When I was invited to speak at the Philadelphia Leadership
& Diversity Conference last year, my first thought was that I was honored.
My immediate second thought was that they must have asked the wrong ‘Al
Raymond.’ Now, I’m not the whitest guy on the planet, but if you look at my
LinkedIn profile picture you’ll see that, yes, I do have a bit of a St. Tropez
tan going on, but I would not be considered the best example of a diversity
candidate to speak at a diversity conference. So what value could I bring to
the conference, and what could I talk about with any degree of credibility?
When I told my team of the invite and what my first
impressions were, they had a bit of a chuckle too. But when I explained to them
my struggle for a suitable topic, they reminded me of a few very excellent and
insightful points that I had overlooked. I should remember, they told me, that our
Privacy team was 87% female. And 50% of those females were minorities. (Our
inside joke is that I am the minority
candidate on the team). And that they were all very happy where they were in
their current careers.
They were spot on. And this got me thinking about what I
wanted to talk to the Conference about: the fields of Compliance in general,
and Privacy specifically are a fantastic and natural place for female candidate
to look for their future careers. I have found that there is something about a
female approach to a Compliance or Privacy challenge that varies significantly
from a male’s perspective. The women on my team, and women in Privacy in
general, bring a very nuanced approach to thinking about Privacy issues and
solutions. And it makes sense: Privacy and its kissing cousin, Compliance, are
built on a foundation of accordance with laws and regulations. If you know
anything about the laws in the Compliance and Privacy space, you know how many
shades of gray are involved in the black letter laws. More than 50 shades, for
sure. Most laws in our world have enough ambiguity to drive a Jeep Cherokee
through, so it helps to have people who can think in terms of gradation, yet be
practical.
I speak from experience on how women think differently from
men in this space. I started out in information security, and I was primarily
focused on protecting data. It was an easy exercise: build a moat around the
data and don’t let anyone get to it. Thus, the data is protected; problem
solved. But the discipline of privacy differs from information security in that
one of the tenets of privacy is the principle of access. It states that an
individual should be informed of the existence, use, and disclosure of his/her
personal information and should be given access to that information and be able
to challenge the accuracy and completeness. That is a whole lot different concept
than simply making sure the data center has locks on the doors with hungry
Dobermans running around it at nite.
Thanks to my team’s counsel, I spoke to
the Conference participants about the worlds of Privacy and Compliance and how
they both present a relatively under-publicized and untapped goldmine of
opportunities for both women and minorities to seek their professional fortunes.
Both are places where people are judged on their merits and accomplishments,
and it makes it easier to stand out as star employee that way.
I enjoyed my time in InfoSec and still
stay interested in technology and cyber security issues, but the evolution of
my professional journey into Privacy, which has allowed me to be surrounded by
so many competent and talented women and minorities, has been a force
multiplier for my career that plain old hard work just could not have produced alone.
It stands as the single best career decision I have ever made. And you can too.
