Earlier this month, the IAPP released the results of a survey of more than 250 privacy leads within U.S.-based Fortune 1000 companies, the main takeaways being that the privacy profession is growing more mature but also growing extensively in size and resources. The intersection between privacy and IT and info-security also emerged starkly from the report. 

Fortune picked up on the survey this week, adding an interesting angle to it: the fact that half of privacy professionals in the U.S. are women and that they often earn more than their male counterparts. Not bad, really, especially when you take into account that intersection with IT and info-sec, and throw big data into the mix. All of these areas—as Fortune’s Kieran Snyder points out—are almost exclusively male territory.

Reading the IAPP report, and combining it with Snyder’s own survey of 716 women who decided to leave the tech industry, I couldn’t help but try to draw a parallel with this side of the pond.  

In Europe, data protection has been at the forefront of the European Union’s political debate for years now, and it looks as though we may be starting to see the light at the end of the legislative reform tunnel. (The EU Justice and Home Affairs Council is meeting again on 4 and 5 December, by the way.)

Appropriately, the data protection debate has so far been driven by a woman, Viviane Reding. The European Digital Agenda has also been drawn by a woman, Neelie Kroes, who famously said her “ambition is to get more women into ICT.” Maybe in a few years, once the European legislative landscape is clearer and the data protection profession has matured with it, we can go back and look at how many women have made a difference.