Highlights from our ‘Women in tech in the public sector’ event

Our recent event, ‘Women in tech in the public sector’, brought together senior leaders from policing, defence, the NHS, local government and the civil service for a day of open and engaging conversation about:

• How women got into tech
• The challenges they faced along the way
• Where the real opportunities are right now
• The role of male allies
• How to build and sustain networks
• How to protect your energy and focus while still giving back

In this blog we’ve pulled together some of the most interesting thoughts, quotes and insights from the day.

Read on to find out more.

Welcome address: Jo Watts, COO, Virgin Media O2 Business

Jo Watts opened the day by acknowledging that technology is reshaping how public services are delivered, but diversity in the sector still has a long way to go

Three ways to challenge yourself today

1. Be curious. If a question crosses your mind, ask it. Someone else in the room almost certainly wants to ask the same thing and won’t

2. Share your story. Everyone here has experiences worth hearing. The more openly we share, the more we all learn

3. Make connections. Introduce yourself to people you do not know. The relationships you build today are part of what makes events like this worth attending

The biggest challenges she faced

• Moving from technical expert to manager, from one of many women in a small team to one of very few women in a large, predominantly male IT department
• Imposter syndrome. She applied for a senior role she assumed would go to someone else and was the only candidate. The people around her had seen her capability long before she did
• Doing too much at once. Running a complex job share across five councils while serving as Socitm President during Covid was too much. She said so directly

In 2016 a leadership course changed her career. It gave her a framework for understanding her own reactions, a clearer sense of her network and the confidence to act on things she had previously parked.

She now helps run that same course through Socitm Inspire.

Her advice

• Believe in yourself earlier. The 18-year-old version of you has no idea what you are capable of
• Look at the structure charts. Ask yourself honestly who should be in those senior roles. If the answer is you, say so
• It is not as hard as you think. Most people in senior roles are working it out as they go

Key themes

• Imposter syndrome. Every panellist named it. Jill said it took until the final five years of her career to come to terms with it. Coaching helped. The goal is not to eliminate it but to act anyway
• The move from technical expert to manager. You have to let go of what made you successful and trust the people around you
• Ask for sponsorship, not just mentoring. A mentor advises. A sponsor actively opens doors
• Be bilingual. Himani reframed a stalled business case from ‘technical debt’ to ‘financial debt’ and the CFO immediately acted

Where the opportunities are

• AI will absorb more technical tasks. Managing change and making technology land well inside organisations grows in value
• The NHS, police, and local government need people who can bring organisations together. That is a relationship skill

What organisations get wrong

• Resilience programmes put the problem on the individual. When the structural causes of poor wellbeing sit inside the organisation, asking individuals to become more resilient moves responsibility to the wrong place
• Interventions are rarely evaluated. Without measurement, wellbeing programmes become symbolic. Staff see through it quickly and stop using it
• One-size-fits-all policies hide disparities. A study on maternity policies in policing found women of colour experienced them far more negatively than white women, yet the policy was identical. Disaggregate your data
• People mask rather than speak up. Psychological safety is not a soft issue. Its absence has serious consequences

From the national police wellbeing survey:

• Only 16% felt their force was well managed
• 16% had experienced bullying or harassment
• Nearly half told nobody because they didn’t expect anything to be done

What actually works

• Start with the outcome, not the activity. Decide what you want to change, design activities that point toward it and measure whether they work
• Co-produce policies with the people they affect. Top-down design misses critical context
• Make your values real. Embed them into management conversations, appraisals and promotion decisions
• Invest in prevention, not just response. Wellbeing is a business issue, not an add-on

The numbers that should concern us

Martin McFadyen put a series of data points on the table that the panel returned to throughout the discussion.

• 75% of people working in the tech sector are male. In more technical and engineering roles, that percentage is higher
• Women are three times more likely to be spoken over in a meeting than men
• Board representation in tech is now around 40% female, up from 11% fifteen years ago. Progress is possible, but it has taken sustained effort
• 89% of leadership books are written by men. The reference points that people learn from are still predominantly male
• 85% of university professors are male, despite women making up the majority of the education workforce below that level

His point was direct: if you are silent when you see these patterns in your organisation, you are implicitly endorsing them.

Behaviours we still tolerate

• Women being spoken over. Christopher actively brings quieter voices into conversations. In person, this requires deliberate effort
• Ideas credited to the wrong person. A woman raises an idea, it is ignored, a man repeats it and receives the credit. Staying silent when it happens makes you part of the problem
• Fear of saying the wrong thing leading to nothing being said. People see something wrong and bring it to a leader in private rather than speaking up in the moment

Calling people in, not just calling them out

Publicly naming the behaviour has a role, but the follow-up private conversation is where actual change happens. The harder conversation asks why and tries to understand where the behaviour came from.

Some actions for every man to take

• Stop being a silent witness. Say something when something doesn’t feel right
• Create space in meetings. Notice who is not speaking. Bring them in
• Mentor and sponsor actively. Sponsorship is about using your power, not just your time
• Challenge stereotypes at home as well as at work

Katie Gardiner described the Home Office's cross-sector mentoring work connecting women across public and private sector.

One colleague attended an event, found the courage to apply for a technical role she had been putting off, got the job and started the following week. Small interventions at the right moment can change the direction of a career.

Cassandra Gardiner addressed the structural problem: the workforce was designed when women were not expected to be in it. Career breaks still largely reset women to zero.

She argued for portfolio-based careers, job-shares at senior levels and returnship programmes. She also flagged that the UK has stopped collecting data on women in digital leadership, making progress harder to measure.

Building and sustaining women's networks

Donna Geoghegan founded Network Rail's women's forum with no budget and no permission asked. It grew into a quarterly women in tech programme running for three years in partnership with Microsoft. Her advice: you do not need permission to do the right thing.

Claire Finn's equivalent initiative at Thames Valley Police won the NPCC Diversity and Inclusion Award. Her principle: one small improvement at a time.

Dr Rahim and Victoria Betton co-founded the Health Equity Charter after a prominent NHS software supplier made publicly racist and misogynist comments about Diane Abbott MP.

They turned outrage into a set of 10 principles covering ethical procurement, algorithm bias, and workforce representation. Two years on, it’s a live and growing movement.

Resilience and staying energised

• Know what refills you and protect it deliberately
• Rest is resistance. You cannot sustain advocacy from an empty position
• Find your people. You do not have to do this alone
• It is a marathon, not a sprint. Create space to talk about how people are actually doing, not just the task at hand

Lucile opened by asking the room to raise their hands if the work they had been thinking about during the day was actually someone else's work that had become their problem

Most hands stayed up.

The data

• Women in the public sector spend on average 200 hours per year on non- promotable tasks — the equivalent of five working weeks
• Women are asked to mentor others at a rate 30% higher than men and say yes more often too
• Women in senior public sector roles report 23% higher rates of emotional exhaustion than men

Giving by default vs giving by design

Giving by default means saying yes out of habit or conditioning. Giving by design means choosing where your generosity goes so it serves your purpose, not just the immediate comfort of those around you.

Strategic generosity is not selfishness. It is protecting your focus so that what you give is your best, not whatever is left over.

The harder point: when women absorb invisible work and keep broken systems running, they provide cover for those systems to continue.

Every time you succeed at doing more with less, you make the case that nothing needs to change.

Three ways to put it into practice

1. Shape culture by creating opportunities for others to step forward, rather than solving everything yourself
2. Sponsor, don't just mentor. The sector is mentor-rich but sponsor-poor. Write down one woman's name. Put her forward for an opportunity she doesn't yet have access to
3. Protect your energy. Block time for strategic thinking. When you stop being immediately available, the people around you develop their own capability. Before saying yes, ask: does this align with where I want to create impact and could someone else do it equally well?

One action this week: before doing anything, reflect. Write down where you are now and where you want to go. Clarity is what makes next steps meaningful rather than just more busy work.

Martin closed by noting that there is a real lack of women in the rooms where key decisions are being made — and that absence costs organisations a perspective they’re not getting.

There are already significant numbers of women doing exactly that work. The task is to unlock more of it, faster. Everyone in the room has a role in whether that happens.

A parting request

Take one thing from today. One action. One commitment. Whether that is sponsoring someone, challenging someone or seeking out a perspective different from your own.

Listen out for the voices that tend to go quiet in rooms. Some of the best thinking in any organisation sits in silence, waiting to be heard.

Innovation in the public sector

Join us to see how innovation is transforming public services across the UK, from 5G network slicing to drone technologies, SIM-enabled body-worn video and more.

Where: Virgin Media O2, Sheldon Square, Paddington

When: 3 June at 9.30am