What does it take for a woman to reach a leadership position in the digital sector, and what keeps stopping her from getting there?
Simona Ramanauskaitė, lead of Thematic Working Group on Leadership Empowerment within the Connecting Women in Digital project, brought together practitioners, researchers, and advocates on April 9th, 2026, for a webinar that was less presentation and more collaborative inquiry. The session served as one of the final opportunities to enrich the working group’s findings before the group concludes its nine-month mandate in May.
Why are we still having this conversation?
Ramanauskaitė opened with a question she has encountered more than once, often from men: is this still relevant? Her answer was built on two foundations: the numbers and the potential they represent.
Women hold fewer than one-third of senior management roles globally. In the digital and ICT sectors specifically, the figure remains low. Projections from the World Economic Forum suggest that, at the current pace of change, meaningful equality in leadership is more than a century away, and recent data indicate that progress is not even linear.
“The numbers are not just a moral argument. They are an economic one. Gender diversity in leadership is associated with significantly higher organisational performance and broader GDP gains: the case for inclusion is also a case for competitiveness.”
Mapping the barriers: internal, external, and deeply connected
The Thematic Working Group 2 spent its mandate identifying and structuring the obstacles that prevent women from entering and advancing in digital leadership. Over the course of its work, members catalogued 65 distinct barriers.
Internal barriers describe the doubts and hesitations women themselves carry: the sense of not being ready for a fast-moving sector, limited access to high-visibility digital assignments, and the quiet weight of imposter syndrome.
External barriers are those imposed from the outside: organisational cultures built around narrow definitions of leadership, recruitment and promotion structures that favour certain profiles, and an innovation ecosystem in which visibility still skews heavily male.
What the working group found, however, was that the two dimensions rarely operate in isolation.
“In most cases, the internal and external barriers are connected. Imposter syndrome does not arise in a vacuum; it is shaped by the biases and assumptions that surround a woman from early in her life and career.”
Voices from the room
The webinar’s central activity invited participants to map barriers on a shared digital canvas, noting what the obstacles were and what concrete actions might dismantle them.
Cassandra Gardiner pointed to the gap between stated ambition and actual practice: organisations call for innovation while reverting to the same hierarchies and the same people. Diversity initiatives are launched and quietly dropped; women are placed on panels without the authority to act.
“You can put forms in place, you can put mentors in place, but somehow they manage to contain it.”
Paula Walshe, whose research focuses on early childhood education, redirected the conversation upstream. Gender roles, she argued, begin forming before the age of five or six, long before any career decision is made. Everything that follows, she suggested, is managing consequences rather than addressing causes.
“After that point, we are putting out fires. If we really want to address root causes, we need to understand when these biases start for both girls and boys.”
What the working group is building
The session also clarified how the contributions gathered from participants (both from the working group’s core members and from the broader community) will feed into four concrete outputs.
- A policy brief will translate the 65 barriers and associated recommendations into targeted guidance for decision-makers, organised by who is best placed to act: education ministries, innovation departments, and regulators.
- An educational framework will address the systemic dimension, proposing what needs to change in how schools and educational institutions approach gender and digital leadership from an early age.
- Finally, a best practices repository will document initiatives already working in the field: concrete examples that organisations and policymakers can study and build from.
“All of us, by default, have something to contribute. The question is whether we give ourselves permission to say so.”
