Are We Closing the Gender Gap in Tech?

If you visit our company’s leadership page, you will find something you do not see at a lot of other tech companies.  

The majority of executives on our leadership page identify as female, including our CEO (yours truly), our CFO, and our Chief Legal Officer. You do not typically see women occupying the majority of C-Suite positions at a tech company. According to a recent report from Deloitte, women occupied 21.2% of leadership roles at large tech companies in 2019, a percentage that they expect to increase to 25.3% in 2022.  

On the one hand, I can’t say our executive team’s gender diversity was a complete accident.  As I discussed in a previous LinkedIn article, I built LogicMonitor’s leadership team to make it diverse in a variety of ways — not just gender, but also race, professional experience, and ways of thinking. On the other hand, my two top priorities as I assembled a leadership team were to find leaders who would instill a performance culture at LogicMonitor and keep everyone on our team serious about customer success. I did not go in with a plan to build an executive leadership team with more women than men on it; yet, in achieving my top two priorities for the team, we ended up with more women than men occupying C-Suite roles at LogicMonitor.  

I am hopeful that my experience building a strong leadership team with a high percentage of women on it will be increasingly replicated at other tech companies. As the report from Deloitte indicates, the number of women in executive leadership positions at large tech companies is increasing, albeit slowly. In addition, the same report found that today 25% of board seats at technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) companies in North America are now held by women, up from 17.4% in 2018. And, while you would have been hard pressed to find a woman leading a large tech company when I started my tech career in the late 1990s, today women like Safra Catz at Oracle, Revathi Advaithi at Flex and Lisa Su at AMD lead some of the world’s largest and most respected tech companies.  

But despite this progress, the tech industry still has a long way to go when it comes to gender equity — as demonstrated by both Deloitte’s research, as well as a quick review of the number of women occupying CEO and other C-level positions at the world’s 10 most valuable tech companies. While many more women occupy tech company’s C-Suites than in the past, we still have a lot of work to do before we close the tech industry’s gender leadership gap. 

As I wrote in a previous article, one way we can address this problem is to fix the “leaky pipeline” that results in women slipping through the cracks as they progress on their STEM career journeys. At LogicMonitor we are trying to do our part to plug these leaks in a variety of ways, including encouraging young women to pursue tech careers through our Women in STEM scholarship program.  

But plugging the leaks in this pipeline is not enough — we also must ensure that as women move through this pipeline, they eventually get the opportunity to become senior leaders at a tech companies.  One way to do this that many large tech companies are adopting is to set corporate leadership gender diversity and inclusivity goals — as HP has done with its goal to achieve 50/50 gender equality in leadership ranks, and Intel has done with its goal to double the number of women occupying its senior leadership roles.  

I am hopeful that these and other efforts will result in more women occupying leadership roles at tech companies. How do you think we can increase the representation of women in this industry?