Britain’s technology industry is bleeding female talent at an alarming rate, with nearly 90 per cent of women abandoning the sector within ten years of joining, according to fresh research from Akamai that lays bare the scale of an inclusion crisis costing the UK economy up to £3.5bn a year.
The findings paint a damning picture of an industry that has long trumpeted its diversity credentials yet continues to lose women at the precise moment they should be ascending to its upper ranks. More than half of those who depart do so within five years, while the average tenure for a woman in tech now stands at just six years, a figure that suggests the sector’s much-vaunted pipeline initiatives are pouring talent straight into a leaky bucket.
Crucially, this is not a problem of recruitment. Women are walking away mid-career, typically when their experience and expertise are at their most valuable. The reasons cited will be wearily familiar to anyone who has tracked this issue over the past decade: poor working conditions, inadequate remuneration, a paucity of role models in senior positions, and workplace cultures that remain stubbornly resistant to flexibility and genuine inclusion.
Elizabeth Anderson, chief executive of the Digital Poverty Alliance, argues the problem extends well beyond the corporate balance sheet. “There is a clear and often overlooked link between digital exclusion and the retention of women in the tech sector,” she said. “When workplaces fail to provide inclusive, accessible environments — whether through equitable access to tools, flexible working, or supportive cultures, it can reinforce barriers that disproportionately impact women and ultimately drive them out of the industry.”
Anderson warns of a feedback loop with national consequences. “If the people designing and delivering technology do not reflect the diversity of those using it, we risk embedding exclusion into the digital services that underpin everyday life,” she said, pointing to the 19 million Britons still living in digital poverty. “Representation in tech is therefore not just a workforce issue, but a critical factor in ensuring technology works for everyone.”
The numbers reinforce her case. Women account for roughly a quarter of the UK technology workforce, but only a sliver progress to leadership roles, evidence, the research suggests, of structural barriers that calcify the higher up the ladder one looks.
For SMEs in particular, the exodus represents a bottom-line problem as much as a moral one. Sheila Flavell CBE, chief operating officer of FDM Group, believes the answer lies in coordinated action between Whitehall and industry. “The findings that almost 90 per cent of women leave the tech industry within a decade highlight a challenge we can no longer ignore,” she said. “Upskilling and reskilling women in digital skills must be a priority.”
Flavell is calling for clearer routes into technical and leadership positions, alongside targeted investment in artificial intelligence and digital training. She is particularly insistent on the need to support women returning to work after career breaks. “This also means providing dedicated pathways for women returners looking to re-enter the workforce after a career break, ensuring experienced talent is not lost to the tech sector.”
The economic stakes are considerable. The loss of mid-career women is feeding directly into Britain’s chronic technology skills shortage, with the resulting drag on productivity estimated at between £2bn and £3.5bn each year. Much of that expertise is not lost altogether, it is migrating wholesale to financial services, education and healthcare, sectors that have proved more accommodating of senior female talent.
There is, however, a glimmer of opportunity for employers prepared to act. A substantial proportion of women who have left the industry indicated they would consider a return under improved conditions: better pay, transparent progression, flexible working and cultures that move beyond box-ticking inclusion. For the SMEs and scale-ups that dominate Britain’s technology landscape, that represents a sizeable pool of experienced talent ready to be recaptured, provided they are willing to overhaul the structures that drove these women away in the first place.
The question now is whether Britain’s tech sector treats this latest evidence as another statistic to be filed away, or as the wake-up call it so plainly is.
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Britain’s tech sector haemorrhages female talent as nine in ten women quit within a decade