Women in OSINT

Marta Silvia Viganò
What The OSINT!
Published in
3 min readNov 30, 2020

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Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

As you might have noticed in the list of organizations and people to follow to keep up with the latest on OSINT I published here, the male presence is quite predominant in the sector.

The need for diversification was first recognised years ago, when Bellingcat published this article on how to tackle the underrepresentation of women in OSINT. At the time, in 2015, “the overall proportion of stories reported by women had been gridlocked at 37 percent in the past decade” and “women made up only 25 percent of the people in Internet news stories”.

With specific regard to the OSINT sector, Rayna Stamboliyska suggested that “current women underrepresentation in OSINT is essentially due to the novelty of the field”, with few professionals openly labelling themselves OSINT people. Or at least that was her hope.

Almost five years later, however, it seems that women-identifying individuals are still short on representation in the field. Keeping in mind that Twitter is the platform where OSINT is thriving the most, one example is that the #WomenInOSINT list on Twitter has just 89 members and 228 followers and the #OSINT one has 56 members and 448 followers.

The solutions offered in the piece — namely “highlighting the professionals already operating” and enhancing their interactions — were and remain necessary.

However, scholars argue that an intersectional feminist approach — a thought that looks at how race, class, sexuality, religion, ability and more determine the total experience of the world beyond gender — can aid open source investigators in reimagining ways of working in the field.

According to Sophie Dyer and Gabriela Ivens, the authors of the academic article What would a feminist open source investigation look like?, the democratising potential of the use of publicly available data to retelling violence is vast, both in terms of who contributes to OSINT investigations and whose stories they centre. In other words, women in OSINT would not only empower the women professionals in the field, but would also give…

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Marta Silvia Viganò
What The OSINT!

European and Italian digital reporter covering environment and human rights. Mundus Journalism student. #EMJ2021 #Y4R2020