For founders looking to take control of their destiny, it’s no different. Female founders typically need twice the experience of a male counterpart to secure funding, while just 28% of the 50,000 UK tech grant enquiries in 2024 came from women.

Given this grim landscape it’s no surprise that less than a quarter of data and AI professionals in the UK are women. And of course, the more senior you become, the fewer women you see alongside you.

But why? How do we change this and ensure women achieve the leadership positions they deserve?

As has been said over and over: mentorship.

But why are we still saying it? Millions of women are still waiting for their opportunity in the tech space. Is mentoring enough? Clearly not. 

A mentor’s limitations

Mentorship is, at its heart, about guiding and supporting an individual. In business, your mentor will not only be your confidant but someone who encourages reflection and personal responsibility, which are powerful drivers for self-improvement. A mentor is like a free coach.

What they can’t do is compensate for systemic bias. While mentors can be invaluable components of our success, they empower us to do our utmost from our side. They can’t guarantee that opportunities are given even if our work warrants reward.

A more powerful version of this model is required to break the cycle. Without someone capable of actively championing their advancement – going beyond advice and actively pushing doors open – women and other underrepresented groups are far more likely to remain locked in mid-level roles, with great work going unsung.

Enter: sponsorship

While a ‘sponsor’ can offer advice and support, in contrast to mentors they use their position and influence to specifically advocate for the progression of those who deserve it.

They’re the ones in the room ensuring that women are always in the frame for leadership roles – always considered and never a token name on the list.

I’ve seen it too often in the tech sector. Women are denied a serious place in leadership pipelines in favour of yet more personal development.

There’s a biased assumption that women need development rather than advancement. This simply reinforces the stereotype that they require greater support and aren’t as capable as their male counterparts of facing and addressing a challenge head-on.

Rather than focusing on mentorship programmes that might assume some sort of development need from the outset, we should start moving towards actively creating genuine opportunities for women – who already have the skills and qualities they need. 

This is where the sponsor is most effective. Challenging assumptions and the question too often repeated: “is she ready?”. They become the voice in the room that answers with an assertive “yes”.

It’s not about knowing that someone can do the job, but about actively advocating for this exact person as the best for the role.

Built-in bias

Of course, the processes that lead to hires for leadership positions don’t often protect themselves against bias. In most tech organisations, policies like 50/50 shortlisting, blind CVs, and language reviews/ bias eradicators of job specs other structured attempts to enable biased outcomes simply don’t exist.

Integrating sponsorship into company policy can ensure that such programmes are baked into promotion cycles. As part of a wider structure, official recognition and involvement of a sponsor in the promotion cycle helps to eliminate the informal networks that so often marginalise or exclude women.

Sponsorship gives the wider workforce genuine agency in decisions, as well as mandating a wider responsibility to ensure that women can see tangible opportunities for career advancement.

At a time when we can see the US swinging wildly away from DEI initiatives – with huge corporations from Mastercard to SalesForce actively eliminating the terminology from their branding – sponsorship will soon become an even more important force for positive change in the corporate world.

Culpability remains as important as ever.

Advocacy, not advice

Carla Harris, in her famous Ted Talk, makes the crucial point that high performance isn’t enough on its own. No matter how capable you are, if there isn’t someone speaking your name in the rooms where decisions are made, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

With that in mind, she recommends selecting your sponsor with real intention. It might even be something as strategic as identifying the decision-makers in your organisation, making a concerted effort to demonstrate your value beyond doubt to shift their perception of you.

The important point is to cultivate those crucial connections to proactively position yourself to succeed. Championing yourself, ironically, thus becomes an important part of the sponsorship process.

It’s these qualities that elevates sponsorship above mentorship – not just allyship, but active advocacy. Without systemic change, mentorship can simply become paying lip service to diversity efforts, while the structures that inflict them remain unchanged.

If we’re too slow the haemorrhaging of female talent in the tech space, the sponsorship approach will prove crucial.

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