On International Women's Day 2026, the data on gender representation in tech remains concerning, but the business case for change has never been clearer.
The theme for this year’s International Women's Day 2026 is ‘Give to Gain’, and one of the standout quotes on the IWD website this year is “When women thrive, we all rise.” However, despite much progress in gender equality, women remain underrepresented across the technology workforce, and that trend deepens significantly at leadership level. For organizations competing in a market defined by technical complexity and rapid change, this phenomena means a significant competitive disadvantage for the tech industry as a whole.
The Current Tech Workforce Picture
Globally, women account for approximately 29% of the technology workforce. This is up slightly from the 2024 figure of 28%, but remains far from reflective of the available talent pool.
One of the key structural problems is that representation declines at every level of seniority. Women hold 29% of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) entry-level positions, 24.4% of STEM managerial roles, and just 12.2% of C-suite positions in these areas, according to World Economic Forum and LinkedIn research published in 2025.
The issue here is what McKinsey has identified as the "broken rung" — the first promotion to management level. In 2025, only 93 women were promoted to manager-level roles for every 100 men. This imbalance has a compounding effect in every subsequent managerial tier, meaning steadily fewer women make it up the corporate ladder.
And there is a new factor that is likely to make the problem worse.
The AI Dimension
Women currently hold a higher proportion of roles in administrative, coordination, and customer-facing functions such as including HR, finance, marketing. These face greater exposure to AI automation than engineering and development roles, where male representation is higher.
Research from the World Economic Forum identifies what it describes as a "triple challenge" for women as AI adoption accelerates. There are fewer women entering AI roles from university; there are lower rates of progression to senior positions for those who do; and then they have to cope with disproportionate exposure to the automation of roles they currently hold.
This is a problem that is liable to be amplified too as the composition of AI development teams has direct implications for product quality and market reach. Research indicates that as many as 44% of AI systems across industries exhibit measurable gender bias and this is partly a consequence of the gender homogeneity of the teams that build and train them.
A Harvard Business School analysis identifies three business consequences of an AI gender gap: reduced career advancement for women; measurable loss of potential revenue and growth for organizations; and diminished female influence over the development of AI systems.
This lack of inclusion in the development of models can have consequences downstream, and our industry offers an easy example. If a company produces AI-powered models that don’t account for differences in gender preference when providing content recommendations, then these recommendations will be significantly less accurate than a model that does.
The Business Case
By now, the commercial argument for gender diversity in technology leadership is well established. Companies whose executive teams include at least 30% female leaders are measurably more likely to deliver stronger financial performance than those with lower representation.
Research consistently shows that visible female leadership representation is a significant factor in women's decisions to join and remain at an organisation. This is an important recruitment pipeline consideration in a sector experiencing structural talent shortages.
There is also a macroeconomic argument here. The global economy loses an estimated $7 trillion annually as a result of gender inequality in employment. A World Bank analysis found that global GDP would be 19% higher with full female labour participation.
Encouraging Signs
There are encouraging signals. Women's representation in AI engineering skills listed on LinkedIn rose from 23.5% in 2018 to 29.4% in early 2025, with the gap narrowing in 74 of 75 economies with available data. Companies with flexible hybrid working policies retain women at 35% higher rates — a structural advantage for organizations whose operations are distributed or remote-capable by design.
And when it comes to streaming specifically, the number of women creators working on streaming programs in the U.S shot up nine percentage points from 27% in 2023-24 to 36% in 2024-25, a historic high. This has a knock-on effect throughout the production. On shows across streaming and liner television with at least one female creator, women constituted 42% of directors, 62% of writers and 32% of editors. On programs with exclusively male creators, women accounted for 20% of directors, 20% of writers and 20% of editors.
Where We Should be Heading
On International Women's Day 2026, the technology sector's gender gap remains significant, but there is clear room to improve. The data on AI adoption, technical skills and leadership pipelines shows that progress is achievable where organizations commit to changing the structural conditions that support it.
For companies operating in streaming and media technology, the business case for action is clear. A more representative workforce produces better products, reaches broader audiences and is better positioned to compete. To return to IWD’s own phrase: “When women thrive, we all rise.”
