Labels

Jordan had fallen into her career inadvertently. Computers were still new enough that the issues of cybersecurity were not yet prevalent. She worked her way up from data entry to supervisor of data entry, to project manager overseeing requests for discovery requests in the legal department until someone, an intern in the mailroom, clicked on the link to the cat video in the email. Jordan accepted a lateral position to help with tracking and documenting the cleanup and stayed on.
The Technology department, located in what everyone called “the Basement,” was a lot less formal than the Sales & Service floors. No one looked askance if she wore slacks and flats instead of a skirt and heels. “The Guys” as she came to refer to her collective colleagues, took her under their wings and taught her what she needed to know to not only survive in the department, but to thrive.

There were slow periods, between upgrades she worked on hardware inventory. In one corner of the untracked assets shelves, there were two large bins of cables. No rhyme or reason, all manner of cable mixed in together. Jordan stopped by requisitions on her lunch break and asked for a label maker. That afternoon she dumped all the cables out and began sorting:
•    USB A
•    HDMI
•    Ethernet
•    Power with converter
•    Power without attached converter
•    basic telephone cable

She then labeled smaller redwell accordian folders and placed the sorted cables in the appropriate folder. She did the same for mice, tracking balls and cats-tracking pads. When she was done, she turned her attention to sorting and labeling the other shelves of trackable assets – computers, monitors, and the like.

Her label maker became something of an in-joke. Things were Jordanized if they were labeled. Something needed Jordanization if it was a jumbled mess.

Her true introduction to cybersecurity came with an attack that took out the company's entire network. While she wasn’t trained as a programmer and didn’t spend her time working her way through untangling locked networks, reading lines of code, etc. She used her prior experience as a project manager and documented everything.

To expand her knowledge, when events were local, she got permission for reimbursement to attend conferences and workshops offered by the recently hatched professional organizations. Over the course of several years, she earned enough recognition that a conference might comp her hotel if she participated in or moderated a panel. A compulsive note-taker, she compiled everything she learned, shared it with the team, and even published a couple white papers on data recovery steps. Her name was both recognized and respected. She was doing well for herself; although she doubted she made the same pay as some of her male colleagues.

It was only a matter of time before she started getting invitations, by email, by actual hard copy: Women in Cybersecurity; Association of Women in Information Technology; Professional Women in Technology. In the spring, when conference season started, she got invitations from eight or nine organizations asking her to join. All of them had Women in the title.

She deleted the emails and tossed the hard copy into the recycle.
Jordan went over to the shelves, she’d so carefully organized when she was first learning the ropes. She removed the labels from the shelves, she then removed labels from the folders. She couldn’t quite bring herself to dump everything in a hodgepodge pile, but she recognized that it was the labels that were the issue: labels were stumbling blocks, which people may not look beyond. Labels identified, but even more so labels separated.

— Lkai