Spain faces a critical challenge in its labor market: the shortage of women in tech in Spain. Women currently represent only 16% of ICT specialists, according to Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE, 2026), and just 11.5% of female STEM leadership positions in the sector. For any professional looking to advance her tech career, understanding these numbers is the first step toward transforming the industry and unlocking underused talent.
In a market where demand for tech professionals grows year after year and the talent shortage curbs business competitiveness, leaving out 50% of the population isn’t a matter of fairness. It’s an economic decision with measurable costs.
The most recent data confirm the trend isn’t improving: on several key indicators, it’s actually going backward, although, as we’ll see further on, the overall picture isn’t entirely negative. Understanding what’s behind these numbers is essential for any woman working in the IT sector and for any organization that wants to remain competitive.
The State of Women in the IT Sector: Gender Gap Figures in Spain for 2026
The 2026 data on women’s presence in Spain’s tech sector calls for rigorous analysis, not just headlines. The numbers are stark, but understanding them well, and separating what is within our control from what isn’t, is the starting point for taking effective action.
Key Indicators of the Digital Gender Gap in 2026
The Women and Business 2026 report from Grant Thornton Spain, published in March 2026, provides the most recent data:
The share of women CEOs in Spain has fallen from 28.5% to 18.5% in just three years: a 10-percentage-point drop between 2023 and 2026. In the tech sector, women’s presence in leadership stands at 11.5%, the lowest share of any sector analyzed. Companies with no women at all on their leadership team rose from 4.5% in 2025 to 7.8% in 2026, nearly doubling in a single year.
These figures line up with the global picture. According to UNESCO, women make up only 26% of the global tech workforce (UNESCO, 2022). In Spain, only 25% of STEM degree students are women (Instituto de la Mujer, 2022), compared with a 35% global average (UNESCO, 2022). In artificial intelligence, the sector’s fastest-growing field, the share of women in Spain doesn’t even reach 22%.
Attrition in the IT Sector: Why Female Talent Gets Lost
One of the most revealing data points about the state of female STEM leadership is the attrition rate. More than 50% of women who start a career in tech eventually leave it over the course of their professional trajectory, twice the rate of their male colleagues.
They don’t leave because they aren’t competent. They leave because barriers accumulate over time and because, in many cases, the personal cost of staying outweighs the perceived benefit. That attrition carries concrete economic consequences: years of investment in education and development that the sector loses when a professional exits mid-career.
The Causes of Women’s Underrepresentation in Tech: The 3 Main Barriers
The underrepresentation of female talent in the IT sector has multiple, overlapping causes. Some are structural — hard to change in the short term. Others are organizational. And others still, the least studied and perhaps the most actionable, are internal.
External Barriers and Bias in Tech Hiring
Unconscious bias in hiring and promotion processes, the scarcity of visible female role models in the sector, workplace cultures skewed toward masculine norms, and the lack of work-life balance policies that don’t penalize one’s career are real obstacles the tech sector still has to address.
So is the problem at the source: only 22% of computer science degrees in Spain are earned by women. Without early intervention starting in education, the gap keeps reproducing itself generation after generation, regardless of the diversity policies companies put in place.
The gender pay gap in the tech sector in Spain runs between 21% and 23% — an additional deterrent to staying in the field long-term.
Organizational Barriers: Corporate Culture and Promotion in Tech
Beyond initial access to the sector, organizational barriers go a long way toward explaining why women who enter tech advance more slowly. The Women in the Workplace 2024 report from McKinsey & LeanIn (McKinsey & LeanIn, 2024) documents that 76% of women in tech in Europe have faced bias affecting their leadership prospects, and that 70% believe promotion processes are unfair.
The solution to these barriers rests with organizations: their hiring and promotion policies, their leadership models, and their willingness to measure and be held accountable for their gender diversity initiatives in tech.
Internal Barriers and Self-Perception in STEM Careers
And then there’s a third layer: the least visible and, paradoxically, the most actionable from an individual standpoint. Internal barriers are the thought patterns and self-beliefs that lead women to make career decisions that fall short of their real potential.
Women apply for a job when they meet 100% of the listed requirements; men apply at 60% or 70%. Women rate themselves 7 points lower than their male colleagues in performance self-assessments, despite identical objective performance. 82% of men feel ready to ask for a promotion, compared with 70% of women.
None of these gaps reflect an actual difference in competence, they reflect a gap in the perception of that competence.
The Business Case: The Benefits of Gender Diversity in Tech
One of the most important lenses for understanding the situation of women in tech in Spain is to stop viewing it as a social justice issue and start seeing it as an untapped economic opportunity.
Companies with greater gender diversity on their leadership teams are 21% more likely to outperform their competitors on profitability. Organizations in the top quartile for leadership diversity are up to 39% more likely to post above-average financial results for their sector (McKinsey & LeanIn, 2024).
Gender-diverse teams generate more innovative ideas, make better-calibrated decisions, and produce more sustainable results. In a tech sector that builds products used by people of every gender, the absence of female talent on design, development, and leadership teams impoverishes the products themselves.
Bringing in and retaining female talent in the IT sector isn’t generosity, it’s a strategic decision.
Power Up Your Tech Career With Strategy
There are things a woman working in IT can’t control: market bias, her company’s culture, or the pace at which diversity policies evolve. There are things she can influence, though only indirectly and over the long term. And there’s a third group that is entirely within her control: how she manages her own tech career.
Actively managing your career,with the same methodology and strategic approach used to manage any tech project, makes a substantial difference in outcomes. It means having a clear sense of purpose, identifying and questioning the beliefs that limit your decisions, knowing your own strengths, and building a network of visibility that amplifies real talent.
It’s not about working harder. It’s about managing what you already have more effectively.
The Bloom! book by Mariana Hernández-Delfino devotes an entire section to impostor syndrome and other limiting beliefs that specifically affect female talent in the IT sector. Backed by more than 200 scientific references, it offers an evidence-based framework for moving forward without victimhood or empty formulas.
Transform your career path with the Bloom! Methodology to manage your career strategically.
Get your copy of Bloom! on Amazon! →
Frequently Asked Questions About Women and Female Leadership in Tech
How many women work in tech in Spain in 2026?
As specialists and executives, women remain a minority in Spain’s ICT sector (see the detailed figures in the section above). But there’s an angle rarely told: as founders, Spain leads Europe. In 2025, 12% of tech startups founded in Spain had an all-female founding team, compared with a 10% European average, according to Iberoeconomía. The problem persists in funding: across Europe, all-female-founded startups captured only 2% of total investment in 2023, a figure that rose to 12% in 2024, still far behind what mixed-gender or all-male teams receive.
What are the main barriers to female STEM leadership in Spain?
Research traditionally distinguishes between external barriers (hiring bias, lack of role models, the pay gap), organizational barriers (opaque promotion processes, inflexible work cultures), and internal barriers (limiting beliefs, impostor syndrome). The Athena Factor, from the Center for Work-Life Policy, gets more specific: it identifies five patterns in tech’s corporate culture that push female talent out, from marginalization in hyper-masculine environments to risk-and-reward systems that penalize people who are, on average, less inclined to take extreme risks. Nearly 40% of women in science, engineering, and technology say they feel stalled in their careers.
Why do women leave the IT sector mid-career?
The Athena Factor, on the phenomenon of female brain drain in science and technology, pinpoints the critical moment precisely: attrition spikes around the tenth year of a career, typically between ages 30 and 35, when the first promotion ceilings coincide with growing family responsibilities. It isn’t a gradual, even exit spread across an entire career, it’s a very specific window where several pressures converge at once, which suggests retention policies should focus there instead of being spread thin across generalities.
Is the situation for female tech talent in Spain improving or getting worse?
It depends on the indicator. In business leadership, Spain is losing ground: the Grant Thornton data already cited show fewer women CEOs and more companies with no women in leadership at all. But on other fronts, there are signs of progress. The Global Gender Gap Report 2025 from the World Economic Forum confirms that the gender gap keeps closing globally, if slowly (68.8% closed, with full parity projected 123 years from now), and it continues to flag technology and leadership as the areas with the greatest female underrepresentation. In Spain, meanwhile, investment in startups with mixed-gender teams tripled between 2022 and 2025, and specific public funding lines for digital women entrepreneurs have emerged that didn’t exist just a few years ago. The setback at the top is real, but it coexists with pockets of progress at the base of the ecosystem.
What can I do to advance my own tech career?
Beyond managing your own career through visibility, beliefs, and strengths (see the previous section), Spain already has concrete resources active right now:, the Mujer e Ingeniería initiative from the Royal Academy of Engineering has already reached more than 1,900 students, and programs like STEM Talent Girl and Girls in Tech Spain support professional development in tech at different career stages. None of these replace actively managing your own career, but they do provide what’s scarcest when you’re navigating it alone: network, visibility, and real role models.
Written by Mariana Hernández-Delfino, author of Bloom! Career Management in Tech.
