To mark tomorrow's International Women’s Day 2025, we talked to two of our leading engineers about their experiences in the industry and their advice for the next generation of women in tech.
International Women’s Day has been around for well over a century now — the first was marked in 1911 — and this year’s theme is #AccelerateAction.
“Focusing on the need to Accelerate Action emphasizes the importance of taking swift and decisive steps to achieve gender equality,” says the IWD website. “It calls for increased momentum and urgency in addressing the systemic barriers and biases that women face, both in personal and professional spheres.”
With the World Economic Forum stating that gender parity around the world has stalled at 68.5% closed in its latest report (100% would be absolutely equality), we thought we would talk to two of the women within VO that have been Accelerating Action themselves. Women are still underrepresented in the technology industries, making up 28.2% of the workforce versus a general figure of 47.3% across all employment sectors, but as our interviewees ably demonstrate, they are an increasingly powerful voice within it.
Two women in tech
Linor Cohen is an R&D Director at VO. She studied mathematics and computer science at university, and specializes in cryptography. She started out in the industry as a full stack engineer twelve years ago and has been with VO for just over five years. Mali Nagdiman is a Solutions Architect who studied computer science and business at university and has honed her skills at a number of different companies worldwide, before settling in at VO seven years ago.
“When I arrived at VO, I was really surprised to see that so many developers, software architects, and product managers were women,” she says. “I think it has a positive impact on the atmosphere in the company, on the way people talk to each other and how they manage conflicts.”
Both have powerful stories to tell. In her spare time, Linor is a speaker for Shavot, an organisation established to enable girls to strengthen their sense of self-worth and to provide them with tools that will enable them to realize their aspirations. Interestingly, Mali decided to pursue a career in computer engineering after meeting a female computer engineer during a school science program at a young age. “That was when I decided this is what I want to do,” she says simply.
At the time that was quite a leap. She grew up in a disadvantaged neighborhood where it was rare to even see a woman working outside home. When she returned there after several years, she saw that while many of the women she grew up with were still not working outside the home, the new generation faced a very different reality.
“I think older people don’t believe they can do it. They don’t even dare to dream,” she says. “But 15 years ago, we built a new school here designed to bring in people from other areas, and the neighborhood has changed significantly. Now, there’s a whole new generation growing up here – one that is taught to dream — and they dream big.”
You’re the voice
Talking to Linor and Mali, one of the main things that emerges is the benefit of the balanced viewpoint that they bring to the workplace, both to themselves, the people they work with, and the projects they manage. Mali talks of her time in Japan and the need to harmonize the cultural, technical, and business aspects of a project to make it work and to make things happen. Linor, meanwhile, says that one of her biggest assets is that she knows how to walk the fine line between being technical and people-oriented.
"I know how to turn technical concepts into motivating tasks," she says. "As a senior manager, I need to balance driving the company’s high-level vision with understanding the technical details that make it happen. It’s all about how I communicate—while focusing on business goals, I also need to keep my teams engaged and motivated."
“This proves what I was saying,” adds Mali. “It’s about taking our skills as women and using it in the workplace. When I was younger I wouldn’t do that because the mindset was that you had to be like the men; you had to be tough, you cannot be yourself. But that has changed, and we now have a better balance in the workplace and that is a good thing.
“You can do everything that men can do, it doesn't even matter,” says Linor. “Just a few days ago, a colleague asked me ‘It's such a male oriented industry, so how do you find yourself in these kinds of roles?’. I said I never saw the difference. And this is my slogan across the years; I don’t see the difference. I don't understand why as a woman I am different from my male colleagues. If I want it, I will achieve it. I will find a way to do it. And I am telling young women the same thing: if you want it, you can achieve it. It does not matter if you're a male or a female, you can do it.”
“I fully agree,” says Mali. “I come from a family with Middle Eastern heritage, where traditions played a strong role. I grew up in a modest neighborhood and I am a woman. But I never felt discriminated against because I always believed my voice matters. And this is the advice I give to young girls nowadays; no matter what you do, your voice is important. Do things that matter to you and raise your voice to make them happen”.
Unlocking ambition
Currently, according to the World Economic Forum, it will take women 134 years to reach equality, longer again than Intentional Women’s Day has so far been in existence.
But with the support and assistance of numerous organisations and many initiatives both within and outside of technology companies — we are happy to say that we have our own in place at VO — we can indeed help to accelerate that process. And, while it can sometimes seem like we are taking two steps forward and one step back, the idea is that we can empower more young women to not only dream freely about what they can do in their futures but give them the tools to follow their dreams as well. This will encourage even more girls to say, just like an 11-year-old Mali did, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up and no one is going to stop me.”
