Women still underrepresented in top tech roles

Despite pockets of progress, women looking to make inroads in tech leadership continue to face obstacles. Here, two female CIOs in South Africa share their experiences.

Today is International Women’s Day, a day that provides an opportunity to acknowledge achievements and highlight struggles faced by women around the world. For the tech industry in particular, it’s a chance to reflect on progress made, and devise more robust strategies progress, given the work that still needs to be done.

While a leadership gap is apparent across most industries, it’s far wider among tech companies. According to stats from DDI’s 2023 Global Leadership Forecast, which surveyed close to 2 000 HR professionals and around 13,500 business leaders from over 1,500 companies around the world, the share of women in tech leadership roles now stands at around 28%. In recent years, the sector has acknowledged the importance of bringing female perspectives into science and technology, but the numbers show that real progress isn’t being made. As such, women in tech leadership still face uphill battles to secure C-suite and boardroom seats.

For instance, when May Govender, group CIO of pan-African financial services group Old Mutual, first started moving up the corporate ladder, she was one of very few women doing so. As a result, she didn’t feel like her counterparts properly heard her or took her ideas seriously. She recalls voicing her opinion and being ignored, only to have a male colleague suggest the same thing minutes later and be lauded for his ingenuity.

“I very clearly remember giving my opinion on a topic and feeling like people heard me but like I wasn’t really heard,” she says.

May Govender, group CIO, Old Mutual

Old Mutual

People also didn’t acknowledge her technical capabilities because women in leadership roles were more typically involved in other areas of the business, like marketing or people management. And being in the minority, she says, meant she was excluded from male-only cliques. Describing these struggles as a bit of a “branding” issue, she felt prejudged and disproportionately scrutinized since she wasn’t like everyone else in the room.

Aveena Mothilall, CIO of African energy group Engen, faced similar hurdles early on in her career. Like Govender, she struggled to make inroads into male-dominated circles and earn trust. Plus, many of her colleagues had negative perceptions of other responsibilities women have to carry, such as thinking she didn’t take her job seriously because she had to attend a meeting at her child’s school, for example. According to Mothilall, the industry has come a long way since then, but she acknowledges a lot needs to change to make spaces for women in tech, and to increase the number of women in leadership roles.

Encouraging the industry to step up

Creating space for women in technology has to be purposeful, Mothilall and Govender say, with very strategic pipelines created to ensure the tech leaders of the future are more diverse. And it’s too late to try to attract women into the sector once they’ve graduated; they need to be enticed into these fields early on and show the importance and value of equipping women with IT acumen so they can take up highly influential leadership positions.

While some believe ‘women in tech’ events and conferences further cement the divide that already exists between men and women, Mothilall and Govender stress that these platforms actually create spaces where women can share knowledge, learn from each other, and build networks that further their careers.

These communities also showcase what’s possible with such structures and support in place. “These forums allow us to come up with solutions to common challenges,” Mothilall says. One such challenge many female leaders face is finding a functioning work-life balance. During the pandemic in 2020, women’s careers took a massive hit — disproportionately higher than their male peers — because they had to work while handling much of the home and childcare responsibilities, resulting in the perception of diminished dedication to work.

Aveena Mothilall, CIO, Engen

Engen

But Mothilall believes that having to juggle many different responsibilities makes women more adaptable, and that female CIOs are more inclined to empower their teams to perform and make big decisions on their own. “It’s about getting results out of others rather than being the techie that everyone turns to when someone breaks,” she says. “When we do so, female CIOs have more time to focus on strategic efforts.”

With technology now seamlessly integrated into every part of life, it’s crucial that the people who create these tools are diverse in the way they look and think. A recent McKinsey report reveals that businesses with such executive teams are more likely to perform better financially over time because they create products and services that resonate with a broader range of customers.

“The modern IT era has less to do with hardware and servers and more with designing and building solutions,” says Mothilall. “There’s no longer a fixed recipe for success. This is why it’s so important to have different ideas and perspectives in the room so we can ensure that the solutions we create are the right ones.”

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