If you’re a CEO or senior executive of a tech company, here’s the truth: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are no longer things you can just support. They’re things you need to lead. Not symbolically. Not passively. But directly and visibly, as part of your core business responsibilities.
This is a call to arms, and it’s addressed to you – the decision-maker, budget-holder and culture-shaper. Whether you’re running a global platform or a fast-scaling Australian success story, the future of your business will be shaped by how seriously you treat equity and inclusion at the top.
DEI is not a sideline issue. It’s a performance imperative. Your board, talent pipeline, and licence to operate depend on it.
The cost of detachment
Most DEI strategies fail not because the work is flawed, but because leadership is absent.
When the responsibility for equity is parked in the “People” team, without senior ownership, proper resourcing or any line of sight to business outcomes, it withers. Or worse, it becomes performative. You get some awareness training, a few calendar moments, maybe a commitment to “look at the numbers” next quarter.
Meanwhile, the real systems that perpetuate inequity, including hiring practices, leadership behaviour, promotion processes and pay frameworks, go untouched.
And it shows.
We’ve had decades of research, pilot programs, and pledges. Yet women remain underrepresented in technical roles, outpaced in leadership, and underpaid across nearly every job family. Especially in the tech sector.
That’s not an HR problem. That’s a business problem, which makes it your problem.
DEI is a leadership discipline
In a company that’s serious about performance, we set standards. We hold people to them. We make them measurable. We invest in improvement. We reward progress.
Yet when it comes to DEI, most companies stop at good intentions. Or worse, delegate the hard stuff – the system redesign, the policy overhaul, the cultural accountability – to people without the power to implement it.
If you’re a CEO, you are the standard-bearer. What you talk about, people pay attention to. What you fund, gets resourced. What you measure, improves. And what you ignore, stagnates.
So ask yourself:
- What KPIs does your executive team carry on equity?
- When was the last time DEI metrics were front and centre in your board pack?
- How often do you ask your team about pay gaps, promotion bias or attrition by gender and ethnicity – and what have you done about the answers?
Because if you’re not actively engaged in these questions, you’re not driving progress, you’re impeding it.
This isn’t charity. This is strategy.
Let’s be clear, equity and inclusion are not about virtue signalling. They’re not about “niceness” or “optics” or “social good”.
They are business-critical requirements because:
- If you want to attract and retain the best people, you need inclusive workplaces.
- If you want innovation, you need diverse thinking and psychological safety.
- If you want to survive regulatory reform, stakeholder scrutiny and generational change, you need equity embedded in your operations – not slapped on as a brand veneer.
Recent data from the Tech Council of Australia and CommBank make the issue even more stark. The biggest driver of Australia’s gender gap in technical careers is not lack of interest or capability; it’s skills wastage. Women are exiting tech mid-career in droves, not because they can’t do the work, but because the workplaces themselves are inhospitable.
Women are not leaving because they’re failing but because the system is failing them.
And that means the system can be fixed.
Scott Farquhar spoke directly to this in his keynote at the National Tech Summit, calling on the sector to address the mid-career cliff facing women in deep tech. He declared that if Australia wants to meet its ambition of 1.2 million tech jobs by 2030, we can’t afford to keep losing the very people we’ve already invested in. This is a problem that can be solved if company leaders take responsibility for changing the culture that drives women out.
What leadership looks like now
Leading on DEI in and beyond 2025 doesn’t mean getting it perfect. It means showing up.
It means:
- Asking harder questions at the top table about who gets hired, paid, promoted and retained – and why.
- Ensuring equity metrics are tracked, reported and acted on – not buried in dashboards or filtered out of performance reviews.
- Backing your people team to invest in a multi-year commitment and plan.
- Owning the outcomes, not just the optics.
You don’t need to be an expert in gender equity, cultural inclusion or accessibility. But you do need to treat those things like your business depends on them, because it does.
The time for passive support is over
The tech sector loves to talk about disruption. But when it comes to disrupting the inequities baked into our industry – from recruitment to leadership – most tech leaders fall eerily silent.
If you’re serious about building a future-facing company that attracts trust, talent and innovation, DEI must move out of the margins and into the executive core. Not next year. Not “when we’re more mature”. Now.
Because the companies that will lead the next wave of growth and global influence won’t be the ones who did the bare minimum.
They’ll be the ones whose CEOs stood up, took ownership, and drove change from the top. This is your job now.