By Susan O’Connor, Shift Left Ltd – Leadership Development for Women in Tech
Layoff patterns continue to hit women hardest. The real cost? Lost leadership capability, slower delivery, and cultures that can’t sustain transformation.
Tech Leaders — We Need to Talk About the Hidden Cost of “Rebalancing”
IBM has just announced another round of cuts — thousands of roles, mostly in the US.
Not a shock. Not unusual. Not isolated.
It’s part of a pattern we’ve watched spread across the industry: restructuring, flattening, “rebalancing”, “optimising”, “aligning to future strategy”, “leveraging AI efficiencies”… pick your preferred corporate synonym for letting people go.
The headlines focus on the numbers. But they miss the human truth inside the business:
The real cost isn’t who goes. It’s who’s left — and what they’re left with.
Organisations are cutting people faster than they’re developing leaders to replace them. And inside engineering, product, and tech functions, the cracks aren’t hairline anymore. They’re structural.
If you’re a CTO, VP Engineering, Director of Product or senior HR leader, this raises a question you cannot ignore:
“Who is being cut, and what is that really costing us in leadership, culture, and
Here’s What the Patterns Shows
We don’t yet have gender-specific figures for the most recent round of layoffs — ONS workforce data always lags by 12–24 months.
But here’s what we DO know from the data we have:
1. Every major redundancy wave has disproportionately impacted women.
· In Europe, women made up 41.6% of tech layoffs despite being only a third of the workforce.
· In the US, women accounted for 46% of tech layoffs during October 2022–June 2023.
2. UK workforce data shows women’s representation falls even when the tech sector grows
· Q4 2022 → Q1 2023: women in tech fell by ~17,000.
· Q1 2023 → Q2 2023: women in tech fell by ~3,000.
Meanwhile, the overall UK tech workforce grew by around 85,000 between Q1 and Q2 2023.
3. ONS figures show instability, not progress.
Women in tech fluctuated sharply between Q1 2022 (447,000) and Q3 2022 (532,000), before dropping again.
4. Representation remains fragile.
Women still make up only ~22% of the UK tech workforce — and progress is easily reversed during economic stress.
Given this long-term pattern, and with major tech organisations restructuring again in 2024–2025, it is entirely reasonable, and honest, to assume the same disproportionate impact has continued.
Which means your organisation likely has fewer women in tech than it should… at the exact moment you need their leadership capability the most.
If you’re already thinking about the risk inside your own teams, my Expert Directory listing explains exactly how I help tech leaders strengthen culture, retain women in tech, and protect the leadership capability your organisation relies on
What Leaders Rarely See from the Inside
In a global PayTech organisation where I held a senior leadership role, we went through multiple rounds of redundancy over the years. And here’s what most senior leaders never see or realise until it is too late.
The people who stay, the “survivors”, carry guilt, exhaustion, fear, uncertainty, anger, anxiety, and a deep erosion of trust.
Even when my role was not made redundant in earlier rounds, I and everyone was thinking:
“Is my job secure?”
“Can I trust what is being told to me?”
“Should I be preparing to leave?”
“Is this business in trouble”
And when I was made redundant, the response from other women within the business was immediate:
“I’m looking. I don’t want to stay somewhere that’s removing senior women.”
“If they can make you redundant, no-one is safe”
Within three months, they had left.
Operationally, the gaps were huge: influence, continuity, delivery pace, cross-team relationships, institutional memory — gone.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: women talk. And when one goes, others follow.
The Leadership Capability Organisations Lose When Women Leave
Mid-career women bring leadership capability that is nearly impossible to replace quickly.
When they leave, you lose leaders who can:
• influence across departments
• translate business needs into delivery
• manage conflict and hold psychologically safe teams
• maintain momentum and rebuild trust
• anticipate risks and stakeholder reactions
These are the exact skills you need in AI adoption, transformation and cross-functional delivery.
If you want to retain this level of leadership capability — the influence, the continuity, the cross-functional glue — this is exactly the work I do with tech teams. You can review my Expert Directory listing to see how.
The Opportunity Cost Tech Leaders Can’t Ignore
When someone leaves, especially a mid-career woman, the cost is never just recruitment.
It’s the gap.
And gaps slow down delivery, collaboration, decision-making, quality, innovation and morale.
Your Tech Leads and Engineering Managers suddenly become hiring managers, counsellors, fire-fighters and interim team leads.
Meanwhile, a new hire takes 6–12 months to build the trust, influence and context the woman they replaced already had.
AI Doesn’t Replace Leadership. It Exposes It.
AI can generate code, summarise meetings and flag risks.
But it cannot rebuild morale, repair trust, read the room, support humans through uncertainty or hold culture together.
When layoffs remove women from your pipeline, AI won’t fill the gap. You need humans to do that, and you’ll have fewer of them.
Let’s Talk About Retention — the Real Kind
Maybe it’s too late for you and you have let a lot of your talented future leaders go and are now aware that you need to retain the ones you have left. Here’s how you can start.
Real retention looks like:
• sponsorship, not vague career chats
• leadership development that builds confidence and capability
• managers who can lead humans, not tasks
• psychologically safe teams
• visible pathways into leadership
This isn’t about “fixing women.” It’s about creating an environment in which they can develop, advance and lead effectively.
Leadership development is often the pivot point. It’s the stage where a high-performing woman moves from delivering excellent work to unlocking her full potential and driving meaningful impact across the organisation.
This is where organisations like Shift Left come in.
Our work combines practical leadership development, helping women strengthen their influence, presence, gravitas and impact. Together with coaching from experts that have worked in the industry deeper self-awareness and a clearer understanding of the behaviours within the teams and stakeholders they work with, is built. This insight is essential for effective stakeholder management, which is a critical capability for any mature, forward-thinking organisation.
If you want to find out how this could work for you, check out our listing on the Expert Directly and get in touch
Tech Leaders — The Three Questions You Must Ask Yourself
1️⃣ What is the future leadership consequence of our rebalancing?
2️⃣ Are we protecting the culture that enables innovation — or eroding it?
3️⃣ Who are we sponsoring into the needed leadership spaces these changes create?
Retention Isn’t a DEI Problem. It’s a Leadership Problem.
Mid-career women are not leaving in ones and twos. They are leaving in waves.
When they go, your organisation loses continuity, judgement, cohesion, delivery capability, influence and leadership potential — and gains cost, disruption and slower delivery.
The Lovelace Report makes it clear: women leaving tech is one of the most expensive and preventable losses.
What Forward-Thinking Organisations Are Doing Right Now
Organisations working with Shift Left Ltd are:
• retaining mid-career women
• stabilising delivery during AI and organisational change
• strengthening culture and psychological safety
• accelerating women into leadership
• reducing post-redundancy quiet attrition
• protecting productivity through leadership capability
Leadership — not technology — is your biggest competitive advantage.
If your organisation is restructuring, scaling or losing people, this is the moment to act. My Expert Directory listing outlines how Shift Left Ltd helps tech leaders retain talent, grow future leaders and protect delivery during change
