The Influence of Religion and Gender on Information Security Problems in Cross-Cultural Environments

The purposes of this paper are to find whether religion and/or gender has relation with information security problems or not in cross-cultural environments and to know how they are related with each other. Analyzing the data collected by a comprehensive series of international surveys on problems related to information security management in 8 investee countries/community, this paper identifies serious potential problems and finds statistically which problem has relation with religion and/or gender. The data had been collected through Internet-based surveys from more than 1,000 local employees working for foreign companies. The most common problems is “unintentional sharing of confidential information.” The problem of “using a previous company’s confidential information” sits in the second position. Both of them are found to have relation with religion as well as gender. As far as these two problems are concerned, Buddhists are found to be the riskiest, especially women; women are 2 times as risky as men. This study may be the first empirical analysis of human-related problems of information security in relation to religion and/or gender in cross-cultural working environments.