Female leadership in the IT sector: why your pipeline leaks, not your vacancy
AuthorMSP Late NightPublished on:Female leadership in the IT sector gets a few minutes on the agenda in every MSP boardroom. Usually with the same conclusion: “we would like to, but we cannot get them in.” Last week three female IT business owners sat down with us, between them more than 40 years in the trade, and that conclusion was shot to pieces within ten minutes. Not with theory, but with examples from their own companies from last month.
Fewer than 1 in 5 leadership positions in IT is filled by a woman. That figure has been repeated at every industry drinks event for years, and the reflex of MSP owners is almost always the same: it is the intake. Too few women come out of applied IT degrees, so what can we do about it. At a recent open day at the applied IT faculty in Zwolle there were two women among fifty students. Point made, conversation closed, back to invoicing.
Except: it is not right. Or rather, it is only part of the story. Industry research shows that on balance 30 to 35 per cent more women leave than enter at senior level. You do not only have an intake problem. You have a leaking pipeline. And it does not leak at the recruiter, it leaks in the daily run of things at work: in who gets repeated in a meeting, who gets a sales director title and who stays called sales manager, and who gets asked by the organiser at an event whether she is “having a nice chat” while she is the cybersecurity speaker.
What does work for female leadership in the IT sector
What we see working at MSPs is not a quota and not a half-day diversity training. It is a shift in what the owner steers on. Not on “how many women did we hire this quarter”, but on three harder signals: who gets credit in meetings for what is said, how the title relates to the actual role, and where in the employee journey we lose people.
One of the women at the table runs an MSP with 60 professionals, 80 per cent of them women. Her approach is not mystical: 32-hour contracts where that fits, paying well, talking instead of assuming. When an employee did not shake hands with female colleagues, there was internal muttering. Her response: ask him. It turned out to be a religiously motivated respect for his fiancée. Done. No HR process, no policy. A two-minute conversation. That is the pattern: if the leadership itself has the habit of testing assumptions instead of managing them, that spreads through the company.
The three places your pipeline leaks
If you seriously want to know where female talent leaves your MSP or never moves up, look at these three points. They sound small. Together they explain a good part of that 30 per cent outflow.
1. The meeting effect
A woman says something in a management meeting. Nobody reacts. Five minutes later a man repeats the same observation. The idea is picked up and attributed to him. All three women at the table recognised this immediately, without the question needing any explanation. Research has confirmed it for years, but in practice most MSP owners only notice it when someone points at it literally. The fix costs nothing: as chair of a meeting, give the first speaker credit. “Marina said something important just now, I want to come back to that.” One sentence. Every meeting.
“I say something, nobody listens, until somebody else repeats it”
What sits underneath is subtler. In most MSP management teams there is a dominant speaker, usually the owner or the CTO, and the meeting is implicitly set up to confirm that person. If you do not actively break that pattern, you will never hear what your junior network architect or your operations lead really thinks. And that is not only a diversity problem: that is a decision-making problem. You take decisions on the basis of half the information present in the room. A simple test: let someone else chair the meeting once and count who gets to speak.
2. The title discrepancy
A woman who over 22 years at the same company grew from sales rep to commercial director, and was interim managing director in between, is usually announced in external communication as “commercial manager”. One of those present put it bluntly: a man in my place would have been Sales Director at least. Maybe CEO. Female MSP leaders structurally play themselves down, and the organisation around them cheerfully joins in. Take a look at your own LinkedIn, your own website, your own quotes: which title sits with whom? And does it match the responsibility?
This is not a cosmetic point. Titles help decide who gets asked to the table by clients, who may be put forward as key personnel in tenders, and who is taken along to the next strategy conversation as a matter of course. If your commercial director is called “manager”, at a prospect she is routinely passed on to someone who appears to sit higher up the tree. That is lost revenue, and internally it reinforces the picture that she is “not ready yet” for the next level. Fix your title structure in one afternoon and you will have more effect than three quarters of diversity policy.
3. The client question
An MSP owner said it at the table: “Our clients ask for women.” Not for quality, for women. Sixteen years ago her company already started with female support staff on first and second line, because clients on the phone experienced more patience and more calm. Fifteen years later that is a USP. If your first-line support is 100 per cent male and your clients occasionally complain about tone or patience, that is not a staffing problem. That is a positioning choice you forgot to make.
“Our clients ask for women, they do not ask for men”
Why AI will accelerate this (and not solve it)
The hardcore code writer will have less work in five years. That means judgement, client communication, collaboration skills and translating complex technology into understandable choices become more important. Precisely the competencies research has said for years that women as a rule score slightly higher on. That does not solve your pipeline problem by itself, but it does raise the cost of doing nothing. MSPs that already have a diverse leadership team will have a demonstrable advantage in three years in client retention and keeping talent. That is not ideology, that is running a business.
The conversation about female leadership in IT does not have to be big, complicated or political. It starts with three small things: give credit where credit belongs, look critically at the titles in your company, and ask instead of assume. Anyone who dares to do that will not need a quota in five years. Anyone who does not will keep complaining about intake while the outflow simply carries on. Walk through one management meeting this week with these glasses on, and within an hour you will know where your pipeline leaks.