Ayumi Moore, Women in Tech Global

It’s no surprise that the tech sector has a gender diversity problem. Both globally and locally, the industry is a male-dominated one. According to a recent UNESCO Science report, women remain in the minority across STEM education and careers, representing only 28% of engineering graduates, 22% of AI workers and less than one-third of tech sector employees globally. When you look at representation across the top tiers of the tech industry, women account for just 27% of FTSE 100 CIO positions. Looking more broadly, the WEF reports that, globally, women occupy just 24% of leadership roles in technology today.

Absa and Brainstorm’s Women in Tech roundtable, held at the Silo Hotel in Cape Town at the beginning of October, brought together some of these women to talk about the challenges they face and to discuss what they think is needed to create successful gender equality initiatives.