View from a career: Why supporting women isn’t about leaving men behind
Guest blog by Helen Milner OBE, Chair of the TECH SY Women in Tech & Investment Taskforce.
Helen is one of the UK's most respected technology and social innovation leaders. As
Founder of Good Things Foundation in the UK and Australia, and Computer Weekly's
Number 1 Female Founder in UK Tech 2025/26, she has spent decades championing
digital inclusion and tech for social impact, scaling internet organisations from early
stage since 1986. Helen was also an NED on the Board of DSIT (the Government’s
former technology department now under DBIST).
In January 1986 I walked into an office in Grays Inn Road in London and began my ‘proper’ tech career. It wasn’t my first role using technology but it was where I built the foundations for a curiosity in how technology and the internet was going to change society. I could see the changes coming to the way we would communicate and collaborate so, in late 1985, I saw a job ad for an “Information Manager” in the Evening Standard newspaper and jumped at it.
Forty years later I’m through a wonderful career where I’ve felt what I’ve achieved has been purposeful, impactful and has led to some green shoots of system change.
Out the other side of that career, I’m still feeling purposeful. I’m still a Founder, Chair, and Mentor, and I’m feeling free to explore ideas and meet people who stimulate my brain and fulfil my soul. More than once I’ve been called a magpie, now I’m free to follow the things that sparkle and be curious about them. One thing that sparkles is the South Yorkshire Women in Tech and Investment Taskforce - so I agreed to be its Chair.
I have a confession to make. When I first took on the role of chairing this tech Taskforce, I felt a familiar, nagging hesitation. I knew the data. I knew the stark reality of how little venture capital goes to women founders. I knew the exhausting daily friction women face just trying to stay in the tech sector.
But I also worried about how to talk about it. I’m all about inclusion, so I worried about sounding exclusionary. I worried that by focusing intensely on the barriers women face, it would sound like an attack on men.
Let’s be completely honest: it’s not. But we cannot fix a broken system by pretending the cracks don’t exist.
Women in Tech: The Weight of the Context
As women in tech, we spend a massive amount of emotional and intellectual energy just explaining the baseline. We have to justify why a comment was undermining, why a hiring process felt skewed, or why an investment pitch went sideways.
That is why this Taskforce prioritises the FoundHERy - a programme specifically for female tech founders. It isn’t about exclusion; it is about efficiency and survival.
In my career as a female leader, I knew I had it so much better than the women in the previous generation. In the early 1990s I even had a female leader tell me that “we burned our bras for you”. I pushed aside any fears. If I knew I was equal to all my peers, men and women, then they would know I was equal too. Right? Be as good as a man, be as tough as a man, work as hard as a man! For me, becoming a Founder (in the mid 2000s) meant that I had the levers to create a workplace and a culture where everyone was equal - where everyone was owed respect, where everyone’s views could be heard, where the collective vision drove the action.
It’s sad for me to hear from the modern female tech founder that female only space makes a difference to them. That they feel an incredible, profound sense of relief when they walk into a room and realise they don’t have to explain the context. They can just let their guard down. They can be vulnerable, share failures, and admit fears without worrying that vulnerability will be weaponised against competence. In these spaces, they say they can skip the introductory debate about whether bias exists, and get straight to the high-level business strategy. They accelerate each other. That is why the FoundHERy exists.
Over the summer I have been talking to female tech founders in South Yorkshire about their journeys. I’ll be sharing some of their thoughts in future blogs.
A Stronger Tide for Everyone
Acknowledging that women are systemically disadvantaged as tech founders isn’t a complaint, it’s a market diagnosis. When we leave brilliant, revenue-generating ideas on the table simply because of who is pitching them, the entire tech ecosystem loses. Innovation stalls. Capital is misallocated.
Fixing this isn’t a zero-sum game where women win and men lose. When we build a tech culture that values diverse leadership we build a healthier industry for everyone.
To the men in our industry: we don’t want to shut you out. In fact, we need you. We need male investors who actively look for their own blind spots. We need male founders who advocate for fair equity. True equity isn’t about shrinking the pie so women can have a piece; it’s about expanding the horizon so the entire sector thrives and grows for everyone.
We are going to be fiercely, unapologetically honest about the barriers women face. And we are going to build the spaces we need to grow, lead and succeed. But the door is wide open for anyone ready to help us build a better tech future.
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