If you are a tech leader, you might encourage your daughter to follow your path, imagining a journey, like yours, with challenges that can be overcome with hard work. But if you are a man — especially a white man — you are likely unaware of the massive obstacles she will face that you didn’t. For women, the path to leadership is littered with obstructions that hard work can’t overcome.
Those obstacles start at the first rung of the ladder. Women remain less likely than men to be hired into entry-level roles, which leaves them underrepresented from the very beginning, according to the 2024 Women in the Workplace study. And women are far less likely to get promoted — a situation that hasn’t changed much over the past several years. For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2018, only 79 women were promoted. In 2024, that number was just 81. This is why men outnumber women at every level. It is why only 29% of C-suite members are women.
If your daughter is very young, she might see workplace parity in her lifetime — unless she is black. “It will take 22 years to reach parity for white women — and more than twice as long for women of color,” according to the Women in the Workplace study. That means, without any setbacks, we won’t see a workplace that reflects the US population until 2073.
The good news? You can help. If you are aware of the obstacles, you can help make efforts to move them. Women need allies. Be one of those.
Here are eight of the biggest obstacles women face and what they and tech leaders can do about them.
1. The floor is sticky
The first obstacle is at the first rung of the ladder.
“We call it the sticky floor effect,” explains Žydrūnė Vitaitė, co-founder of Women Go Tech, an NGO focusing on women in the tech sector. “Women tend to not believe in their capabilities.” They won’t apply for a job unless they have all the required skills, a hesitation that men do not share. “It starts from the beginning,” says Vitaitė.
When women are subjected to undermining stereotypes, have few female role models, are spoken over, or treated as if their contribution isn’t welcome, imposter syndrome is difficult to avoid.
“When a woman looks at a job, she’s only going to apply if she meets 90% of the criteria,” agrees Debby Briggs, CISO at NetScout. “For men it’s much less.” Despite the world telling you not to, you have to believe in your own technical skills and abilities. “You have to be able to say, ‘I know these three things. Maybe I don’t know these four other things. But I could learn,’” Briggs says.
If you are hiring for tech roles, recognize this difference between men and women. Instead of waiting for superlatives and self-bragging, look for skills, experience, and leadership qualities. Humility is a powerful asset in a leader.
2. You don’t look the part
“There is still a bias about what someone in IT or cybersecurity looks like,” says Kendra Perry, director of emerging tech and innovation advisory at Stratascale. “There’s this mold they have in their mind.”
Perry doesn’t look like that mold. Most women don’t.
“A few years ago, I was boarding a flight and chatting with a man in the line,” she says. “He was a retired FBI agent, and I had done some work in that area. We knew some of the same people. He said, ‘You don’t look like you’re in cybersecurity.’ He wasn’t being rude but what does someone in cybersecurity look like?”
This bias can have vast, invisible consequences for women who are overlooked for promotions and jobs because of it.
“I have a master’s degree and have developed many solutions,” says Marijana Gligoric, co-founder and CEO of Brigit.dev. “Yet people often assume I’m in sales or marketing. If you are a nice-looking woman, you can’t be a software engineer or understand artificial intelligence, blockchain, and things like that. Stereotypes are killing us,” she says. “They block opportunities.”
Stereotypes are difficult to change. So, what can you do? Get angry. Be blunt. Call people out. If you are in a position of power, work to eradicate your own bias. Or, as Gligoric does, use the stereotype to your advantage.
“I’m trying to use them as my strength,” she says. She turns instances like this into Instagram posts, calling them out and explaining her tech skills at the same time. This allows her to showcase her work as a developer, call out oppressive behavior, and build her brand.
3. You feel like an outsider
Women make up only 35% of STEM employees and hold only 8-9% of titles like CIO, CTO, or IT manager. The chance of being the only woman in the room is high. This can be uncomfortable and is often loaded with “microaggressions.”
In fact, 75% of women in tech report a prevalent “bro culture” and 35% of female workers and 55% of women in senior leadership report being sexually harassed in the workplace. Despite the moniker, women do not see these aggressions as small. According to a Logitech study, 82% of women in the US have watched female colleagues leave their career in tech due to microaggressions.
Being seen as an outsider also costs women opportunities, since leaders tend to promote people they know. All the women I spoke to told me they survive this by building their own network. One study found that women with mentors increase their salary by 20%.
“Mentorship and sponsorship play a critical role in advancing women in technology,” says Deb Ashton, co-founder and SVP of customer experience at Certinia. “A mentor can provide guidance, and a sponsor is someone who actively opens doors for you.”
“This is a must-have,” says Briggs, who adds that she collects mentors. Anytime she finds someone she admires or who has a skill she lacks, she reaches out. “Your mentors don’t have to be women,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be formal. Someone told me I have to find my own board of directors. Seat your board with people you respect.” Start at Women in CyberSecurity and the Executive Women’s Forum, she suggests. Women in Tech and Logitech also offer mentoring programs. Or start a program within your company.
Mentors can offer solutions you don’t see and connections you don’t have. “I have a lot of prior bosses who are mentors,” says Alice Fournier, CIO of ISS Facility Services. “They are people I deeply admire and can go to and say, help me navigate this.”
4. You are invisible
It happens all the time. In a meeting, a woman is the tech leader, but the client turns to a man with questions. A female engineer is taken for a sales rep, intern, or assistant. Women say they feel invisible. “If I am at a tech event standing next to a man and another man walks up to us, more than 50% of the time he will address the man,” says Briggs.
This invisibility happens in small interactions and large ones. The website for tech companies is often filled with the faces of white men. The speakers at tech events are all male. How do you scale this obstacle?
“If someone invites me to an event, I look at who is on the panel. If it’s all white men, I tell them they don’t have a diverse enough perspective and choose not to go,” says Briggs. “The industry needs to start making sure women are represented.”
Finding women to speak might take more work. But this is an area where your efforts will have a clear and lasting effect.
“People in leadership, people who are planning events, have to take responsibility for working harder to find a woman who is qualified to speak,” says Perry. “Given the current industry makeup, it’s probably easy to find men to talk about cybersecurity. You may have a hard time finding women who are VP and above. Look for mid-career women who are looking to move up in the industry. That way you have someone who’s not only giving a perspective as a woman, but you also have someone giving a different perspective from where they are in their career.”
5. You have to constantly prove your competence
According to Women in the Workplace 2024, 38% of women report having their judgment questioned in the area of their expertise and 18% of women report being mistaken for someone at a much lower level than they are, something that rarely (10%) happens to men. These numbers are much higher for women with disabilities or LGBTQ+ women.
“When a man comes into the role, he is presumed to be confident, competent, and capable,” says Fournier. “Women don’t always get that presumption. We have to start by proving we are capable. It may be to my team, to a new leader, to colleagues. You are always having to prove your competence while also doing your job.”
One study found that the problem gets more intense the higher up the leadership ladder a woman rises. Even when assessments rate a woman’s performance higher than men’s, she is judged as having less potential. It’s exhausting, but many women in leadership have had to bake “bragging” into their workflow to address this.
“This has led me to make sure that at the start of external meetings, I talk about my technical acumen and background,” says Perry. “Even as you move into leadership, and away from the technical side, you have to say, ‘This is my technical background. This is the experience I have.’”
6. Self-promotion is a double-edged sword
There is a substantial gender gap when it comes to self-promotion. Men are much more likely to take the credit and to use superlatives to describe themselves and their work while women are humble and share credit with their team.
This is a tendency that hiring managers, team leaders, and people looking for potential tech leaders need to understand. Confidence is not a measure of competence. People with a great deal of confidence often lack the competence to recognize what they don’t know.
This turns even darker when you pair a preference for confidence with a dislike for women who assert themselves.
“We have to learn to say I am a subject matter expert in this,” says Perry. But this is often not met with the same promotions and admiration men experience. Women who do this are often called bossy, haughty, conceited, overdoing it, and other derogatory terms. When women assert themselves, they fall into the likeability bias trap, which has a detrimental effect on their career.
Women have learned to walk a fine line. “It’s very hard,” says Fournier. “I choose to be authentic. I try to be the best leader that I can be, to seek out the best in my people, to lead from my heart. When your team feels that you are leading from a genuine place and have everyone’s best interest in mind, it avoids this layer of, ‘Is she bossy? Is she not bossy?’”
If you are a male tech leader, rooting out this attitude is something to work on with your team. Consider doing some anti gender bias training.
7. You have children
Professionally, parenthood is very different for men and women. Men are paid more and given promotions after having children. For women, motherhood invites a new set of obstacles and brings back some they already dispensed with.
According to one study, 50% of women reported that their colleagues see them as less competent and committed after they have children. “This bias is self-fulfilling,” says Salome Mikadze, cofounder of Movadex. Women are told they aren’t committed, are marginalized, and are made to work their way back up the ladder. So, they leave. Not because they are less interested in work but because they can’t fight through the bias.
Yet, for many women, a child increases their commitment. “I want to leave a legacy behind for my daughter of a world that will support her,” Mikadze says. “I think that is true for every mother. We want better for our children.”
In tech leadership, this problem is inflated by the fast pace of change, which creates a real knowledge gap on top of the social bias. “Cybersecurity doesn’t stay stagnant,” says Briggs. “What’s top of mind today, could be old news next week. If you leave the workforce for eight or 12 weeks, some of what you were working on may not be relevant.”
If you take your job seriously, you probably won’t drop that interest when you go on leave. But you might have to prove this by staying in touch and keeping your head in the game. It helps, too, to have a boss who understands. “I have women working for me,” says Briggs. “I understand this. But everybody may not.”
A disparity in maternity and paternity leave contributes to the problem. According to Vitaitė, this is especially true in European markets where women can take as much as a year of maternity leave and men are offered much less. Even when a woman has no desire to have children, this is weighed against her.
“Men are preferred when it comes to employment or leadership positions,” says Vitaitė, because the employers don’t want to make accommodations for maternity leave. If regulations required that men and women be offered the same amount of leave, men would better understand the situation at work (and at home) and it would eliminate some of this bias. “The discrimination on the employer side would be lower,” she says, “because they would have to balance the workload for leave in either case.”
8. When visible, you are objectified
The world of technology has a rich history of “booth babes.” At one time, the only women you saw in a computer magazine or at a tech trade show were porn-adjacent spokesmodels. When you are one of only a few female tech leaders (or journalists) at an event that uses women as props, it is uncomfortable. It is also detrimental to your career. The industry has, to a large extent, grown out of this type of objectification. But it still happens.
“Cybersecurity is still very male-dominated,” says Briggs. “We make all these strides and then something stupid happens like the ladies that wore lampshades on their heads at Black Hat. I felt like, we took two steps backwards.”
Briggs suggests that women speak up when this sort of thing happens. “Speak with your words,” she says. “Or with your legs.” Refuse to attend events that participate in this sort of thing. Use it, too, as Gligoric does, as your strength: Call it out while pointing out your own skills, experience, and knowledge.
If you are male and in a decision-making capacity at a tech company, though, it falls to you to avoid making this sort of decision. This is not something women will do or enjoy. Company events should be gender neutral. Using women as sex objects holds the women in your company back — and will likely result in considerable backlash.
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