Women in IT still face a representation gap in 2026

At a glance

What this is: This guide argues that women still face a representation and culture gap in IT, even as the field offers strong pay, growth, and flexible career paths.

Why it matters: It matters to IAM practitioners because inclusion affects the available security talent pool, team diversity, and how identity and access programmes are staffed, operated, and improved.

By the numbers:

• According to Gartner, only 31% of IT employees are women.
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says computer and information technology jobs are expected to grow by 13 percent from 2020 to 2030, adding 667,600 new jobs.

👉 Read StrongDM's guide to women thriving in IT careers

Context

Women in IT remain underrepresented relative to the overall workforce, even though the field continues to expand and offers strong compensation and flexibility. In practice, this is a talent and culture problem, not a skills problem alone.

For identity and access teams, workforce diversity is not a side issue. It shapes who gets hired into security, who stays, and how well organisations design programmes that work for real people rather than idealised users.

Key questions

Q: How can organisations improve representation of women in IT teams?

A: Organisations improve representation by fixing both entry and retention. That means broadening hiring channels, writing inclusive job descriptions, making promotion criteria transparent, and creating a culture where people can contribute without harassment or exclusion. Representation improves when women can enter the field, grow in it, and see a credible path to senior work.

Q: Why does workplace culture matter so much in technical careers?

A: Workplace culture shapes whether people stay long enough to build depth. In technical roles, harassment, bro culture, and poor support drive attrition, reduce collaboration, and make career progression uneven. A healthy culture is not a morale perk. It is part of how organisations retain the people they depend on for delivery and resilience.

Q: What is the best way to bring more women into cybersecurity?

A: The most effective approach is to treat cybersecurity as a broad career family rather than a single narrow path. Organisations should recruit from support, analysis, operations, and adjacent technical roles, then provide mentoring, training, and promotion paths. That widens the talent pool and reduces dependence on one traditional background.

Q: How should leaders measure whether inclusion efforts are working?

A: Leaders should measure hiring mix, retention, promotion rates, access to training, and participation in high-visibility work. If representation improves only at entry level but not in advancement, the programme is not working. The real signal is whether women are staying, progressing, and taking on technical leadership roles.

Technical breakdown

Why women’s representation in IT still lags

The article frames a persistent mismatch between broad workforce participation and the smaller share of women in technology roles. That gap matters because hiring pipelines, promotion paths, and workplace culture all influence who enters and remains in technical disciplines. When teams are built from a narrow slice of the workforce, they tend to replicate the same assumptions about communication style, career progression, and what technical competence looks like. The result is not just fairness risk. It is a practical constraint on talent acquisition and team resilience.

Practical implication: review hiring, promotion, and retention signals together, not as separate HR issues.

How culture affects retention in technical teams

The guide points to bro culture, harassment, discrimination, and lack of support as recurring barriers. In identity terms, that is a governance issue because organisations cannot rely on recruitment alone if the environment drives people out. Culture determines whether people feel safe to contribute, ask questions, and grow into more senior work. It also affects whether teams hear weak signals early, such as role friction or unequal access to opportunities. Security programmes inherit the culture of the organisation they sit inside.

Practical implication: treat retention and psychological safety as programme inputs, not soft extras.

Why flexible career paths widen the tech talent pool

The post highlights remote work, varied career paths, and transferable skills as reasons women can enter and progress in IT. That matters because modern technology organisations rarely need a single entry profile. Operations, support, analysis, architecture, and security all reward different strengths. The broader the recognised pathway into the field, the easier it is to reduce unnecessary exclusion and make room for non-traditional entrants. This is especially relevant in cybersecurity, where demand outpaces supply.

Practical implication: create multiple entry routes into security and IAM work instead of relying on one career template.

Breaches seen in the wild

• ASP.NET machine keys RCE attack — 3,000+ exposed ASP.NET machine keys enabled remote code execution.
• DeepSeek breach — DeepSeek breach exposed 1M+ log lines and sensitive secret keys.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Representation gaps in IT are a workforce governance problem, not just a diversity metric. The article shows that women remain materially underrepresented even while demand for technical talent keeps rising. That combination tells us the market is not short of interest, but short of inclusive structures that let talent persist. For IAM and security leaders, the conclusion is simple: workforce composition is part of operational risk management.

Culture determines whether identity and security teams can retain the people they recruit. The article’s discussion of harassment, bro culture, and weak support maps directly to retention failure. If people cannot work in psychologically safe conditions, technical depth will not accumulate. Practitioners should read this as a warning that talent loss is often a programme design problem, not an individual performance problem.

Broadening the entry path into IT increases the resilience of security and identity programmes. The guide’s emphasis on varied roles, remote work, and continuous learning reflects how modern technical organisations actually function. Teams that recognise multiple career trajectories can widen the supply of analysts, architects, and security operators. Practitioners should build hiring and development paths that capture that broader pool.

Inclusive teams improve the quality of identity and access decisions. The article links diversity to innovation, customer empathy, and problem-solving. In IAM and security work, that translates into better user experience, better edge-case handling, and fewer blind spots in policy design. The implication is not symbolic inclusion. It is better governance outcomes from better team composition.

From our research:

• 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which shows how weak identity oversight remains in practice.
• That visibility gap is a reminder to pair inclusion work with stronger access governance, as explained in 52 NHI Breaches Analysis.

What this signals

The security workforce shortage will keep forcing organisations to widen the funnel, but widening the funnel only works when the environment retains talent. Gender representation, career mobility, and psychological safety are now operational concerns for teams that need durable IAM and security capability.

Talent density: the organisation that treats support roles, analyst roles, and engineering roles as connected pathways will outcompete the one that only hires from a single pipeline. That is how resilience is built in practice, especially in security functions that need breadth as much as depth.

For practitioners

• Audit hiring and promotion pathways for hidden exclusion Review job descriptions, interview loops, promotion criteria, and referral patterns for signals that narrow the candidate pool or advantage one profile repeatedly.
• Strengthen workplace reporting and response mechanisms Make harassment and discrimination reporting usable, confidential, and fast to act on so technical staff do not have to choose between safety and career progression.
• Create multiple entry routes into security work Offer internships, rotational roles, apprenticeships, and adjacent-role transitions so support, analysis, and operations staff can move into IAM and security careers.
• Link retention to programme health metrics Track attrition, promotion velocity, and access to stretch work by team segment so leaders can see where the environment is limiting technical growth.

Key takeaways

• Women remain underrepresented in IT despite sustained demand for talent and strong wage growth.
• Culture, harassment, and weak support are retention risks that directly affect technical team resilience.
• Organisations that widen entry paths and improve advancement visibility will build stronger and more durable security teams.

Key terms

• Workforce representation: The share of a workforce made up by a given group, such as women in IT. In identity and security programmes, representation matters because it influences hiring pipelines, retention, team composition, and whether technical decisions reflect a broad range of user and operator experiences.
• Bro culture: A workplace environment that rewards exclusion, aggression, or in-group behaviour over professional respect. In technical teams, it can suppress participation, increase attrition, and make it harder for underrepresented staff to progress into senior roles or speak up about risks.
• Talent pipeline: The path people take from education or adjacent roles into a technical career. Strong pipelines are not just recruitment channels. They include training, mentoring, progression, and retention, which together determine whether organisations can fill and keep critical identity and security roles.
• Retention risk: A condition that increases the likelihood that skilled staff will leave or disengage. In IT and security, retention risk can come from culture, promotion bottlenecks, or lack of support, and it directly affects programme continuity, capability depth, and organisational resilience.

Deepen your knowledge

Women in IT, career pathways, and inclusive technical team design are practical themes covered in the NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building stronger security teams and want a broader view of identity governance, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by StrongDM: How to Thrive as a Woman in IT: A Comprehensive Guide in 2026. Read the original.