This week, the Lovelace Report 2025 was launched by Oliver Wyman, WeAreTechWomen and Karen Blake, and it’s one of the most urgent and impactful pieces of research we’ve seen on women in tech in recent years.
The headline figure alone is staggering: £2 to £3.5 billion. That’s how much the UK tech sector stands to lose every single year because women are leaving their roles – or the industry entirely – in large numbers.
But this isn’t just about economics. The report also tells a more personal, more structural story, one that echoes what we at Women in Tech hear time and again: that women are doing the work, gaining the experience, and building the skills, but the system is not built to reward them for it.
So how did we get here? And more importantly, what needs to happen next?
The assumptions are wrong and costing us dearly
For years, industry narratives have pointed to childcare, flexibility, or “personal life choices” as the reason women leave tech. But the Lovelace Report lays that myth to rest once and for all.
Only 3% of women surveyed cited caring responsibilities as their main reason for leaving.
Instead, the report highlights deeper, more systemic issues:
- Lack of career progression (25%)
- Lack of recognition for contributions (17%)
- Inadequate pay (15%)
- Toxic workplace cultures and poor visibility of role models (8%)
These aren’t anecdotal frustrations. They’re structural failures embedded in how tech careers are built and advanced. In fact, over 70% of respondents said they had pursued additional qualifications or leadership training, yet most still found it “very difficult” to progress into leadership roles.
This disconnect between effort and reward, skill and opportunity, is where the real talent drain happens.
The cost of inaction: a £3.5 billion talent drain
The numbers tell a sobering story. Each year, 40,000 to 60,000 women leave their tech roles. Of those, nearly half leave the industry altogether, and the rest switch employers, often seeking the career progression or recognition they couldn’t find where they were.
- £1.4B–£2.2B is lost each year due to women leaving the tech industry completely.
- £640M–£1.3B is lost from churn, onboarding costs, and drops in productivity when they move roles.
- In total, this amounts to £2B–£3.5B in lost value to the UK economy every year.
And that’s not even counting the indirect costs: the erosion of institutional knowledge, the lack of diverse leadership perspectives, and the long-term impact on innovation and inclusion across the sector.
All of this is happening at the very moment the UK is positioning itself as a global tech and AI leader, and faces a projected shortage of 98,000 to 120,000 professionals. If we want to meet the government’s ambition to scale AI capacity twentyfold by 2030, we cannot afford to keep losing this volume of talent.
The “sticky middle” is where women get stuck
One of the most revealing parts of the report is the sharp drop-off that happens in mid-career.
- Nearly 80% of women surveyed had recently left or were considering leaving their tech roles.
- 40% said they’d been in the same role for three years or more with no promotion in sight.
- Women in tech often wait 3 to 4 years for a promotion, compared to an industry norm of around two.
- For women with 11 to 20 years of experience, that wait stretches even longer, often to five years or more.
This is the so-called “sticky middle”: a place where women with strong experience, proven skills, and advanced training find themselves plateauing. Not because they’ve run out of ambition, but because they’ve hit a structural ceiling. The result? Many either opt out or seek better opportunities elsewhere.
Pay doesn’t match progress
Pay inequality is another recurring theme.
The report found that over 60% of women with 6 to 20 years of experience earn below the benchmark salary for their level. And despite having two decades in the industry, more than 80% of senior women still earn less than £200,000, well under the expected rate for VP and C-suite roles.
Pay is not a “nice to have.” It was ranked as the number one priority by 75% of respondents, rising to 80% among women with 20+ years of experience. Flexibility around childcare, often assumed to be top-of-mind, came much further down the list.
What employers must do now
This isn’t a mystery anymore. We know what women in tech want. We know what’s pushing them out. And we know what works.
The Lovelace Report lays out a clear three-part roadmap:
1. Develop and sponsor mid-level women
- Spot women who’ve been stuck in roles for years.
- Give them meaningful, high-visibility projects.
- Back them with sponsorship, not just mentorship.
- Track who gets promoted, who gets access, and where the barriers are.
“My company ran a leadership programme for women, but we had to do it in our own time, and nothing happened after we completed it. That was worse in a way.”
2. Grow authentic visibility for senior women
- Nominate them for awards. Give them media visibility. Feature them internally.
- Don’t sideline them with ‘soft skills’ tasks, put them at the helm of new ventures.
- Help them co-design their next steps: across functions, borders, and boardrooms.
3. Make career maps transparent and pay match the plan
- Use competency-based frameworks like SFIA to build fair, bias-free progression maps.
- Link promotions to compensation automatically – no more “let’s review it in six months.”
- Post internal roles and open up lateral moves with equal weight and respect.
As the report puts it: this is a competitive edge hiding in plain sight.
Our take: this is a blueprint, not just a diagnosis
At Women in Tech, we welcome the Lovelace Report not just for the data, but for the clarity of its message.
We’re no longer in the territory of “let’s raise awareness.” We’re in the territory of: what are you doing about it?
As Karen Blake, Digital Inclusion and Policy Specialist and former Co-CEO of Tech Talent Charter, powerfully puts it in the report:
“We’re at a pivotal moment for our industry and economy… We have the tools, we have the talent, and now we have the blueprint. It’s time to turn this opportunity into reality.”
That blueprint is here. Now it’s up to the industry to act on it.
We’ll be using this report to inform our work with partners, our campaigns, and our community engagement, and we hope others do the same. Because if we want a sector that’s fit for the future, we need to build one where women stay, progress, and lead.
The Lovelace Report was authored by Deborah O’Neill (Oliver Wyman), Dr. Vanessa Vallely OBE (WeAreTechWomen), Karen Blake, and Irina Iovita (Oliver Wyman), and we’re grateful to them for putting forward such a compelling blueprint for change.
