Whilst Women in Tech Week 2026 shined a spotlight on accelerating women’s careers in technology, the conversation must extend beyond a single week. As AI reshapes the tech industry and creates new career paths, important questions remain: how can we ensure that women aren’t left behind and make sure the leadership gains made are not lost as the industry evolves?
AI is carving out new career paths and redefining the skills businesses should prioritise in their teams. At the same time, women remain significantly underrepresented in the AI sector. Recent research reveals that women made up only a quarter of new hires in AI roles in the last year, falling to just 13% at executive level.
If women are excluded in the development and executive roles of AI, businesses risk excluding valuable perspectives. Organisations must provide dedicated mentorships schemes, practical AI training, and clear pathways into the future ensuring women have the skills and autonomy to influence how the technology evolves.
Ensuring women’s voices shape the future of technology
Across the technology industry, AI is moving at a rapid pace in which users, businesses, and governments cannot keep up. This technology has sweeping impacts across how we interact with our jobs and our lives. Recent research highlighted how women occupy 82.6% of the most AI-vulnerable occupations making them disproportionately exposed to its impact. As AI continues to change how we work, Kat Judd, Chief People Officer at Lucid Software comments that: “As AI reshapes how we work, build, and solve problems, it’s imperative that women are part of those conversations and decisions. Doing that means making sure women have the support and resources to contribute.” Businesses must make sure that women have access to AI training and develop new skills so they can play an active role in emerging career roles that are being created by AI.
Moreover, if businesses overlook women, they risk undermining the legacy of those who have played a vital role in shaping the technology industry. Sara Faatz, Senior Director, Community and Awareness at Progress Software draws attention to key figures across the industry and the role women have played. She suggests that women have “been shaping the technology since long before it became part of our everyday conversations. From pioneers like Margaret Masterman, whose work helped lay the foundations for natural language processing, to Fei-Fei Li, whose contributions transformed computer vision, women have played a fundamental role in making AI what it is today”.
If women continue to be underrepresented, companies will develop products that don’t take into account the experiences of the different people using them. Addressing this starts at school with initiatives that encourage young women to take up STEM subjects and that actively tackle perceptions around the ‘tech bro’. We must also encourage male champions of female talent while also nurturing female talent across dedicated AI labs.
Breaking down barriers to women’s career progression
Top positions within the technology industry continue to lack female representation – specifically executive roles where fewer than one in five (14%) of women are senior AI executives. Women also face more barriers to accessing these roles. Recent government research found that 74% of respondents agreed that improving team and organisational cultures would support women’s entry, progression, and leadership in tech. However, the report cited women continue to face male-dominated workplaces, discrimination, and barriers to progression, including promotion bias and unequal access to professional networks and development opportunities.
Lucy Bell, Software Engineer at Arqit highlights these challenges. “Women are less likely than male candidates to apply for a role unless they feel 100% qualified”. Specifically, in a niche and rapidly evolving sector, “it will not often be the case that any candidate is 100% qualified. Employers should distinguish between essential skills, and ones that can be taught in the role. Otherwise, we risk discouraging a diverse group of candidates applying for a role in a team that needs diverse thought”.
Continuing to cultivate platforms where women are given the opportunity to enter the sector through accessible technical training and dedicated development opportunities allow women to access the necessary skills to progress their careers – which is essential to driving long-lasting change.
The role of career mentorship in career progression and skills
Visible female role models and meaningful mentorship opportunities play a vital role in showing the next generation of women what is possible. In fact, Mala Pillutla, WW VP, Observability & Security at Dynatrace, believes that “the lack of visible female leaders remains a hurdle in our industry. To inspire the next generation of women in tech, including those considering a pivot from another field, young people must see a diverse range of role models demonstrating that there are many ways to enter the industry, build a career, lead, and succeed.” She gives clear advice to businesses who actually want to create real change. “We must invest in mentorship, build genuinely supportive workplace cultures, and actively pave the way for women to pursue long-term careers in technology.”
Creating opportunities to progress
Mentorship alone is not enough to accelerate women’s careers. Businesses must provide dedicated development opportunities where women have exposure to develop practical AI skills, through seminars, workshops, or direct involvement with projects where AI is being deployed. This will provide women a direct line to apply their own knowledge to explore new careers paths, build more niche professional networks, and share responsibilities with a more diverse set of technology influencers.
This is particularly important within the cybersecurity space, where a diverse range of thinking is needed to counter increasingly sophisticated and complex attacks. As Emily Hodges, Deputy Chief Executive Officer at Risk Ledger, explains, the industry depends on bringing together people with different perspectives, experiences, and ways of thinking, especially as they work across sectors and evolving threats across where this is rarely one way to approach a problem. Hodges reinforces the need to look beyond representation alone, emphasising the importance of creating more meaningful opportunities for women to progress within the industry. “Diversity requires more than encouraging women to enter the industry. We need to make sure they can see clear paths to progression, have opportunities to take on responsibility and leadership, and work in environments where their perspectives are heard. That’s how we build stronger and more resilient technology sector for the long term.”
Turning ambition into meaningful progress
To accelerate women in technology, they should have the guarantee of a seat at the table where they can contribute meaningfully. Businesses need to focus on removing the barriers that prevent women from progressing through making promotion criteria more transparent, ensuring women have equal access to high-profile projects and creating clear pathways into senior management positions. Combined by having strong mentorship, visible role models, and access to practical training, we can make further strides towards ensuring female leaders are no longer underrepresented in the world of technology and AI.
