The Highs and Lows of Being a Woman in Tech

Elizabeth Grace
11 min readMar 10, 2017

There has been momentous push to highlight gender inequality within tech, yet the question still remains: Why are there so few women in tech and in top leadership roles?

According to a recent Reuters study, 30% of 450 technology executives stated that their groups had no women in leadership positions. Only 25% of the IT jobs in the US were filled by women and considering the fact that 56% of women leave IT in the highlight of their career, it’s no surprise that there’s so few women leading the tech industry.

30% of 450 technology executives stated that their groups had no women in leadership positions

The value of having women in leadership is common sense — women make up half of the purchasing demographic so having limited or no representation of women leading companies can make them miss out on valuable insight. This common sense is backed by a study by a DDI consulting firm that found the top 20% of top-performing companies had 27% or more women in key leadership positions while the bottom 20% of companies had less than 19% of women in these roles.

I asked women in leadership roles to share their experience in the tech space, everything from why they chose a career in tech to…

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Elizabeth Grace

She writes about tech and the tech workplace; her expertise has been featured in a variety of publications.