Women In Tech Don’t Need DEI

“We need a radically transformed workplace” Penny Horwood, associate editor at MES Computing’s sister site, Computing, reports.

As #IWD2025 approaches, DEI initiatives are being ditched across the tech workplace. But did they ever really help the women working in tech? And what can we do more effectively to replace them?

The campaign theme of IWD2025 is #AccelerateAction. It feels like a message from a different era like the late nineties or maybe early noughties, when it felt like feminism could be filed under ‘job done.’ Women were everywhere. One had been Prime Minister and everything. Sure, there were still very few women in positions of power but look at how far we’d come! There’d never been a better time to be a woman. Progress was inevitable.

Except it wasn’t. Against a darkened political backdrop, many women have realised, too late, that momentum didn’t just fail to accelerate in the first two decades of the new millennium. It stalled then went into reverse. Women are now having to relitigate battles we thought our grandmothers had settled decades ago while our daughters look at tradwife accounts on TikTok.

And in the workplace? Specifically, the tech workplace? Much depends on who you ask. Ask a woman in her late thirties or older, and the chances are that she’ll acknowledge that expectations and boundaries have shifted. But ask her if there has been systemic change in her workplace which helps to level the playing field, and the chances are she’ll say no.

Ask a man of similar age and you could get a very different answer. Some will agree that their female colleagues face challenges they don’t. But plenty would argue that DEI makes it impossible for white men to get a promotion now, or that high ranking women (particularly if they have black or brown skin) are ‘diversity hires.’

Who Is Right?

Women make up 49% of the workforce but only 29% of the tech industry. Not all those jobs will be technical in nature because women tend to be overrepresented in areas such as talent acquisition and marketing. Women hold 20% of software engineering roles in the UK.

Globally, the share of women STEM graduates has remained stagnant at 35% for a decade.

When it comes to leadership the picture deteriorates. Globally, the share of women tech leaders peaked in 2022 at 14%. In the UK, 21% of senior tech roles are held by women, and approximately 8-9% of women list their job as CIO, CTO, IT Manager or similar.

Analysts have, for years now, pointed out that women leave tech at double the rate of men, with more than half quitting before they hit 35 years of age,

These numbers suggest that the DEI myth is just that. DEI has not led to a surge in unqualified women being gifted roles to which they are unsuited. The demographic most likely to succeed and prosper in technology remains white men.

The data also suggests that despite the genuine efforts of many organizations to diversify their workforces to be more representative of their customers, those efforts have, on the whole, failed.

Why?

But Pipeline

For as long as people have questioned the male domination of technology, tech employers have blamed pipeline. Consequently, much activity has focused on fixing the pipeline of female talent into tech. Start in schools, get girls interested in coding, increase the numbers actively pursuing tech careers and that will fix the problem.

It’s a persuasive analysis. Charities such as Tech She Can have an abundance of evidence that girls are failed by educators, industry and society in general because harmful stereotypes are allowed to prevail, and girls are told that they won’t belong. They get the message.

Dr. Claire Thorne, Co-CEO of Tech She Can comments:

“What’s been missing from DEI, STEM initiatives and tech talent pathways more generally is a long-term view. There is not quick fix and that's why Tech She Can programmes start from age 5 years - and stick with them. It’s the sustained commitment to the pipeline that's needed.

“We see the demand in schools for industry-relevant, modern, inclusive tech careers education - we directly reached over 60,000 children across the UK on just one day (Safer Internet Day 2025) with our Cyber live assemblies and we know that this type of education changes perceptions of boys, girls and teachers. We know that these open doors to careers that would otherwise never have been considered.

“What does change lives and solves the UK's critical tech skills gap is not one-off employer engagement experiences but our real commitment to sticking with them throughout their schooling.”

Fleur Laffont, Head of Graduate Training at FDM Group agrees on the importance of sustained commitment.

“Building meaningful relationships and partnerships between universities, education institutions and businesses can create clear paths for training and education. Encouraging these organizations to think about what they can do to proactively encourage better gender representation and make avenues into tech more accessible at apprenticeship and university level.”

Women Need Workplace Transformation, Not support

Few people would argue that the pipeline of female tech talent doesn’t need attention in the way that Thorne and Laffont describe. But is it enough? Not everyone is convinced that the pipeline is the problem.

Patricia Gestoso is a technologist, award-winning inclusion strategist and career coach for women in tech.

“Tech has taken this concept of diversity and inclusion, and they have decided this is performative,” she says. “You say to somebody in HR ‘you are head of diversity, but guess what? I'm not going to give you any resources. Or KPIs. You just have to recruit volunteers’. Who are those volunteers? They will be women.”

Gestoso is also wary of the much-heralded concept of allyship.

“Men are allies, but this reminds me of women that work both at home and at work telling me that their husband or partner helps with the children. The message is that children and the home are still very much her responsibility, but the husband is ‘helping.’ They don’t own it.”

Fleur Laffont also expressed concerns about DEI as marketing, as opposed to building a genuinely inclusive and equitable workplace.

“The crux of the issue lies in the way DEI is used. DEI is utilized far too often as a tool for marketing and recruitment and far too little in the interest of retention and supporting underrepresented groups in their organizations long term. This is extremely detrimental as DEI is not a trend to profit from when convenient and tokenism in tech clearly remains a challenge as companies focus too largely on diversity in recruitment rather than inclusivity and equitable opportunities in the workplace. “

The data backs up Laffont’s argument. Not only are too few women entering tech careers, but most of them won’t stay to develop those careers and become leaders.

Patricia Gestoso argues that tech has proven so stubbornly resistant to attempts to rebalance it because to do so we must radically transform the workplace. DEI, without any kind of performance metrics, executive support or financial backing was never going to be capable of bringing this transformation. She continues:

“We have focused on what I call couponing. We solve point problems. We don't solve caring; we solve maternity leave. We focus on supporting women in a flawed system instead of transforming the system.

"For example, we know women are over mentored and under sponsored, but we keep giving women mentors and more mentors and focusing on fixing women, saying that they don't like STEM and tech or that they have imposter syndrome.

"We have all this rhetoric that women don't like STEM and that makes women the problem, which we expect to fix with one-off hackathons or imposter syndrome workshops. The reality is society signals women that they don’t belong in STEM careers through advertising, stereotyping, and lack of support for STEM education for girls and women. Tech has not done better, resisting making the transformative changes necessary to make workplaces truly diverse and inclusive.”

There is an unpalatable truth at the heart of Gestoso’s logic. That truth is that the women and girls who shun the tech workplace are being perfectly rational. It’s the tech workplace that needs fixing, not the women who would rather forge a career elsewhere. If we don’t collectively face up to this, nothing will change.

Virtual Optimism

Given how resistant the tech workplace has proven itself to take up this responsibility, is there any hope? You have to squint, but the answer is yes, and you might be surprised as to where it can be found.

Kevin Kelly is director of the AWS Cloud Institute, a flexible and virtual training program that is intended to help people of all ages and starting abilities to pursue a career in cloud development. He has some remarkably interesting data about recent graduates and the current cohort.

“48% of our learners are women,” Kelly says. “What our women learners are telling us is that they like the fact that they’re not the only woman sitting in a classroom. It's a virtual environment and they’re on an equal footing. No one knows who people are because we use Slack as part of the program because we think it's important to teach them the etiquette of a modern IT workplace. They can create a handle, you don't know who they are. It’s an aspect that we didn't anticipate but it’s been a positive for making the program more inclusive.”

This data is fascinating. By taking teaching out of a physical environment, and making it virtual and flexible, Kelly has achieved gender parity by accident. Educators at all levels advocating for greater inclusion should take note.

Ironically, given Amazon’s very public RTO mandate, it also indicates that if companies want to retain the women they have, forcing them back into offices might not be the best way to go about it.

Even more ironically, according to Kelly it’s the customers and partners of AWS that have been pushing for a more diverse talent pipeline.

“We wanted to create the mechanisms that would allow us to respond to our customers and partners asking for not only an entry level workforce but a more diverse entry level workforce. They’re telling us, ‘our back office cloud developers don’t look like our customer base, and we know we need to fix that but we don’t know how.’ That’s why this is one of the objectives we built the program on.”

Fixing the pipeline of women in tech is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for a more balanced tech workforce. We also need a radical rethinking of the tech workplace itself. Yet a quick win could have been staring us in the face for years – take it online to stop women being intimidated out of the space.

What is clear, is that whilst the willful and politically motivated misrepresentation of what DEI tried to achieve is driven by bias, resentment and entitlement, DEI is and was failing to help women technologists. Women deserve better.

This article originally appeared on our sister site Computing.