Driving Change in Tech 2025
The Women in Digital Report
The 2025 Women in Digital Report is now available!
The conversation around gender equity in tech has never been more urgent or more important. The 2025 Women in Digital Report “Driving Change in Tech 2025” dives deep into the lived experiences of people in digital and technology roles across Australia, providing a powerful data-driven overview of where we are, and where we need to go.
This year’s report centres around three pivotal themes:
Path to Progress
Australia’s tech sector is making progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion, but significant barriers remain. The Path to Progress explores aspects of the workplace and culture that drive the retention and progression of women in the industry.
The Missing Middle
For many women in tech, career momentum slows mid-career, not due to a lack of ambition, but because workplace structures fail to support the realities of caregiving and flexible work. This “Missing Middle” is where cultural and structural barriers intensify, leading to stalled progression and attrition.
The Pipeline
As Australia’s tech sector grows, the challenge is no longer just attracting women into the industry, it’s ensuring they are retained, developed, and advanced into leadership roles at all ages and stages.
Bringing together open data, industry commentary, and firsthand accounts from women in the field, the 2025 Women in Digital Annual Report is an essential resource for business leaders, HR professionals, policymakers, and anyone committed to creating a fairer, more equitable digital future.
Note: The data presented in this Discourse was collected from our community in Australia through comprehensive surveys. These surveys included a mix of qualitative and quantitative questions, enabling us to gather both measurable data and detailed feedback, providing a well-rounded understanding of the insights and experiences of the tech industry.
Download the Annual Report
What does the data tell us?
The Women in Digital Report set out to capture the real, current experience of people working in digital across Australia. By generating our own data through direct survey responses, primarily from women in tech, we explored issues such as salary transparency, career progression, flexibility, parental leave, and male allyship.
This year, the data reveals both hard-earned progress and stubborn challenges across three critical areas.
Path to Progress
Workplace flexibility is now widely embedded, a significant win for those juggling work and life. Encouragingly, perceptions of the “boys’ club” culture are on the decline, and confidence in pay equity has increased.
But the work is far from done. Men and women still have vastly different perceptions of support and fairness in the workplace. For example, 81% of men believe male colleagues are supportive of women’s career progression, compared to just 62% of women. Retention issues remain closely tied to persistent cultural barriers.
The Missing Middle
Women’s careers are stalling mid-way, not due to a lack of ambition, but because workplace structures fail to support the realities of caregiving, part-time work, and flexible schedules.
While paid parental leave is becoming more gender-equal and accessible, nearly half of women still believe that having children hinders their career progression. Part-time employees are significantly less likely to feel encouraged to pursue leadership roles.
The Pipeline
The challenge is no longer just getting women into tech, it’s keeping them, supporting them, and promoting them.
There’s strong growth in early-career support, with graduate programs expanding and many young women seeing a clear path to progression. But support fades over time. Only 22% of employees over 55 see a clear path to promotion, and confidence gaps between genders persist at senior levels.
Why does it matter?
A survey by the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) highlights that skills shortages are the biggest barrier to business growth, with half of Australian organisations outsourcing IT roles offshore due to a lack of local talent—especially in AI and cybersecurity.
But what if we focused on building equitable workplaces where everyone, especially women, can thrive? Ensuring that policies and processes reflect the needs of all team members is critical. To meet the goals set by industry bodies, we must expand Australia’s tech talent pool by prioritising the inclusion of underrepresented groups.
The future of job creation in Australia depends on how well we develop and empower local talent—starting today.
Meet our Contributors
2024 Annual Discourse
A lot has changed since we published our 2024 Women in Digital Discourse Shaping the Future of the Digital and Tech Industry. That report sparked critical conversations around workplace equity, culture, and inclusion. It laid the foundation for the data-driven approach we’ve continued and expanded in this year’s report.
If you’re interested in tracking progress or exploring how far we’ve come, you can download last year’s edition below.