- What does your job role entail?
- How did you get into the cybersecurity industry?
- What is one of the biggest challenges you have faced as a woman in the tech/cyber industry and how did you overcome it?
- What are you doing to support other women, and/or to increase diversity, in the tech/cyber industry?
- Who has inspired you in your life/career?
Organised by Eskenzi PR in media partnership with the IT Security Guru, the Most Inspiring Women in Cyber Awards aim to shed light on the remarkable women in our industry. The following is a feature on one of 2026’s Top 20 women selected by an esteemed panel of judges. Presented in a Q&A format, the nominee’s answers are written in their own words.
In 2026, the awards were sponsored by BT, Bridewell, Plexal and Fidelity International. Community partners included WiCyS UK & Ireland Affiliate, Women in Tech and Cybersecurity Hub (WiTCH) and Seidea.
What does your job role entail?
I work at an intersection that doesn’t always have a neat label. Cyber Trauma. Safety. Technology. Child Protection and Safeguarding. Child online safety. Online harms. Cybersecurity. Privacy and Data protection. These things don’t often appear in the same sentence, let alone the same job description. But for me, they’ve always been inseparable.
How did you get into the cybersecurity industry?
The digital world is not a neutral space for children. The risks they face online are not just technical they are emotional, psychological, and often invisible to the adults around them. I’ve spent my career trying to build the language, the frameworks, and the professional understanding to address that. So, to be recognised within the cybersecurity community specifically feels significant. It tells me the conversation is shifting. Human behaviour exists as an emergent property of technological progress in the same way we describe epigenetic changes in the field of human evolution.
What is one of the biggest challenges you have faced as a woman in the tech/cyber industry and how did you overcome it?
In some corners of the cybersecurity world there is still a tendency to treat child safety as a separate or secondary concern. My career has been a quiet but persistent argument against that view. The same systems that protect enterprises from attack are the systems children navigate every day often without the vocabulary, the support, or the lived experience to recognise when something has gone wrong.
Bringing a trauma lens to cybersecurity means asking harder questions: not just “was the system breached?” but “what happened to the person on the other side of that breach?” For children, those questions have particular urgency. And I’ve spent my career ensuring they are asked.
What are you doing to support other women, and/or to increase diversity, in the tech/cyber industry?
As the cybersecurity sector continues to grapple with increasingly complex challenges, the need for diverse perspectives has never been clearer. Those of us who bring depth, specialism, and humanity to this work are not just inspiring within the field we are helping to define what that field can become.
Having the honour to stand in a room of 200 incredible women in cyber nominees, I felt the weight of how much talent and dedication exists in this space. What this recognition tells me is that the conversation around children, trauma, and online safety is one the cybersecurity community is ready to have. That gives me so much hope.
Who has inspired you in your life/career?
I have a background in the Military (Army) and was the first woman to complete my trade training, providing me with s systemic focus on technology. The raising of my children in a world of home computers allowed me to create a safe castle for them, but it failed to protect them when they were in a school or other settings where other children showed them graphic and gory content. I was able however to help them process what they had seen, to think critically about technology, however that is where the theory of cybertrauma was borne. I now am on a mission to ensure we have robust supportive pathways for victims of this type of trauma which includes human development, trauma literature and practice and the knowledge of actor network theory to help us understand the interplay of human and the technological environment.
