If you google famous real life hackers, you will come up with names like Kevin Mitnick, Albert Gonzales, Adrian Lamo. You will unlikely find Susan Hadley, Jude Milhon or Joanna Rutkowska. If you read cybercrime textbooks or law enforcement reports, they will profile a hacker as a white male in their twenties as the most likely suspect. Yet women have been part of hacking since its earliest days, working in communities that resisted their presence and rarely acknowledged their achievements.
Women hacking in pop culture
Women in pop culture didn’t lack in representation. There is plenty of beloved characters in movies and TV Series that shaped the narrative of brilliant women in tech: from Kate Libby in Hackers (1995) to Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), from Penelope Garcia in Criminal Minds to Abby Sciuto in NCIS. These characters have portrayed quirky, brilliant women who were essential to the narrative of the story.
So why don’t we hear of real women in the world of hacking? How did that affect cybersecurity history?
How the stereotype formed
Early computing communities were shaped by university cultures where men dominated engineering and computer science. When bulletin boards, phone phreaking networks, and early internet channels formed, they carried that culture forward. These spaces gathered people who loved tinkering, bypassing rules, and exploring systems, but they also mirrored the social biases of their time.
Many women joined these communities, though their presence was often met with scepticism or gatekeeping. Skill had to be proved repeatedly to earn even basic respect. The result was that women either adopted pseudonyms that concealed their identity or avoided public visibility altogether.
Media reporting amplified the imbalance. When authorities profiled intrusions or arrests, the names that made headlines were almost always men. Many films and documentaries reinforced the pattern. Visibility shaped perception, and the cycle fed itself.
Why women were less visible
Women in hacking did not lack skill or impact. They lacked the social conditions that allowed recognition.
- Hostile or dismissive community dynamics: early hacker groups were informal and competitive. Women entering these spaces were often assumed to be outsiders. This created a barrier to mentorship and participation.
- Pseudonyms that concealed identity: because anonymity was standard, many women produced code, exploits, or analyses under nicknames. Their achievements were separated from their gender, which erased them in hindsight.
- Legal risk and self-protection: some of the most influential hackers worked at the margins of legality. Women, who often faced harsher social consequences for transgression, were more likely to stay anonymous or avoid notoriety.
- The divide between offensive fame and defensive invisibility: the public romanticised “breakers”. Yet many women worked in defence, policy, cryptography, or systems engineering, areas with less dramatic visibility even though they shaped cybersecurity foundations.
What gets lost when stories go untold
The absence of women in cyber history does not reflect reality. It reflects an incomplete record.
This gap shapes how young people imagine future careers. When only one type of expert is visible, others do not see themselves in those roles. It also leads to a shallow understanding of cybersecurity, since the work of many women lies behind inventions, research, or innovations that the public rarely associates with them.
Understanding this history helps us see hacker culture as it truly is.
Women in hacking
This is why we have decided to dedicate a series of articles to explore the stories of the women in hacking. We will look at the pioneers of social engineering, the innovators of underground cultures, the creators of secure operating systems, the architects of modern vulnerability disclosure, and the cryptographers and privacy researchers shaping the future of cybersecurity. We owe them that much.