War is gendered. The scholarship of gender and war is comprehensive and multi-layered, yet there seems to be some difficulty to keep up with the new developments in technology and its involvement in warfare. It was only until a few years ago that a new method of warfare - cyber warfare, a form of hybrid warfare, emerged and got the spotlight in the discussions on new methods of warfare. However, as the literature is growing, and international organisations are producing policy and strategy documents on cyber warfare, there seems to be a research gap on the relation between gender and cyber warfare, more specifically the gendered aspects of cyber warfare. This thesis attempts to fill that research gap and intends to answer how cyber warfare may be gendered. This is be done by generally looking at the literature of “Gender and War” and “Gender and Cyber”, and Gunneriusson and Ottis (2013) categorisation of how cyberspace is used in military operations from a hybrid warfare perspective.Gunneriusson and Otitis’s categorisation focus on inter alia cyber-attacks on non-military targets, and the use of propaganda. The overview of the research on gender and cyber focus on the workforce within cyber related sectors and gender-based violence, and the overview of research on gender and war brings up numerous examples of the nexus between gender and war. Based on the overview of the two fields of research along with Gunneriusson and Ottis categorisation this thesis comes to the conclusion that cyber warfare can be gendered. The purpose of the examples of cyber-attacks are the same when same attacks are conducted offline and these types of attack offline have the same effect online. The difference is that an attack through the cyberspace intensifies the consequences in comparison to when these same methods were used in other domains.
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