Norm Entrepreneurship and Gendered Cybersecurity: A View from Europe

It could be said that cybersecurity and gendered security are issues that entered international policy discourse around the same time. While both innovations entered high-level consciousness in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as part of a larger rhetorical expansion of security as a concept, the two ideas have taken different trajectories. While cybersecurity has been embraced and institutionalized by the vast majority of countries, high-level policies on gender have made inroads at a slower pace. This paper examines a previously overlooked intersection of gender and cybersecurity, which is the presence of gendered discourse in national cybersecurity strategies. Drawing on unique data collected from the national cybersecurity strategies of European countries (2008–2022), I argue that the strong normative framework around rights-based cybersecurity has not yet expanded to include gendered discourse and attention to other marginalized groups. Looking at the literature on cyber norms and exploring two key cases in detail, I argue that attempts by some countries to gender cyber-norms and policies suffer from a failure to see gender as a complex concept. The paper further speculates on how this inquiry might contribute to our understanding of small states as potential norm leaders.