mean it to be a bad thing. I had a manager tell me once, cuz I've always been the only female on my offensive team. When you leave, I wanna replace you with a female. I was like, you're not gonna replace me with a female just because she's female. You're gonna replace me with someone who can do this job if she happens to be female, great! But let's bring that back to Gen Z. Why is this important to them? How does this need to change if you are albeit gonna start diversifying somewhere? Some women are gonna have to be the first, and we know we're gonna be the first diversity hires. What are your recommendations? Why is this important? How should companies be changing? Amber, we'll start with you. So I think, gen Z, and I actually have a funny TikTok that's coming out soon pending guys. But it's gonna be about the different generational players in the same jobs, right? So what a Gen Z SOC manager looks like versus a boomer. If we wanna put it that way. I love that. I think Gen Z, there's a lot going on with like impatience, of course, right? I feel like I have younger sisters and I also have a 10 year old son, so it's in between those ages, right? They want things now. They have no patience for anything. They're a little bit entitled, right? Cause nobody's told them to sit down for a second. They also do things for like social causes. And so now we're seeing a lot more, Girls Who Code, right? Doja Cat helped carry that thing further out than I think anybody expected it to do. Now we've got, all these girls of color, we've got transgender kiddos, we've got girls in general that are coming up. And so it's like a lot of gen Zers are, asking like, "Hey, what are you guys doing about this? What's your culture like?" That's like the most important question I feel like everyone should ask anyway in an interview is like really asking about culture. Not saying, what's your culture like? Cause everyone's gonna be like, "it's wonderful. Come work here, please. Don't look back there. Don't worry about what's going on back there." But, asking questions like, how do you support your people or what parts of the community are you guys involved in? Or, what's your value system? What makes a great worker here? And you can really tell I've asked these questions and. I thought it was stupid right? I read an article and I'm like, of course everyone's gonna give their best answer. You would be shocked at how many people answer honestly. And they're like, "well, I expect them to work 14 hours a day. And I expect this and I expect that. And if you're not, I don't care if you're a man or a woman, like you better be good at your job." But like all this stuff. I can't imagine you saying that to a Gen Zer and having them go, "oh, that sounds great. I totally wanna work here." I just feel like it's a different generation to cater to in general. And as much as it's pulling out hair sometimes for a lot of folks who are, like older, right? That are like, "Hey, we do things a certain way. You have to go through this because I had to go through this when I was your age and you're lucky to be here." But it's " Hey, let's realize that the times are a changing. And how can we grow with that instead of fight against it as we move forward together?" I think just being more aware, like more socially aware of what's going on is gonna be pretty key for these companies. That's great advice. So I actually read an article about how the military is having a really hard time recruiting Gen Z because the military is not diverse enough and is just like fake diversity. And it was really interesting to me is like our number one like power source of making sure that things are running the way they need run is having this issue. And Gen Z is not going to stand for not having diversity, but they're also not gonna stand for being the diversity hire either. They want to have earned the position because they deserve to be there, not because they had to feel like they had to be scratching and clawing their whole entire way up through. They will be more appreciative of the opportunities that they're given, but they don't wanna have to ever doubt that you maybe only put them there because they're a woman, or you only put them there because they're a minority or because they fit some sort of check box for you. The companies that jump on the bandwagon and just do it because they're jumping on a bandwagon, the Gen Zers are gonna call you out on that. But here's a positive note.

coming into cyber itself is where you want to be to flourish and be innovative and be who you are. Because tech companies are so progressive. Now, you will find tech companies that say they're gonna do this, and this, and they really don't do it. They're just saying it because they wanna appeal to Gen Z, but you can figure that out when you go and interview with a company or you go and research them. If they say they're diverse, and they have only one color on their entire executive board, which is, middle aged white men. Ask about that. What are you doing to change that? And most companies will, answer you for that. But with all of these things that you guys aren't going to put up, it's also the place that you need to come to flourish and to be who you are as Gen Zers. I think that's like a big one too, right? They wanna be special, they individually want to be special. Because they've earned it and they want the recognition and they're gonna put in the work. It's funny, I was reading an article the other day about this and it said that they are, next great generation, right? So they are THE next one. That's kind of if they can get their entitlement in check. I don't know if it's so much entitlement as it is, I feel like when you're almost having to fight or defend something that's seemingly normal to you, it comes off as aggressive. So it comes off as extreme, right? So in this case, the extreme version would be entitlement. When really it's just,"Hey, I wanna be heard. I understand you guys do things a certain way. Can we be more open-minded?" Then you have all the people on the other side, they're like, "no, like this and this is how we do it here. This is how you're gonna do it." They're just like, "no, that's not how I'm gonna do it." It's just kind of this never ending back and forth. But I think this is a good talk, right? Because it's like how can we get both sides to chill out a little bit on the whole thing and go, how can we help each other? How can we keep those same like moral/work values, but also have an open mind to the fact that, maybe this newer generation has good ideas to bring to the table too? Collaboration. Yeah, collaboration. That's really what they want. We do have an episode where we talk about Gen Z specifically strengths and weaknesses. And we had a Gen Zer on, don't come at us in the comments. We had a Gen Zer on, she knows, she's in the trenches with that. No, I'm kidding. We do identify certain things that make them a little combative, but we identify certain things about their mindsets and their capabilities that are gonna make them so powerful for the industry. But those are all great points. Like you pretty much echoed the whole episode. It's right here. You're need to listen to Episode Eight. It's right there. But I think it's just so important to remember that as much as we would like to see diversity be something that's baked in and like in the fabric of everyday cybersecurity, it is still new and there are still companies figuring it out. Even if they're figuring it out wrong, at least they're taking the initiative and the effort to put time and energy into diversity. And I love that for them. I would just say though that like, keep in mind, some of us are gonna have to be the first trans, the first LGBTQ, the first Asian, African American, Pacific Islander, Native American, like whatever it is that you've got. Some of us will have to be the first, and it is important to keep in mind that if you are, how you present yourself and how you communicate with your peers, laterally and vertically is really gonna matter for everyone who comes after you. They're kind of taking a chance. They're trying it out and you need to show them that this was a good idea, it was a good investment, and convince them to scale it more, essentially. So every time I want to go off on somebody or I do encounter something toxic, I have to remember that I am representing all the women right now in this moment, that you're gonna encounter for the rest of your working career. And I want you to treat us differently, which is why I try to convert them and not necessarily just to fight them. I think this has all just been such sage, amazing advice. Gen Z, like Amber said, they are entitled, it is a little bit of entitlement and just they're demanding cuz they're not gonna settle for less. Gen Zers. You do have to realize when you're crossing that line. If you want collaboration from companies, you're gonna have to collaborate with them as well, because, like Maril said they are figuring it out. And if they're trying, why don't you get on their DNI board or try to give them, do interviews with them and give them advice, because that's how we're evolve and learn. It's still an issue, but I do wanna go back to one more point. If you are being hired because you're a woman, it's your first job in tech. Think about turning that down because it might be your break getting into cyber, cuz it is difficult to get into cyber if you don't know people and you don't know the ropes. Don't be so offended if you get some inkling that you're being hired cuz you're a woman or a minority. But just dig into it a little bit. Make sure you're being hired cuz you're the right person. But sometimes, like I said earlier, you gotta use that booster. That's how I got my first sales job in cyber, I was a woman. Oh yeah. The fact that me and Nathalie are women and vets, it's like, oh, we're knocking off two demographic diversities with one person. This is excellent. I leaned into that a little bit. I relied on it to get my foot in the door, because it's hard to break into this industry. That's a thing. But that is really good advice, Erika. Yeah. But that doesn't have to be how you drive your career forward. You have to have another driving point behind it. You can't just drive it off of being a woman or being a veteran or any of that. You have to drive it off of being awesome. Something you could do to qualify those is to ask them, do you have a lot of turnover in this position? Did my predecessors leave for some kind of cultural or temporal reason? Or is it just that I'm the first because you've only hired recommendations from people and they've just all been buddies. You can get to the bottom of it in the interview and find out like, have a lot of women bailed on this company? Or have you just not encountered a woman you thought could take care of it yet? Yeah, cuz you're eventually gonna have to work and show your skills. But. Here's a question that I have for Amber. So Amber mentioned this a few times that she does TikTok. She's actually a TikTok star in our world and like getting out there. So I know you talk about that you respond to these comments, but still to this day, and I've seen it, I know that you are treated differently or somebody might look at you differently and that you got to where you are because you're a woman. How would you respond to that today versus when you first started in the industry? How have you evolved? I think when I first started it was, talk about, not turning down jobs, right? I pretty much took every job I did, all the crappy ones nobody wanted to do, and I was fine with that because I had a goal in mind. And I always knew, good or bad, I always knew it was more of a stepping stone, right? So I think, in the beginning it was, I remember calling my parents. I worked at a cybersecurity company based outta Chicago. They're in Denver they are now, but they were at the time too. They just started. I remember calling my dad and I was like, "I think that they only wanna hire me cuz I'm a girl." It wasn't even a woman at the time. It was like, cause I'm a girl and he was like, "good get in the door. Who cares about your feelings right now? Just do it because this is like your break." Typical military dad. I was like, okay, that sounds great. And so I like didn't even pay attention to it. I'm sure like I had all that stuff happening around me and it actually, it's funny cuz we talk about how I'm on the technical side, but I am more recently on the sales side. All the stuff that Erika and I have talked about that she's gone through since we've worked together. Being on the sales side is so much more, so much more toxic than anything I dealt with on a technical team. I feel like when you're in the technical side, unless it's like leadership or people who are a little bit more further removed from like the objective at hand. Engineers all the time are like, "all right, that's great. I don't care. Whatever. You're awesome. You're a woman. That's great. You being a woman is like the last thing on my list for why I like working with you." And those are the real ones. But then you have like the higher ups that are like, "oh, well Anne, she's a woman." And it's like, "oh, okay, cool." Like I said, I think I don't get as mad about it now cuz I realize that companies are trying to move towards this whole, let's get up to 50% of women in the cyber workforce by whatever, 2025 or something like that, I think were the numbers. Change doesn't happen smoothly ever, especially when it's gonna be global. And so I think, like you said, telling Gen Zers just be a little bit more patient. Just like boomers need to be more patient or whoever else needs to be more patient. We're all being more patient together. I think it is a matter of realizing though, if you're in the position to where you are being told by your friends or coworkers or whoever, to just be more patient. You already have the upper hand, cause everyone else is like scrambling trying to figure out how to handle you. That's honestly the best place to be because like you said earlier, you're setting the example for everybody else. I actually just had a call with Erika a couple weeks ago and I remember I went to a conference and there was like just a ton of things that happened and I actually right before that I also went to a quarterly business review. I never have to say it out loud. We usually just use the acronym QBR. I remember there was a new hire and he just sat down at this table and just like went, "wow." And I was like, "What's up?" And he is like, "so you're an engineer?" he goes, "really? Are you like, how though?" I was like, "well let's see. I applied for this job." You know what I mean? Like I was just leaning into it a little bit because I could tell he was like just absolutely wasted anyway. I was like, okay, we'll have fun with this one. This'll be great, and I was like, "yeah, just keep putting your foot in your mouth." This is perfect and I didn't really have to even do anything. I just kinda like, "oh yeah, that's interesting that you think that it's funny cuz I actually am here to be that punching bag, right? For people like you that just cannot seem to wrap their head around the fact that I'm a woman sitting in front of you doing the same job. How weird!" And I told Erika too, it's like on my TikToks, I'm actually happy being in the punching bag for things because I know that at the end of the day, as stupid as people think I am, I also know that I'm helping people in the industry that are trying to break in that are like, " until you did this, like I had no idea that I could even have a job like this, right? Thank you for putting yourself out there. Thank you for showing us all these videos. I like the humor, I like the sarcasm, but I also like the fact that you're doing this cuz I see all of the haters and I see all these awful comments. But you just still keep doing that." And it's like, yeah. Cause actually I get like, and this is the spicy part of me: I love when they're haters because I know that I'm ruining somebody else's day. Like mentally. Just by doing what I'm doing. I'm like, "oh, that's perfect. Yes." I love my little hater fans. It's perfect. Cause they're always there without doubt so.. To all the haters leaving hate comments, that's engagement and we love you for it. Thank you. You're boosting us in the algorithm. I'm like known to say that on my TikToks, thank you for increasing my view count. Now this will push me up to the top. I appreciate that. Love that for me. No, this has been awesome. I wish this episode would never end. Unfortunately though, we do have to wrap it up. So we're gonna bring it, we're gonna bring it around to final takeaways. So final takeaways on being the diversity hire, navigating that, hiring for talent. Anything that's on your brain that you'd like to leave the audience with. Go and we will save Amber for last. Cause I put her on the spot a lot today already.. So we'll start with Erika or Nathalie. One of the Queens, go first? I will say that whenever I've talked to someone else who's coming in from like my interns on up through the analysts that I've hired that are women, I've always told them, let your work ethic speak for itself. Because your work ethic is going to drive what other people think about you and say about you anyway, let that speak for itself and don't worry about the people who hate on you as much as like just letting your work ethic speak for itself. At a certain point, what those people say about you, it's gonna conflict with what other people know about you already. My final takeaway would be to do your research, Gen Z. When you're coming to this field and you figure out what you wanna do, pentester, security analyst, SOC manager, start researching the target companies you wanna work for, understand how they operate, and then start applying. When you go to interview, you'll know more about the company than sometimes the person that's interviewing you and you're gonna shine. That's one way to navigate the diversity hire. The other way is just to be natural. Be yourself and you're always gonna get through it and there will be haters. There will be haters. You will encounter them everywhere. Which brings me to my final takeaway. Thank you for that lovely little segway, Erika. Try and be unbothered. I know that we as females I'm actually not a very emotional female and more logic driven, but as females we are largely more emotional than men. We tend to take a lot of things to heart. So all I will say is, let the haters hate, let people talk. Let them call you the Boppy Millennial Chick in Security. Just be unbothered. Move through your day. Slay as you would, achieve as you would, and who cares what they think about it? Don't let people tell you to calm down and don't let other people determine your rate of success. Try as much as you can to be unbothered because you'll shine and they will look petty. And that's the biggest flex you can have on somebody like that. Preach. Amber, your final takeaway? I would probably say as cliche as this is, I would say, be the change you wish to see, because I feel like we are all, like you said, setting examples in this industry. So it's up to you to don't even give attention when people are like, oh, just be like, what's up? Like almost everyone else is the weird one. You're just doing your thing and it's normal. I think the more we normalize everything, the better this change is going to go for the rest of us. So, and to feed off of what Erika has said earlier, be yourself. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to change who I was to fit a job, just to find a new job where I didn't have to do all that crap anyway. So be yourself. The right career will find you. You will be right where you're meant to be at the end of all of it. Oh, I love that. Couldn't have ended on a better note. Amber, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. We have had so much fun. This episode, is everything I wanted it to be. You absolutely delivered on all the things about you. Thank you all so much for having me. We're so happy to have you here. Yeah, so excited to be on. Last things for Amber. Anything you wanna plug? Any upcoming appearances, events? I know you haven't gotten to talk about Lift very much. If you'd like to talk about that org that I know that you founded. Work with, founded? Yep. Co-founded. So Lift Women in Security, we're based outta Colorado. So we are always looking for every lady, every girl to join. I have some stuff going on. I'll send out, I think you guys are actually sending out the link and stuff for that. Also my kids cyber security book and more importantly Teach Kids Tech, which is my non-profit for kiddos. I'll link all of that. All of that will be linked for you guys. If you are curious to get involved, find out more. Reach out to Amber with any of your questions, follow ups about her initiatives, her products, her services or any of her TikToks, which I watch on the daily. Thanks so much for hanging out with us. We were so happy to have you back. Please like, share, subscribe if you loved any of the content that you've seen up until now. And if you do not, please tell us so we can change it. We respond to every email and every comment personally, one of the three Queens does. So with that, we will see you next week.