Women in Security Special Event

At ASIS New Zealand Chapter’s Women in Security Seminar in Wellington, three inspiring women in security gave insights into the varied paths that led them into successful careers as security professionals.

Now in its second year, the ASIS NZ Women in Security Seminar continues to encourage the advancement of women working in New Zealand’s security sector through the exchange of information and sparking of collaborative relationships.

This year’s 3rd May instalment, held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, was made possible through the support of sponsors Optic Security Group, ICT, Icaras, Provision ISR, Deloitte, and Risq New Zealand.

The stellar speaker line-up included Catriona Robinson, Director of National Security Systems, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet; Sai Honig, ISC2 Board Member; and Catherine (Kate) Pearce, Security Officer at Trade Me, NZITF Board member and Internet NZ Councillor.

The evening also saw the awarding of an ASIS International token to ASIS NZ Deputy Chair Ngaire Kelaher CPP PSP. In presenting her with the token, ASIS NZ Chair Andrew Thorburn acknowledged not only Ngaire’s long term commitment to the ASIS organisation but also her influence as a highly qualified and inspirationally dedicated security professional role model.

Catriona Robinson

Catriona graduated from Victoria University Wellington with a degree in German and Latin, a post-grad scholarship to study in Germany and a vague idea that “when I got back home I could apply at MFAT and then my life would begin.”

“A little card at the student job search caught my eye – it was the 90s, so it was hand-written, and it said something to the effect that if you can speak a foreign language and use a computer then apply here, so I did, and that is how I ended up as an intelligence analyst in the heart of New Zealand’s intelligence community in a little organisation called the GCSB... and it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

“I know in passing just how enormously lucky I was to have been able to basically wander – or stumble – into such a fantastically interesting and rewarding career that national security has been for me with nothing but an arts degree to my name.

“I got to do a lot of really interesting things, I got to work with a number of genuinely world-class minds on some pretty cutting-edge solutions to complex problems.

“It was a great privilege to have worked at the Bureau across a period of time that spanned a lot of interesting changes in intelligence and also in security and for women in security generally from the mid ‘90s to where we are now.

But after 18 years with the Bureau and looking to take the next career step, Katriona found the transition challenging, not least “trying to persuade potential employers who had never heard of me that they should give me a chance when actually I couldn’t talk about anything I’d done.”

“That gave me a great preliminary insight into some of the issues that people who work in national security face, and maybe in particular women who work in the national security space when they try and move around in pursuit of their career.”

It’s an experience that now informs Katriona’s additional role as acting director of the National Security Workforce Programme, which administers the women in national security mentoring programme – a programme commenced in February 2018 to support the participation of women across the national security system.

Bruce Couper (L) and Kate Pearce (R).

Kate Pearce

Kate worked in a range of jobs, including full time in a supermarket for a couple of years, prior to going to university. “That probably helped my people skills more than anything else... keeping a straight face when someone was acting entitled.”

“I did not move sideways into security,” she explains. “I studied into it.”

“I went to Canterbury to do electrical engineering, then shifted to computer engineering, then shifted to computer science, then studied some postgrad, then did a masters. My first job after that was in information security.”

Moving to the US, and following a nine-month contract, she took on a consulting role in a boutique consultancy of around 50 people which, she explains, is “tiny for the US.”

Purchased by Cisco, the consultancy became part of a multinational 100,000-person company. It was, she says, a ‘cultural journey’. “Having business units the size of MBIE was really strange.”

Kate is now Security Officer at TradeMe, a CISO role. “My job is to help us make sure we are secure and trusted for our customers and for New Zealand as a whole,” she said. “We touch jobs, we touch the housing market, we touch second hand goods, we touch new goods, we sell insurance, we have a dating site... there’s a lot of things to keep track of.”

Sai Honig is currently an ISC2 international board member.

Sai Honig

Sai Honig is currently in her last year as an ISC2 international board member, having been elected to the board in 2017. ISC2 is the largest information security professional organisation in the world, with over 141,000 members worldwide.

With a degree in science and aerospace engineering from the University of Arizona and an international business degree, Sai explains that her road to cyber security was not the ‘traditional road’.

“I actually had a childhood friend who introduced me to encryption, although I didn’t know it was called encryption. My friend and I were about eight years old, he was completely deaf, and growing up in southern Arizona we learned American sign language. But trying to communicate by non-verbal means didn’t always work for us. We started writing notes and we got caught with those notes, so we had to come up with a better way and we created a cypher that we only knew.

“Later in high school I learnt some programming and created a cute little program that did just the same thing. I had no idea it was information security or cyber security.”

Sai became a design engineer in the aerospace industry and was involved in the design of rockets, including a project on the international space station. Working with sensitive information, and needing to share information across team members, she found herself again back in the encryption space.

A change in career and an international business degree later, Sai eventually stepped into an IT auditor role before making the move from the US to New Zealand, where she joined the Waikato District Health Board as security manager and then Xero as senior security adviser. “Both of those jobs involved educating people,” she said, “ultimately that is what our roles are.”