Changing the Ratio

I started writing this piece in 2024. I’d been reading about the IndieWeb, a community of people who run their own websites instead of relying on the big platforms, and somewhere in that I landed on a set of notes about diversity. They’re from a session at IndieWeb Summit 2018 called “How can we encourage diversity on the IndieWeb?”, tagged #changetheratio.11 IndieWeb, “How can we encourage diversity on the IndieWeb?”, session notes from IndieWeb Summit, 26 June 2018. The ideas in the notes are decent ones ‒ invite your friends and tell them they’re wanted, ask women to speak, run a “build your website” day for people starting from zero, the way WordCamps put a beginner day ahead of the main event. The IndieWeb wiki’s page on diversity has a similar list, with intro workshops and mentors for first-time site builders.22 IndieWeb wiki, “diversity”, last edited 8 November 2023.

Reading them, I felt tired. I’ve worked in infosec for nearly a decade, and for all of that time I’ve heard the same two answers: more women on stage, more beginner days. I’m not a beginner, most of the women I know aren’t beginners. We’re somewhere in the messy middle of long careers, just past intermediate, but not quite advanced. I like to think of myself as M-shaped, with a lot of general knowledge and some depth, sometimes in strange places. A beginner day has nothing for me, and trying to find a story that’s interesting enough to spend months putting together into a conference talk costs time I just don’t have.

I’m also exhausted by having to think about diversity at all, because, I’ll be really, really, honest with you: I don’t want to be “diverse” or “under-represented”. I just want to do my job. I want a world where I can go on site and not get called “girl”, where men don’t refuse to shake my hand, and where I don’t have to wonder whether someone isn’t listening because I’m a “woman” or because they just don’t care. So I put the draft away. These days these aren’t issues I face as much, but they leave their mark and jade every subsequent interaction I have.

Two years later (now) I re-read it. I’d spent part of 2025 preparing a talk called “Bullshit Jobs in InfoSec”, about finding meaning in work, so the subject was still on my mind. I decided to finish the draft.

When I caught up on the IndieWeb, I found they’d kept at it. The wiki’s diversity page was edited as recently as 2023 and is frank about the tech sector’s shortcomings in general,33 IndieWeb wiki, “diversity”, last edited 8 November 2023. and in 2021 Tracy Durnell wrote “Getting More Women Involved in the IndieWeb”44 Tracy Durnell, “Getting More Women Involved in the IndieWeb”, 26 September 2021. after counting two women among twenty people at an event. The 2018 notes and the wiki page don’t mention time at all. Durnell gets closer, with “limited time and energy” in passing and a later addition about caretakers and paying for childcare, but one of the questions she asks is whether this simply isn’t a priority for most women. I don’t want to single out a group that’s trying. Any concerted effort to fix this is fantastic, and the IndieWeb just happens to be where I was reading. What follows is a response to the wider conversation, the one I’ve been hearing in my own industry for years.

When I hear people talking about “changing the ratio”, what I hear is a request for more of my spare time. The ratio they mean is the one in the digital commons: open source projects, community groups, conferences, working groups, all the shared stuff the tech industry runs on and mostly doesn’t pay for. Both of the usual answers assume people are waiting for an invitation. I think they’re short of time. It’s a lot easier to pour yourself into a career, attend conferences and be involved in a community when a partner, wife or girlfriend is running the house, the calendar and the kids behind you. The rest of us are expected to turn up to the same events and ship the same side projects without that support, and often while being that support for someone else.

I’m a union delegate, a labour activist and anarchist. So I won’t be telling you to give the tech industry more free labour. If you’d rather spend your evenings on literally anything else, I’m on your side. This one is for the people who want to be in those rooms and on those projects and can’t find the hours.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) sorts people into female and male, so that’s the language the numbers below come in. When I say “women”, I mean everyone who ends up with this work because they’re read as a woman, whatever their gender is. That takes in trans women, and the trans men and non-binary people who get read that way too.

I’m one of them. I’m non-binary, which I’d love to see discussed more, and also less? It’s complicated. I’d like to not have to worry about being perceived as a woman. But I look like one, so I face the same systemic issues as anyone the world reads as a woman, and then I don’t feel at home in the spaces set up for women, because they don’t speak to my experience of being a person. It’s a strange third space to occupy. So the use of “women” is a clumsy fit, and I know it grates.

Race, disability, relationship status and being LGBTQI+ all change the size of the load, and this article only covers a small slice of it.

Nobody has surveyed who does the housework in infosec households, so the figures here are for Australians in general. I’m assuming infosec isn’t the exception.

Every so often the ABS asks people to keep a diary of what they did all day. The latest round ran between August and October 2024, and the results came out in December 2025.55 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “How Australians Use Their Time, 2024”, released 17 December 2025. Time figures are averages for people who did the activity on their diary day.

Unpaid work here means housework, looking after children, caring for adults and volunteering.

So women do about an hour a day more of it than men, which is seven hours a week. For mothers of kids under 15 the gap is 2 hours 27 minutes a day, or just over 17 hours a week. Women also get 27 minutes less free time a day.

Seven hours is time that could be put into compiling, researching, writing and rehearsing a talk, or keeping up a steady contribution to an open source project, or sit on a working group and complete the reading. Seventeen is equivalent to having a part-time job.

The pandemic gave us a demonstrable proof of this gap. A study published in 2024 followed the public code commits of more than 600,000 people from 2018 to 2022.66 Casanueva, Rossi, Zacchiroli and Zimmermann, “The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s contribution to public code”, Empirical Software Engineering, 2025, published online in November 2024. Where lockdowns were tighter, women’s contributions fell further behind men’s. The drop was among people who did their coding outside work hours. For people who only committed during the working day, there was no significant effect. The researchers suggest the cause was care: someone had to look after the kids when the schools closed. They worked out gender from first names, so take the size of the effect loosely.

If your household splits things evenly, good. The averages are still the averages, and they describe the pool this industry is hiring and inviting from.

Hours are only part of it though. Someone has to keep track of everyone’s schedules, plan the meals, make sure the kids are looked after, and remember the hundred small jobs that keep a house running. You’ll notice “have a shower” didn’t make the list.

That’s the mental load, and it uses up the same attention a hard technical problem needs. Researchers at the universities of Bath and Melbourne put a number on it in 2024.77 University of Bath, “Mothers bear the brunt of the ‘mental load,’ managing 7 in 10 household tasks”, 12 December 2024, reporting a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family. In their survey of 3,000 parents in the US, mothers reported handling 71% of the household’s mental load tasks, and fathers were more likely than mothers to think it was shared equally.

I found this out the slow way. For years I worked full-time and ran a household of two, me and my husband, where keeping everything in order was down to me. Then there were the conferences, which were for work but came out of my weekends. He was at them too. We both work in the industry, so we’d go together and come home together, to the same Monday.

I’d get home on a Sunday evening, exhausted, and start. Sunday night was unpacking, getting the washing and drying on, cooking something because we’d eaten out for three days, writing the meal plan and shopping list for the week, and picking the cat up from whoever had been looking after her. While we’d often do the shopping and the cat pickup together, working out what needed doing, and when, often felt like it was left up to me. All of that was so I could be “ready to go” on Monday morning. Going to the conference, attending talks and getting back home always felt like the easy part. The hard part was knowing that everything at home was still waiting for me come Monday.

And don’t get me wrong those conferences did help my career: they got me my first job, helped me establish myself in the industry and land new and more exciting roles. But I paid for them with a lack of rest, hobbies and a proper chance to recharge, and eventually this resulted in burnout and chronic exhaustion not just from my job, but also life in general.

The time that’s left over gets discounted, too. Writing for Fashion Journal in 2023, Maddy McKeown described the gender hobby gap:88 Maddy McKeown, “Is there a gender hobby gap?”, Fashion Journal, 26 April 2023. the things she does for fun (a coastal walk, a drink at a rooftop bar, a gossip with friends) get met with “That’s not a hobby” from the men around her. Her point was that when women’s hobbies are treated as lesser, women stop talking about them.

And I think, infosec does a version of this. For as long as I’ve worked in it, I’ve run into the idea that you should always be picking up new skills and reading about the latest CVEs, exploitation techniques, threat actors, etc. It’s very rare to hear anyone say so outright. But it’s easy to get the impression that if you don’t have side projects and you’re not working on bug bounties, you aren’t passionate, and there’s guilt and shame that comes with that.

Conferences work the same way, nobody says attendance is compulsory. But this industry treats visibility as a measure of success, so if you’re not speaking, not on the panel and not “building your brand”, it can feel like falling behind. Jobs that let you properly switch off are rare, and the after-hours stuff gets sold as an opportunity when it’s one more demand on time you don’t have.

It can feel like you need children before anyone will excuse you from all this. They’re the “hobby” people accept as an absence note, and even that can run out once the kids are old enough to look after themselves.

But all this talk about out of work participation also raises questions about pay. If keeping up is part of the job, why does it happen on my own time? A bug bounty only pays out when you find something, so who covers the hours when you don’t? You do, out of your evenings and salary (when you need to pay for infrastructure or software licenses) and while you’re spending them on a target, someone else is doing the dishes, putting the washing on and remembering that dentist appointment. The after-hours expectation only works if the rest of life gets handled without anyone asking who’s handling it. Mostly, it’s women.

None of this is new. HILDA (the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey) has been following the same households since 2001, so you can watch things change. Or not change.

Men’s housework is the “not”. The 2024 report puts it at 12.8 hours a week in 2022 for men a