W20 pre-panel on the Future of STEM: Why Women’s Leadership Matters

Authors Note:

Lisa Adams is the Founder of Citizen Code, a African–based technology collective building inclusive digital products for social impact. She has led the design of youth-focused platforms, AI-enabled chatbots, and web ecosystems that reach millions of young people across Africa and East Asia, with a strong focus on gender justice and digital equity.

She frequently speaks and writes on tech-facilitated gender-based violence, feminist approaches to technology leadership, and the intersection of heritage, culture, and innovation. Lisa represented Civil Society at the W20 pre-panel on the Future of STEM ahead of the G20, bringing her perspective as a technologist and advocate for accessible, community-rooted digital futures.

I recently joined the W20 Panel in preparation for the upcoming G20 forum, speaking on the Future of STEM where I represented the role of Technology and Civil Society. A huge thank you to United Nations Women, HSRC, and WomHub for hosting such a powerful and necessary dialogue.

I was joined by brilliant women across the STEM fields, and I was proud to see the dominant voices of women of colour shaping the conversation. This is a clear shift from the usual spaces in STEM that often remain exclusionary.

The reflections were honest. We spoke about where we have come from as a STEM sector and where we are heading. We acknowledged the persistent difficulties caused by gender inequality and shared ideas about how to push forward in spite of these barriers.

I opened my session by reframing the question of gender inequality. Not as a broad concept but as something that needs to be made practical. What does it really mean in our context today. What holds women back from fully participating in STEM.

Too often gender inequality is presented as just a set of statistics. A percentage here, a disparity there. But behind those numbers are lived realities:

• Women are disproportionately affected by gender-based violence.
• Women are disproportionately excluded from healthcare.
• Women face persistent barriers to education.
• Women are less likely to access affordable, reliable internet.
• And within technology workplaces, women still experience hiring discrimination, unequal access to leadership tracks, skewed measures of success, and racial discrimination in environments that can act as hubs of exclusion.

These are not abstract problems. They are structural realities shaping who gets to participate in the digital future and who is left out.

I cannot live to be 140 years old to witness a fully gender equal society. But I do believe there are ways to accelerate progress for future women in STEM.

1. Civil Society’s Role and Digital Solutions

In the sector I work in, building technology solutions for social impact especially for girls and young women, civil society has a nuanced & critical responsibility. Too often, Social Impact organisations using technology include women only in lower-level or tokenised roles such as project officers, junior developers, or community-facing staff. These roles are important but they do not shift the balance of power.

When women are consistently left out of leadership as CTOs, Heads of Product, Lead Engineers, or Technology Directors, it creates a dangerous gap. Organisations may claim to build for women and girls, but without women driving the design and decision-making, their solutions risk being disconnected, extractive, or even reinforcing the very inequalities they are trying to solve.

If we want meaningful change, then the impact strategies of Social Impact organisations must be re-examined. It is not enough to have women represented as “beneficiaries” of digital tools. They must be positioned as leaders in shaping the tools themselves.

This means:

• Prioritising female technologists in leadership positions, not just support roles.
• Ensuring technical decision-making reflects the lived experiences of women and girls.
• Building pathways where the next generation of women in STEM can see women not only working in tech, but running tech.

The impact is twofold. It expands opportunities for women entering the sector and ensures that the products themselves are rooted in authenticity and proximity to real needs. Social Impact organisations cannot claim transformative outcomes if their own internal structures reproduce inequality.

The call to action is simple. Do not measure your impact in dashboards until you have measured it in your leadership structures. The most powerful statement any Social Impact organisation can make about its commitment to women in STEM is not in the tools it builds, but in who it trusts to lead them.

2. The Language of STEM and Safeguarding the Data

The technology industry is evolving quickly. Today, everyone can be part of technology whether or not they have a traditional technical background. That inclusivity is exciting but it also poses a risk when it comes to how we measure gender equality.

If all women working in technology are grouped under the umbrella of STEM, we risk masking the very real disparities in engineering and scientific roles. For instance, while women make up around 33 percent of the global tech workforce, only about 16 percent are in engineering roles (UNESCO, 2021). In South Africa, women account for just 23 percent of STEM graduates, and far fewer persist in engineering careers (HSRC, 2022).

This worry became very real for me when I started noticing a migration of legal professionals, especially young women, into the technology sector through AI. It is inspiring to see lawyers reposition their expertise into new fields, shaping critical conversations around ethics, privacy, and regulation. But one trend left me uneasy. Many of these roles were titled “Legal Engineer.”

As a technologist, I found myself asking: what exactly does that mean. An “engineer” in technology has historically implied someone who can write code, design systems, or deploy products. When we start to use the word more loosely, attaching “engineer” to roles that do not require those technical skills, we risk inflating our progress.

Yes, it may appear that we are filling engineering pipelines with more women, but in truth, we are not shifting the underlying numbers of women in software engineering, data science, or hardware design. On paper, it looks like inclusion. In practice, the structural barriers for women in core STEM fields remain the same.

Accurate language matters. Titles and classifications should reflect real technical skills, otherwise we create a false sense of equality that will only weaken the case for interventions where they are most needed.

The challenge here is to safeguard our data and our language. Governments, industry, and civil society must be disciplined in how we define and count women in STEM. If we are careless with labels, we will enlarge the very gaps we claim to be closing, and the next generation of women engineers will inherit the same barriers under a new disguise.

Conclusion: We need to name the problem & own the Solution

What connects these two points, the absence of women in leadership and the careless relabelling of roles, is a question of truth and accountability.

Social Impact organisations cannot claim impact if they do not prioritise women’s leadership in building technology. And as a global community, we cannot celebrate progress if the way we measure it erases the lived inequities of women engineers and scientists.

We need honesty in the data. We need courage in leadership. And we need to resist the temptation of shortcuts, whether that is ticking women into lower-level functions or inflating numbers with mislabelled roles.

If we are serious about the future of STEM, then we must be serious about women at the helm and women at the core. Not just present in the room, not just renamed in the data, but defining, leading, and engineering the future.