Sexism, Male chauvinism, and the struggle for Women’s inclusion in African Tech Spaces.

Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and Heddy Lamarr are examples of the fact that the pioneers of computing weren’t entirely men. Some of their work that we relate to and use daily is by Heddy Lamar, who worked with composer George Antheil in 1941 and invented the frequency-hopping spread-spectrum communication system that would later form the technical foundation for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS (Mahal,2020). Grace Hopper developed one of the compilers used today and was the primary architect of COBOL, a programming language whose legacy persists in financial and government systems to this day (Beyer, 2009). These women helped build technology, so assuming they arrived late to it is rather false. Despite their involvement in this foundational history, the same industry these women helped build has spent decades communicating to their successors that they do not belong. The question this article asks is not whether this is happening, because data confirms that it is, instead this article asks why, how and what it will take to change.

The technology sector has always presented itself as a meritocracy, in other words a space where innovation is the currency and talent is the only credential that matters not gender. Yet this is not what women in tech experience daily, beneath the progressive self-image lies a persistent and well-documented contradiction namely as the systematic exclusion of women through cultures of sexism and male chauvinism. It is these cultures that determine who belongs, who is heard and who is ultimately pushed out. This contradiction is a structural and cultural problem with measurable consequences for women, for organizations and for entire economies and it demands both conceptual precision and empirical honesty to address.

In the scholarly literature, Sexism refers to prejudice or discrimination based on sex or gender, especially against women and girls, that functions to maintain systems of male domination through the ideological and material practices of individuals, collectives, and institutions (Swim et al., 1995; Klonoff & Landrine, 1995). Glick and Fiske (1996), in their foundational work on ambivalent sexism, distinguish between two analytically distinct but mutually reinforcing forms. Hostile sexism is characterised by antipathy toward, and negative stereotypes about, women who challenge traditional gender roles or assert competence in male-dominated domains. Benevolent sexism, by contrast, involves seemingly positive but deeply paternalistic views of women: it promotes their dependence on men, assigns them fewer challenging tasks, and fosters their internalisation of incompetence, undermining workplace performance while appearing, on the surface, as protectiveness or care (Glick & Fiske, 1996; Moya et al., 2007). Both forms operate in technology workplaces, though benevolent sexism is especially insidious because it is rarely named as sexism at all, neither by those who enact it nor by those who receive it. A simple example is a women joining a firm as a software engineer but is later assigned tasks that are administrative, with the excuse that “women are better at administration and taking care of offices as compared to men,” yet they were initially employed for the software engineering role.

Closely related but conceptually distinct, male chauvinism refers to the active behavioural expression of a belief in male superiority. The maintenance of fixed attitudes that men are inherently more competent, authoritative, and deserving of professional status than women, associated with the overt or covert depreciation of women in professional and social contexts (Woods, 1976). Where as sexism describes the overarching system of beliefs and attitudes, male chauvinism is its most confrontational enacted form. It is the colleague who redirects a client’s question away from a female engineer to himself, the team leader who attributes a woman’s idea to a male colleague in the boardroom, the investor who describes a female founder as ‘not quite ready,’ applying a standard that would never be used for an equivalent male presenter. Recognising this distinction matters because it enables organisations to identify and address the full spectrum of gender-based exclusion, from the subtle to the overt, rather than attending only to its most dramatic manifestations.

Both sexism and male chauvinism are rooted in, and continuously reproduced by, patriarchy, which according to Walby (1990), is a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women. Walby’s formulation insists that patriarchy must be understood not as the behaviour of individual exploitative men but as a structural phenomenon embedded across six interlocking domains, i.e. paid work, household production, culture, sexuality, violence, and the state. It is within this structural understanding that the particular character of sexism in African technology spaces must be situated. In most African societies, patriarchal arrangements are not peripheral attitudes held by a minority. They are woven into the cultural fabric of communities, families, religious institutions, governance structures, and professional environments alike. Social norms that assign men authority in the home, in public life, and in the workplace are reproduced through everyday practice, language, and a socialisation that begins in early childhood. By the time a young man enters a technology workplace, the belief in male competence and female domesticity has typically been internalised so thoroughly that it does not present itself as ideology. It presents itself as common sense. To them its normal.

This normalisation has a consequence that is both predictable and consequential. Most men who perpetuate sexist attitudes and behaviours in African technology spaces do not recognise themselves as doing so. They are not, in the majority of cases, acting with conscious hostility. They have absorbed a worldview so thoroughly dominant in their social and cultural environment that it does not register as a worldview at all. A man who assumes a female colleague requires assistance with a technical problem, who redirects a client’s query away from her to himself, or who reads a woman’s assertiveness in a meeting as aggression while reading equivalent behaviour in a male colleague as leadership, is operating from internalised chauvinist assumptions, that he may be entirely unaware he holds. The patriarchal character of most African societies means this unawareness is not exceptional, it is common. And it is its precisely normalised, unmarked quality that makes the problem so difficult to confront and so easy to deny.

This denial has its own name in the academic literature. Modern sexism (Swim et al., 1995) described as a pattern in which the denial of ongoing gender discrimination is itself a form of sexist attitude. This is more dangerous because it functions by treating the gains women have made as evidence that the problem is resolved and responding to continued advocacy for equality as unreasonable or excessive. A common manifestation is when men say that women in tech spaces and groups are no longer necessary, they claim that these spaces are creating more imbalance by excluding men so the equality has to be made to their advantage, hence victimizing themselves. Begeny et al. (2020) demonstrated that in traditionally male-dominated professions, the increased presence of women can paradoxically encourage leaders to conclude that discrimination is no longer operative, thereby causing further progress to stall. More recently, Zehnter et al. (2021) introduced the concept of the ‘belief in sexism shift,’ an increasingly prevalent view that men are now the primary victims of sexism, which intensifies resistance to structural gender equality initiatives and provides ideological cover for the backlash such initiatives routinely encounter. In organisations where female representation has marginally improved, leaders frequently fall into what Bohnet (2016) calls ‘negationism,’ claiming that bias and differential treatment no longer exist because a small number of women are now present. The logic is deeply flawed because Representation without inclusion is not equity, it is optics.

It is due to the normalised, often unconscious perpetration and institutional denial that the importance of awareness, and the specific, necessary agency of women themselves, is necessitated. If most men who enact sexism in African technology spaces do so without recognising it as sexism, shaped by a patriarchal socialisation, then naming it and calling it out becomes both a courageous and a necessary act. Women who notice the behaviour, whether it manifests as being consistently spoken over in meetings, being assigned administrative tasks beneath their qualifications, receiving compliments on their appearance rather than their professional contributions, or being told outright that they are occupying the wrong kind of space, must feel empowered to call it out. Not because the burden of educating men should fall on women, but because silence normalises and normalisation perpetuates. Institutions must create structures that make this naming safe and consequential, reporting mechanisms that are genuinely functional, cultures in which complaints are taken seriously rather than managed away, and leadership that models the willingness to be corrected. Organisational safeguarding policies shouldn’t focus only on sexual harassment but educate and safeguard their employees on Sexism too. Organisations, which document gendered experiences, amplify women’s voices, and produce research that names these dynamics clearly, are themselves a form of structural intervention.

The empirical picture confirms the scale of what is being described. Women represent approximately 28.2% of the global technology workforce, despite comprising roughly 42% of the global labour force (World Economic Forum, 2024). Half of all women who enter the technology industry leave before the age of 35 (Catalyst, 2020). Approximately 57% of women in technology report experiencing gender-based discrimination, with 48% specifically citing bias related to their technical abilities, compared to just 10% of men (Deloitte, 2024). Resumes bearing female names receive 30% fewer callbacks for software engineering positions, while blind hiring processes increase the proportion of women reaching final interview rounds by 46% (Goldin & Rouse, 2000; Bohnet, 2016). Women in technology are 1.4 times more likely to receive critical performance feedback targeting personality rather than skills (Correll & Simard, 2016), a pattern that directly reflects the institutional reproduction of gender stereotypes. Approximately 76% of women in the sector have experienced gender bias or discrimination in the workplace at least once, a figure that rose by nearly 24% between 2019 and 2023 (Skillsoft, 2024).

One of the most striking dimensions of the problem is the persistent gap between how men and women perceive the same professional environments. A large-scale survey of men working in cloud computing found that just 6% disagreed that gender equality existed in their workplaces (Tenth Revolution Group, 2023). In the same industry, over 50% of women reported experiencing sexism at work, and nearly half said their organisations were taking inadequate measures to address it, a proportion that had nearly doubled in a single year (Web Summit Research, 2023). This gap is not simply a failure of communication. It is the cognitive consequence of structural privilege, when a system does not target you, its workings are rendered effectively invisible. Belmi et al. (2020) documented a related phenomenon in which sexist managers who were equally rude to men and women effectively concealed their gender bias behind a veneer of indiscriminate hostility, making it harder for victims to name the discrimination and harder for observers to identify it. This dynamic is particularly dangerous in the African context, where the cultural normalisation of male authority makes such behaviours even less likely to be read as gendered.

The consequences of these dynamics accumulate in ways that are quantifiable at scale. Only approximately 4% of technical executives, specifically Chief Technology Officers and Chief Information Officers, are women globally, and just 5.4% of technology startups are led by female founders (Catalyst, 2020). Only 4.9% of venture capital partners are women, and all-female founding teams received just 2.3% of total venture capital funding in 2025, despite the well-documented finding that female-founded companies deliver 2.5 times more revenue per dollar of investment (Brush et al., 2018; All Raise, 2025). Approximately 78% of women in technology report believing they must work harder than men to demonstrate equivalent value (Hewlett et al., 2008), and 53% say they lack a female role model in leadership positions (Catalyst, 2020). These outcomes are not the product of natural sorting or differential ambition. They are the cumulative product of cultures that systematically limit women at every stage of professional development.

In the African context, this paradox is particularly acute. Africa leads all world regions in the proportion of STEM graduates who are women, 47% of STEM graduates from African universities are female, exceeding Europe at 42%, Asia at 41%, and North America at 39% (McKinsey and Company, 2025). Sub-Saharan Africa also demonstrates marginally better female representation in the STEM workforce than the global average (McKinsey and Company, 2025). These achievements are the product of deliberate policy interventions, family investment, and the ambitions of young women who see technology as a path to economic independence in rapidly digitising economies. And yet the same patriarchal gatekeeping that operates at the level of everyday workplace interactions also operates at the level of capital allocation. In 2024, women-led technology ventures in Africa received just 1.0% of the continent’s total technology startup funding, amounting to $21 million, against $2.1 billion directed toward male-led ventures (McKinsey and Company, 2025). Several African nations, have no women in senior technology leadership roles among publicly listed firms (McKinsey and Company, 2025). Efforts such as the African Girls Can Code Initiative, implemented in Uganda by UN Women in partnership with government ministries and the German Development Cooperation, are working to expand the pipeline (UN Women, 2026). But pipeline investment without workplace cultural transformation will not close the gap. Women can be trained, credentialed, and ready, and still walk into organisations whose cultures were never designed to include them.

The cost of this exclusion is not borne by women alone. McKinsey Global Institute (2015) estimates that advancing gender equality in the workforce could add $12 trillion to global GDP. Research from the Boston Consulting Group demonstrates that companies with more diverse management teams generate 19% higher revenues attributable to innovation (Abouzahr et al., 2018). Women typically reinvest between 80% and 90% of their income into their families and communities, compared to 30 to 40% for men, producing economic multiplier effects that are particularly significant in African development contexts (World Bank, 2012). When women are pushed out of technology spaces by a dismissive comment, a denied promotion, a funding committee that does not take them seriously, or the cumulative weight of working in an environment that regards their presence as conditional, the loss belongs to the sector and to society, not only to the individual.

Addressing this requires more than good intentions or isolated diversity programmes. It requires organisations to audit their cultures honestly and accept findings that are uncomfortable. It requires men, particularly in the African context where patriarchal socialisation has been pervasive, to develop the willingness to examine assumptions they have never had reason to question. Bohnet (2016) argues persuasively that awareness training alone is insufficient and that structural design changes, including blind evaluation processes, structured interviews, and standardised assessment criteria, are the more reliable mechanisms for reducing gender bias in decision-making. Reporting mechanisms must be genuinely safe and functional. Investment ecosystems must interrogate their own patterns of capital allocation, given that the underinvestment in women-led ventures reflects bias rather than risk. Institutions must commit to the amplification of women’s voices not as symbolic gesture but as a structural recognition that the people most affected by these dynamics must have meaningful power to change them.

A woman in technology is not occupying someone else’s space. She is claiming what history, from Lovelace’s 1843 algorithm to Hopper’s compilers to Lamarr’s frequency-hopping patent, confirms was always hers to claim. The normalisation of sexism and male chauvinism in technology spaces, intensified in the African context by deeply patriarchal social structures that make such attitudes invisible to the men who hold them, has allowed harm to be done without awareness and without accountability. That normalisation must be disturbed. Women must be safe to name what they experience. Men must be genuinely willing to be corrected. Institutions must be structured to compel both. The technology sector will not become inclusive through aspiration alone. It will become inclusive when the structural, cultural, and interpersonal work required is treated not as optional, but as a foundational condition of doing credible and consequential work in the world.

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