Winners of the 2026 WID Awards

Darryl Carr is an Enterprise Architect who launched Women in Architecture (WIA) Australia in May 2023 to close the gender gap in business, enterprise and technology architecture, where fewer than 15% of architects are women. He built the community so that women lead it as co-chairs, event organisers and advocates, while he focuses on creating opportunities for others. WIA Australia has grown into a national, volunteer-powered network that lifts women’s visibility through events, spotlight stories, publications and speaking opportunities. Darryl also encourages men in the profession to take an active and humble role in driving change, and he is now working towards a mentoring program and closer links with schools and universities.

Danni McCartney leads Honey Insurance’s risk, compliance and quality assurance function, a team of five that kept the business moving through a major underwriter transition. While running business as usual, the team rewrote more than 80% of Honey’s policies, reviewed over 230 operating procedures and redesigned its compliance model to work across two underwriters. Rather than adding headcount, Danni’s team used AI to build their own quality assurance software, freeing time to coach frontline staff on the finer points of each customer interaction. Danni has also positioned Risk and Compliance as a trusted partner across the business, upskilling her team in ISO 27001 and updating governance policies so AI is adopted safely.

Sarah Neill is the founder and CEO of Mys Tyler, a Sydney-based fashion technology company helping women find clothes that fit by showing clothing on bodies like theirs. Its proprietary FIT Algorithm matches shoppers with creators of a similar height, size and shape, drawing on a community of creators aged 16 to 80+ across sizes AU4 to AU32. Mys Tyler has grown to more than 665,000 app downloads, and its FitCheck software now brings body-relevant creator content onto retailers’ own product pages to help reduce costly returns. Sarah’s work puts representation at the heart of online shopping, and Mys Tyler has been named a Fast Company World Changing Ideas finalist.

Ruth Bonser is an Infrastructure Services Manager at Westpac, leading the governance and operations disciplines that keep the bank’s mainframe platform safe and dependable at scale. She leads the governance behind the bank’s mainframe technology refresh program, which keeps software current across a tightly integrated stack and has been delivered with no customer-impacting disruption. Ruth puts her people first, protecting scarce specialist skills, encouraging practical and safe use of AI, and helping turn good ideas like change automation into capability other teams can reuse. Facing a global shortage of mainframe talent, she has driven initiatives to attract and develop the next generation, including co-founding the Sydney chapter of New to Z.

Becca Hurd is a Security Engineering Manager at Canva, where she founded and leads the Security Outreach team, a mix of security engineers, educators and program managers focused on helping people choose the secure thing at scale. She designed and ran Canva’s first crisis simulation for executives, grounding the scenario in real threat intelligence and bringing together leaders from engineering, legal, communications, people and finance. The exercise led to new crisis communications, new response playbooks and new product capabilities, strengthening how Canva would respond on its most challenging day. Becca also built infrastructure that lets non-coders securely host AI-built prototypes, now used by more than 850 Canvanauts, and a diagnostic survey that measures security culture directly.

Emily Cornock is Executive Manager, Core Data Platforms and Cloud FinOps at Suncorp, leading the data, AI and analytics platforms that help the insurer make smarter decisions for its customers. She championed and led RoDAM, a three-year program that replaced 13 different data movement technologies across more than 200 source systems with one modern, governed platform. The result is trusted, timely data for underwriting, claims and customer service, including during major weather events when customers need Suncorp most. Emily also leads Suncorp’s Cloud FinOps Centre of Excellence, balancing AI innovation with strong commercial discipline.

Jude Digital’s all-women Experience team, led by co-founder Millie Clery, rebuilt dss.gov.au, the Department of Social Services website and front door to Australia’s social services system. Their work was grounded in research with more than 440 people, including people who use assistive technology, and usability testing with people living with disability. The new site is written to a Grade 7 to 9 reading level, supports Auslan, Easy Read and multilingual formats, includes a quick-exit safety feature and meets WCAG 2.2 AA standards. An independent assessment by people with disability rated it 5 out of 5, and its modular design means the department can keep it current as responsibilities change.

Hannah Latham is Director, Digital Transformation and Deputy Chief Information and Digital Officer at Macquarie University. She leads Student360, the largest and most complex technology program in the university’s history, connecting the whole student journey from first enquiry to graduation and beyond on a single Salesforce platform. Bringing together more than 300 staff across four faculties, central teams and partners, she standardised very different ways of working and significantly lifted student satisfaction in the program’s first phase. When the higher education market shifted mid-program, Hannah reset the business case and measures of success, and she has since sponsored a purpose-built AI assistant to support delivery.

Sol is an Australian-owned digital consultancy that has made diversity and inclusion part of how it hires, leads and delivers for government and private clients. In the past year it grew the share of women in its team from 18% to 38%, with women now holding a third of leadership roles, and flexible and remote work has helped it build a team from many cultural backgrounds and life stages. Sol’s paid internship program brings young people from non-traditional backgrounds into real client work with mentoring and sponsored security clearances, and both interns it has hosted have moved into ongoing roles. The team also hosts students through the Women in ICT program and has set up a cross-disciplinary AI group so everyone can share in building AI capability.

Miranda Ratajski is Chief Information Officer, Group Business Units at Westpac, leading technology strategy and delivery for HR, Finance, Risk, Operations, Property, Procurement and Customer Solutions. She sponsored an AI-enabled platform that is modernising how the bank’s financial crime specialists investigate cases and make risk-based decisions. Miranda also leads Westpac’s Technology DEI work and launched Rising Women, EmPOWER UP and MobTech, opening technology pathways for emerging women leaders, career returners and First Nations people. MobTech has welcomed 39 cadets and won both a SEEK Award and a WiBF Award, and Miranda continues to champion the responsible use of AI across her teams.

AI JAR is a female-founded Australian start-up using AI to help businesses take their products to the world. Its platform brings together market intelligence, localisation, regulatory awareness and commercial planning, giving smaller exporters the kind of insight once reserved for multinationals with teams of consultants. AI JAR has formed a strategic partnership with the Export Council of Australia, contributing to national conversations on export capability and the practical use of AI in trade. Its founders believe access to AI should not depend on a business’s size, location or resources, and they built AI JAR to open up global markets to more businesses.

Jodi Theisen is the Founding Director and CEO of Digital Nomads HQ, a Sunshine Coast agency she started from her home office in 2018 and has grown to serve 280 clients nationally. This year she architected Amalfi, an AI-native operating system that replaced more than ten separate tools with a single intelligence layer, built by her team in just three months. Amalfi automates repetitive work across campaigns, content and leads, so her team can spend more time on the client relationships that matter most. Jodi has also launched new services in AI search and generative engine optimisation, keeping her regional agency winning against much larger metropolitan firms.

Kim Dyball is a proud Kalkadoon woman and Executive Manager of CSIRO’s Young Indigenous Women’s STEM Academy. Under her leadership, more than 650 young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have accessed culturally safe mentoring, scholarships, internships and leadership development, with a 94.8% retention rate from Year 8 to Year 12. Kim set up a Steering Committee co-chaired by Academy alumni, alongside leading Indigenous women in STEM and an Elder in Residence, so young women help shape the Academy’s future. A Churchill Fellow with more than 30 years in Indigenous education and employment, she is also building participants’ exposure to AI and emerging technology through industry partnerships.

Lakshmi Muthaiah leads a team of business analysts in Datacom’s digital engineering practice. In 2025 she led the development of the Business Analysis Accelerator, an AI-powered, agent-based platform built on Microsoft Azure that automates documentation, strengthens traceability and streamlines analysis across the software delivery lifecycle. What started as an internal tool is now a product in use with customers across New Zealand’s energy, local government and banking sectors, and it won Innovation of the Year at the 2025 IIBA Awards. Lakshmi reframed AI as a way to amplify analysts rather than replace them, and she now guides others in her field through that shift.

Ana Whale is Manager, Digital Inflight Experience at Qantas, leading a squad of seven across the airline’s inflight entertainment and connectivity products. This year she led a full rebuild of the Qantas Entertainment App, moving from a white-labelled, third-party build to an industry-first API-based model that gives Qantas ownership of the experience and has lifted inflight engagement year on year. At the same time, she led the new interactive inflight entertainment interface for Project Sunrise, Qantas’s ultra long haul A350-1000 program, including integrations that control seats, lighting and window shades in First. Running two very different delivery models in parallel with a small team and several international partners, Ana showed what one focused product team can achieve.

The ieMR Medication and Research Support Team, part of Queensland Health’s Digital Health Solutions, looks after the medication management, anaesthetic and research solutions in the statewide integrated electronic Medical Record. The nine-person team, most of whom are women, supports more than 79,000 users across 89 facilities, from major hospitals to rural and custodial sites. Acting as a knowledge broker between clinicians, technical teams and vendors, they keep digital medication workflows safe and consistent while balancing statewide standards with local needs. Recent work, including integrating Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme data, is helping clinicians access updated medicines information sooner.

Ashley Lamont is a software engineer at Atlassian, where she leads features in the editor used by millions of people every day and helps other engineers adopt AI as a Developer AI champion. She led the Sydney hub of UNIHACK 2026, Australia and New Zealand’s largest student hackathon, and kept it running in full when its venue and key partner arrangements fell through two days before opening. Ashley also designed and launched a peer-mentoring program at Atlassian connecting nearly 100 graduates and interns, and serves on the Sydney leadership team of the Girls’ Programming Network. Now Vice President of UNIHACK for 2027, she is determined to be the visible role model she never had.

Claire Kent is a Staff Software Engineer at Canva and its first female frontend staff engineer, looking after the document model behind every Canva design. She led the Large Documents project, inventing a new approach that lets unused parts of very large designs switch to a lighter state, which greatly reduced crashes on Canva’s biggest designs without disrupting the 500+ engineers who build on the editor. Her patterns now underpin Canva’s wider editor performance work and are helping make new AI-driven document features possible. Claire has led launches including Canva Docs and Canva Sheets, and she is a visible mentor for the next generation of women engineers.

Dr Farwa Abbas is a postdoctoral researcher at SAHMRI and Adelaide University, working where AI, computational modelling and clinical neuroscience meet. As technical lead for a brain stimulation research program, she built custom optimisation algorithms that fit brain simulation models to real patient data, helping predict how individuals will respond to treatments for memory and cognitive decline. She set the reproducibility and validation standards her wider team now works to, and her tools have become core infrastructure for the group. Farwa also researches how to make AI more trustworthy in healthcare, and she mentors students and junior researchers in these methods.