Despite widespread acknowledgement that women are underrepresented in technology and continual initiatives to boost the number of women tech leaders, progress is glacial. Board quotas have worked to improve women’s representation in the public sector and on FTSE boards. Are they the logical next step for tech employers?

Women are resigning at at a rate eclipsing that of their male colleagues - especially at the leadership level. With companies struggling for skilled workers and the tech workforce already heavily weighted towards men, this simply isn't good enough. In this session we'll discuss why women leave, how to spot the signs at your own company, and how to build a culture where women want to stay.

Throughout history, women’s work outside their private sphere has been contingent on men’s availability and preferences. This has often resulted in limiting women’s career choices to repetitive and low-paid jobs; the kind of work that technology has frequently either made obsolete or demoted to gig work. The tech sector itself has not been immune to this genderisation of work. When computers took off in the 1960s, women became programmers while men focused on the hardware which was perceived as the most challenging work. As programming gained status during the 1980s, men pushed women out of those jobs. Nowadays women in tech are overrepresented in areas particularly vulnerable to automation such as HR, finance, marketing, and administrative work as well as customer support and quality assurance. They are also part of the human labour behind artificial intelligence, working on low-wage jobs such as data annotation and content moderation. In this talk, we’ll explore the impact of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, on women’s roles in tech as well as the strategies that can help you build a successful, resilient, and sustainable career in our sector.