Leadership is not about positions of authority or administration. It is more about enabling yourself and others to collaborate to achieve a common objective that materializes a vision.

Despite being a leader in the workplace, the tech sector is lagging in terms of gender equality, with women still being underrepresented and paid less than their male colleagues. With millions of women abandoning the workforce since the start of 2020 due to layoffs or taking on additional obligations like housekeeping and caregiving, the Covid-19 pandemic has further slowed women's advancement. Many women thought about downsizing their jobs or quitting the workforce as the status of women in tech become more ambiguous.

How can we, as women in technology, grow the leadership capacities required to create a diverse and inclusive tech sector in the future?

Focusing on these five areas of leadership can help women in IT advance their careers and close the gender gap in the industry:

1. Expert brand development: This focuses on professional branding and how our knowledge, abilities, and experiences are viewed by our industry peers and colleagues. As women in technology, there are opportunities for growing our professional branding like analyzing your professional image to assess the health of your brand, identifying areas for growth by contrasting the audit results with your perception of yourself and drafting a plan of action to put those changes into practice.

2. Thinking about career advancement: This topic focuses on professional advancement and how women in IT may envisage, aspire for, and succeed in new roles. Things like overcoming self-doubt to request the positions and duties you want, using your strengths without letting them limit you, putting your interests first, getting reviews of performance down, and overcoming "imposter syndrome" after promotions are some of the areas that need focus.

3. Increasing your influence's sphere: This discusses spheres of influence and how to increase the impact of your work. Will your excellent job be acknowledged if no one notices it? Maybe not, is the answer. You may make sure that your upcoming achievement will be noticed by utilizing subtle and clever communication techniques. To broaden our domains of influence we need to know how and why to communicate with a certain audience, recognize how competence and assurance interact, networking — always networking, why everyone, regardless of career level, needs a mentor, and enhance your leadership to advance your work

4. Assisting the next wave of leaders: This part series discusses the future and how we might support the upcoming generation of female technologists. Knowing the significance of participating in the hiring process, how to give your peers and reports strong "feedforward", returning the favor by volunteering, assisting others via mentoring, and studying effective leadership techniques helps you to enhance your leadership skills

5. Combining life and work: The last focuses on work-life integration, which is a better term for what was once known as "work-life balance." Using mindfulness to help you establish and achieve goals, how to quit glorifying workaholism, prioritizing your health, how interpersonal networks might encourage professional success and the significance of recalling why we initially entered this industry will contribute towards having a happy work & life to maximum

Although diverse leadership has many proven advantages, the tech industry has not yet fully embraced it. Women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of the corporate pipeline, and the gender gap still exists. Companies must reaffirm their commitment to improving gender equality if they want to effect long-term change. "We all rise by lifting others," says Wyatt. All industry stakeholders, from businesses and their staff to the clients they service, would benefit from committed action.