Generic coaching misses what women in tech actually face. Find out why coaching built for this context produces fundamentally different results.
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Most coaching programmes were not designed for the environment you work in. That is not a criticism of coaching as a discipline. It is a description of a real gap.
The dynamics women navigate in tech, the credibility barriers, the speed of the culture, the specific way informal power flows in engineering-led organisations, are distinct enough that applying a generic leadership framework produces generic results. Sometimes useful. Rarely transformative.
This post explains what those dynamics are, why they make coaching for women in tech a different kind of work, and what it looks like when coaching is built for the context rather than applied to it.
Tech is not just another industry. At the senior level, it creates specific challenges for women — and opportunities for those who learn to navigate them.
The culture moves fast. Decisions that would take months in other sectors happen in weeks. Leaders are expected to act with confidence on incomplete information, pivot without visible hesitation, and communicate certainty in rooms still figuring out the answer.
That pace rewards a specific style of assertive, rapid leadership, a style largely developed by and for a demographic that still dominates tech leadership at the senior level.
According to McKinsey's 2023 Women in Tech report, women hold only 28 percent of senior leadership roles in technology companies globally. At VP and C-suite level, that number falls further.
The underrepresentation concentrates most sharply where technical credibility starts to matter less and political and strategic influence starts to matter more.
That transition point from technical expert to strategic leader is exactly where most women in tech hit their first significant ceiling. And it is precisely the point where generic coaching tends to miss.
In most industries, entering a senior leadership role comes with a baseline assumption of credibility. You earned the role. The credibility comes with it.
In tech, that assumption works differently for women. Research published in the Academy of Management Journal found that women who adopt more assertive communication styles in technical environments often receive negative social feedback labelled aggressive or difficult while the same behaviour in male counterparts reads as confident and decisive.
Many senior women in tech describe having to establish technical credibility before leadership credibility is taken seriously. Not once. Repeatedly, with each new stakeholder group, each new cross-functional project, each new room they enter.
This credibility tax is real, documented, and exhausting.
Generic coaching that tells you to "project more confidence" without acknowledging this dynamic asks you to solve the wrong problem. Coaching built for women in tech starts by naming this reality and building strategies that work within it,not by pretending it does not exist.
Every organisation runs on two structures: the formal hierarchy and the informal network where real decisions get made and real opportunities get created. In tech companies, that informal network is often particularly dense, fast-moving, and built on shared history that predates many senior women's arrival at the table.
The people who get sponsorship, who get pulled into high-visibility projects, who get mentioned when a senior role opens,these are typically the people already embedded in those informal networks. And those networks, in most tech organisations, were built when the senior leadership cohort looked very different.
This is not primarily about deliberate exclusion. It is about how networks form: around people who were already there, who share similar professional histories, and who had access to the relationships that created the network in the first place.
Navigating this requires specific skills: building influence with people who did not invite you into the room, creating visibility that does not depend on existing access, and generating sponsorship through deliberate relationship strategy.
These are learnable. But they are rarely what generic leadership coaching teaches.
Given all of the above, coaching that genuinely works for women in tech has to do more than teach leadership frameworks. It has to engage with the environment as it actually is. That means addressing:
The technical-to-strategic transition — how to shift your credibility currency from expertise to judgment, and make that shift visible to the stakeholders who matter
Influence without formal authority — how to move people and priorities in an environment where informal power flows along channels not built with you in mind
Communication in fast-moving rooms — how to hold authority in conversations that move quickly, where the standard is decisiveness and the room does not always amplify your voice
Sustainable performance in high-pressure cultures — how to maintain strong output without absorbing the tech industry's normalised relationship with overwork None of these are addressed by a standard coaching programme designed for a generic senior professional. They are addressed by coaching that starts from the specific environment you are in.
Coaching is only as contextually relevant as the person delivering it. A coach who has not operated inside a fast-moving tech organisation who has not navigated the credibility dynamics, the informal networks, the particular exhaustion of being a senior woman in a room built for someone else is working from observation rather than experience.
That gap shows up in the specificity of the guidance. Generic leadership advice is still advice. But when the coach's environment and your environment are misaligned, the advice tends to be accurate in principle and slightly off in application.
Coaching for women in tech works best when the coach understands not just the theory of leadership but the texture of the environment, the speed, the culture, the specific dynamics you navigate every time you walk into a high-stakes meeting.
Her Success Coach offers coaching for women in senior tech leadership built on over a decade of direct experience inside global tech organisations — Amazon, Skyscanner, and Improbable among them. The guidance is not applied from outside. It comes from the inside out.
Two starting points:
The women who advance most effectively in tech leadership are not the ones who learned to lead despite the environment. They are the ones who learned to lead within it — with a clear understanding of how it works, what it rewards, and how to build the influence and presence that makes their capability visible to the right people.
That kind of development does not come from a coaching programme designed for a different context. It comes from coaching built for yours.
Generic coaching gives you tools. Coaching built for women in tech gives you the right tools for the environment you are actually in.
Coaching for women in tech is leadership and career coaching designed around the specific dynamics of technology environments — the credibility tax, the pace, the informal networks, and the technical-to-strategic transition. It differs from regular leadership coaching in that it starts from the context you are actually in rather than applying frameworks designed for a more generic professional environment.
Tech cultures reward a particular style of fast, assertive, technically grounded leadership that was developed largely by and for a demographic that still dominates senior roles. Women navigating these environments often face a credibility tax — having to prove technical expertise before leadership authority is extended — and operate within informal networks that were built before they arrived. These dynamics require specific strategies that generic leadership development rarely teaches.
The most impactful focus areas are the technical-to-strategic transition, building influence without relying on formal authority or existing network access, communicating with authority in fast-moving rooms, and sustaining high performance without absorbing the tech industry's relationship with overwork. These are context-specific capabilities that require coaching grounded in the tech environment to develop effectively.
Ask directly about their leadership experience inside tech organisations — not just their experience coaching tech professionals. Ask how they approach the credibility dynamics women face in technical environments. Ask for examples of how their coaching adapts to the specific culture of high-growth tech companies. A coach who understands this context will answer these questions with specificity, not generality.
Yes. Her Success Coach was founded by an executive coach with direct leadership experience inside global tech companies including Amazon, Skyscanner, and Improbable. The coaching is particularly well-suited to senior women navigating tech leadership — because the guidance is built from real experience of these environments, not applied from the outside.
This page is part of the Her Success Coach resource library — a collection of practical articles, frameworks, and coaching programmes designed for women leaders. Explore in-depth guides on leadership confidence, career transitions, executive presence, imposter syndrome, delegation, strategic thinking, and difficult conversations at work. Book a 30-minute Clarity Session to discuss your goals, or join an on-demand course to develop the skills you need at your own pace.
Iveta Dulova is an executive and leadership coach for women with a decade of experience in global technology and a Diploma in Coaching and Leadership from the University of Cambridge. She works with women managers, directors, and founders across technology, financial services, and consulting who want to build executive presence, negotiate with confidence, and build a career that reflects their values rather than their fears.