Who can ever forget Trinity in The Matrix as she attempts to track Neo’s presence in cyberspace using a laptop running with a UNIX operating system in a dark room? While she attempts to make contact, suddenly the door slams and enters three policemen pointing their guns at her. Unaware and unprepared she rushes to subdue the policemen making a daring escape from the Matrix. Very cool from the shades to the boots!  Trinity embodies the perfect female hacker because she is smart, intelligent and very clever on top of being good looking.

While it is easy to create fictional hacker characters, the big question is whether there are many female hackers in the real world?

So far, there have been very few reports of notable women hackers that could or have rivaled previous and existing male hackers’ popularity.  It is not unlikely that there are good female hackers, but they are rare or unwilling to make themselves known.

One well known female hacker is Susan Headley, aka Susan Thunder, because she went public and showed how hacking could threaten national security.  Thunder was a member of the Roscoe gang, named after her hacker boyfriend.  According to Katie Hafner’s Cyberpunk  book, she was a tall, blonde prostitute in Hollywood who found comfort through the telephone.  Thunder became an active phreaker (telephone line hacker) in the 70s because of her association with the Roscoe gang, and became serious in computer hacking in the 80s.   She spent most of her bend-over money (prostitution) to buy computer equipment.  She also hooked up with Ron and Kevin Mitnick, two social hacking experts, just before they got busted. In other words, they busted a load on her before the cops busted them.  Her specialty was breaking on military computer systems, and like Mitnick, was highly noted for her social engineering skills.  Social engineering relies on the hacker’s capacity to obtain information through misrepresentations.

Other than Thunder, Carla Schroeder and Allison Randall are also considered good hackers.  There have been reports of female hacker groups that emerge every now and then but none were taken seriously by the authorities, media or even their peers.

There are two possible reasons why not many females have figured prominently in hacking.  First, in our society women are expected to behave in certain ways.  This implies doing only activities that are considered as acceptable.  Hacking is considered to be unacceptable, hence, not many women found it interesting.  Second, women lack the enthusiasm to do the work.  Hacking is not really an exciting job unless you like to code for hours with only carbonated drinks for company. You tend to get isolated by others and women do not enjoy this kind of environment of forced solitude. Women generally like to do things that require being on their feet rather than sitting in front of a computer for hours.  Women like to have a life, which is equated to going out rather than staying home facing gadgets.