Sydney, NSW, Tuesday 16 September 2025: Challenges such as workplace culture and limited female representation are leading to women dropping out of highly technical roles at almost double the rate of men mid-career, a report from the Tech Council of Australia (TCA) has found.
The report, Women in Highly Technical Occupations: The Leaky Pipeline, developed in partnership with CBA, also identifies low confidence as a major impediment to young women electing engineering and technology subjects at high school and as they enter university, despite their performance in highly technical subjects being on par with young men.
TCA Head of Research Ilana Feain said women make up only 20 percent of Australia’s highly technical workforce, dropping to just 16 percent of the workforce over the age of 40.
“The number of women working in roles requiring specialist technical knowledge and skills, like software engineers, AI researchers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians, has grown only 2 percent over the past five years – that’s despite the top three fastest growing global skills and 8 of the top 10 fastest growing global jobs being highly technical,” Dr Feain said.
“This analysis makes clear that women are at most risk of dropping out of these much-needed professions, or in many cases diverting from these career paths completely, in early high school, late high school, and then again mid-career.
“Australia’s ability to realise the full potential of innovative technology, including AI, depends on having a highly skilled workforce. Targeted interventions at these three drop-out points could triple the number of women coming through the pipeline of highly technical occupations in Australia.”
While skilled migrants make up over 55 percent of Australia’s highly technical workforce, women only make up 24 percent of that total cohort. Participation by domestic Australian women is lower again, at just 14 percent.
TCA Diversity in Tech Lead Adair Robins said despite starting with similar interest and performance levels in early childhood, boys retain both an interest in technical studies and confidence in their own abilities at higher rates than girls throughout their schooling, with boys two times more likely to select technical subjects at high school and three times more likely to preference or enrol in technical studies at university.
“Counter to the lower rates of uni enrolments – only 20 percent of engineering and technology students are women, those who do push ahead actually graduate from technical degrees at a higher rate than men and have similar conversion rates as men to highly technical roles,” Ms Robins said.
“For those women who do enter the tech workforce, systemic barriers remain. Workplace harassment, the scarcity of senior female role models, the low number of women CEOs in technical industries, and the challenges of returning to full-time work after having children all contribute to women leaving mid-career at almost twice the rate of men.”
CommBank GM Engineering and CIO for Technology Brendan Hopper said the under-representation of women in highly technical roles is a critical issue for Australia.
“If we’re serious about building a truly inclusive tech ecosystem, we must confront these realities head-on by addressing the underlying reasons why women, and young girls, are opting out of tech at different stages of their life and careers,” Mr Hopper said.
The report analysed a range of publicly available government datasets to map women’s participation in highly technical study and roles throughout the education and career pipeline.
Read the full report here, or view the executive deck version, here.
