India is one of its biggest sources of tech talent globally and therefore more prone to cyberattacks. CERT-In, the government’s cyber emergency response team, logged more than 2.9 million cybersecurity incidents in 2025 alone, and the country now needs an estimated 3 million cybersecurity professionals against fewer than 200,000 trained practitioners, according to industry estimates. As the country and the global economy push deeper into digital banking, e-governance, and cloud infrastructure, closing the gender gap in its cybersecurity workforce is shifting from a diversity talking point to a national necessity.

Cybersecurity as an Economic Pillar

Cybersecurity is a pillar of economic stability, national security and a source of public trust, according to UN Women. However, women are largely excluded from the field, which is particularly striking given that women make up 48% of India’s population, with current estimates placing the population at approximately 702 million, according to United Nations population data.

How Big the Problem Is in India

The demand for professionals working in cybersecurity in India has increased by roughly 215% between the first and second half of fiscal year 2024 (FY24) alone, according to Quess Corp. Recruitment firm TeamLease Digital projects that women’s participation across India’s tech workforce as a whole will only reach 14.9% by 2027, up from 10.8% in 2022, with roughly 1.92 million women currently working in Indian tech. Within cybersecurity specifically, industry body NASSCOM has noted that women make up only around 25% of the global workforce, and that women in India’s cybersecurity workforce has stayed largely the same even as job openings have multiplied.

There are other promising signs to note. Deloitte India’s Megha Goyal has pointed to roughly a 10 percentage point rise in women’s share of the country’s cybersecurity workforce over the past five to six years. Policies that are more parental-friendly and flexible aid in this. This issue highlights many challenges such as patchy access to technical education, bias in hiring and promotion, workplace discrimination, and a disproportionate share of unpaid caregiving. In India, geographical factors exacerbate these issues. Much of the country’s engineering talent, including a large share of its women graduates, comes from smaller tier II and tier III cities where exposure to cybersecurity as a career path is limited.

The Poverty Cost of the Gap

The cost of leaving women out of cybersecurity is not just a workforce statistic. It shows up in the bank accounts of India’s poorest households. Indians lost an estimated ₹22,495 crore (about $2.7 billion) to cyber fraud in 2025, with complaints rising 24% to roughly 2.81 million cases, according to government data. Research on victim patterns consistently finds that rural users, first-time digital adopters, and lower-income, lower-education households are the most vulnerable, targeted through UPI PIN scams, fake QR codes and task-based fraud schemes that exploit gaps in digital literacy rather than technical sophistication.

That vulnerability compounds existing poverty. A single scam can wipe out a family’s monthly income or the savings set aside for school fees or medical care, and the resulting distrust of digital tools can push already marginalized households away from the banking and government services meant to include them. A cybersecurity workforce that reflects the population it protects, including the rural and semi-urban communities many women technologists come from, is better positioned to design fraud protections and awareness campaigns that actually reach those communities. Bringing more women into the field, in other words, is a poverty-reduction strategy as much as a diversity one.

Why Different Teams Make Better Defenses

Cybersecurity researchers, in studies cited by ISC2 and UN Women, consistently find that mixed teams are better at spotting and responding to threats, and that systems built with women involved tend to serve a broader range of users well. This matters more given how disproportionately women and girls experience online harassment, cyberstalking and digital abuse.

Sarba Roy, a cybersecurity professional with 13 years of experience across India, Europe and the United States, has described a real shift in how companies think about this. Writing for ISC2’s Insights series, she pointed to a growing recognition that diverse teams make organizations more creative, improve decision-making and sharpen risk judgment. “Diverse teams improve creativity, decision making and risk mitigation,” she wrote, adding that an inclusive and diverse cybersecurity workforce “is not an option but a necessity given the multitude of attack vectors from across the world.”

India’s Own Pipeline: CyberShikshaa

CyberShikshaa is a joint program run by Microsoft and the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) that has been in operation since 2018. One of its core initiatives is to train women engineering graduates from tier II and tier III cities and rural areas, in a four-month, full-time cybersecurity curriculum covering cryptography, network security, application security and digital forensics, backed by India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT.

The program’s eligibility rules tie it directly to poverty reduction: candidates must come from families earning below ₹7 lakh a year, or roughly $10,000, meaning it specifically targets women who would otherwise have the least access to a field that pays well above that threshold.

Since launch, more than 800 women from over 90 cities have completed the flagship training, with a placement rate of around 60% into roles across large technology firms, financial institutions, startups and law enforcement. Separately, NASSCOM Foundation has partnered with NortonLifeLock on a similar skills initiative, graduating 232 women engineers into the field.

The human impact behind these numbers is real. One graduate traveled more than 1,000 kilometers from her hometown to train at the program’s Noida center and landed a job at a multinational IT risk-management firm in Mumbai four months later. Another put it simply: “CyberShikshaa not only trained me for my career, but also instilled the belief in me that with the right direction I can reach great heights.”

A Safer Digital India

UN Women’s broader argument is that excluding women from cybersecurity leadership makes it harder for the world to respond to digital threats collectively. For India, where financial systems, health care infrastructure and government services are all rapidly digitizing, that argument carries particular weight.

Bringing more women into India’s cybersecurity workforce is not simply a fairness goal. It is one of the more practical steps the country can take to secure the systems its economy and its citizens increasingly depend on. Programs like CyberShikshaa show what that looks like in practice, and are worth scaling further.

– Jamie Noone

Jamie is based in Dublin and focuses on Technology and Solutions for The Borgen Project.

Photo: Flickr