Nineteen Years in Tech: What Has Changed for Women, and What Stubbornly Has Not

By Tripti | Opinion

When I joined an IT services floor nineteen years ago, I was one of four women in a team of thirty. We were reviewed on how many hours we stayed, not what we delivered. Maternity leave was three months and a quiet understanding that you would return to something smaller than you left.

Almost none of that is true anymore, and I want to say so plainly before I discuss what still needs fixing. The women entering this industry today walk into a materially better one. But they are also walking into a version of it that changes faster than any of us were ever asked to absorb — and that new pressure lands unevenly.

The opportunities are real, not rhetorical

Three shifts have genuinely moved the needle. Hybrid work, whatever its drawbacks, removed the assumption that presence equals commitment — an assumption that quietly cost a generation of women their promotions. Outcome-based evaluation has followed it, and it favours anyone who has learned to work with ruthless efficiency, which describes most working mothers I know.

The third shift is the technology itself. When the tooling underneath a role changes every eighteen months, deep seniority in a single legacy stack matters less than the ability to learn quickly and apply judgment. That resets the board. A woman returning after a two-year break is no longer two years behind on a fixed body of knowledge — because half that knowledge has been replaced anyway, and everyone is relearning together. I have watched returners move into AI-adjacent roles within a year precisely because the entry point was open to everybody at once.

And demand has broadened. The work that now commands a premium is increasingly about translation — between business and engineering, between what a model can do and what a regulated process will actually permit. Many women built exactly this muscle during years spent in delivery, governance and client-facing roles, often while being told it was not "real" technical work.

The challenges have changed shape, not size

The most persistent one is arithmetic. Continuous learning is now a condition of staying employable, and learning takes hours that exist after work. For anyone carrying the larger share of caregiving, those are precisely the hours that are already spoken for. The industry talks about upskilling as a matter of motivation. For a great many women it is a matter of who else is at home on a Sunday evening.

The second is the mid-career narrowing. Entry-level gender ratios have improved dramatically; the ratio in the room where architecture and investment decisions are made has not moved nearly as much. Women leave not because ambition fades but because the years when careers accelerate collide exactly with the years when families need the most. That collision is structural, and it will not be solved by another networking session.

The third is subtler. In a fast-moving field, confidence reads as competence. Women are still likelier to wait until they are certain before speaking, and certainty is scarce when the technology is three months old. The person who says "I think this approach will not hold at scale" carries the room, whether or not they are right.

What I would tell someone ten years behind me

Protect one hour a week for learning as fiercely as you protect a client call, and do not apologise for it. Choose a domain you can go deep in rather than chasing every new tool. Say the half-formed thought in the meeting. And negotiate at home with the same seriousness you bring to a statement of work, because that negotiation shapes your career more than any performance review will.

To the organisations: sponsorship, not mentorship. Mentors give advice. Sponsors put a name forward when a stretch role opens up and the candidate is on leave. That single behaviour has changed more women’s trajectories than any programme I have sat through in nineteen years.

The door is genuinely more open than it was. Keeping it open is now a question of who holds it, and for how long.