Why The Tech Industry Needs Women-Only Spaces

 It’s Not Just About Gender Bias—It’s The Taste of a Different Flavor of Intelligence

Every time the conversation about women-only spaces surfaces in the business world, there’s a predictable backlash:

 “That’s exclusionary!” or “Shouldn’t we be working toward integration, not separation?”

I actually agree that integration is the goal, but I don’t believe we will ever get there by skipping over an essential way-station of the journey. 

Exclusive spaces for women are not just relevant but integral to manifesting that Shangri-La vision of unconditional respect for the quality of one’s ideas, no matter where they came from.

Gender bias is still very real; DEI programs forced it into the closet for a while but it leaks out unconsciously in team meetings and around the boardroom table, to say nothing of the VC cheque books. I personally think gender bias is less pervasive than a problem lying deeper: cognitive and perceptual bias. 

Women don’t just bring a different style of leadership or communication to the tech world—they often perceive and process reality in a fundamentally different way. And that difference of vision is not only confusing to many of their male counterparts, it can actually be intimidating.

Let me unpack this.

Can I Even Say Masculine and Feminine Here?

The words Masculine and Feminine have fallen so far out of favor in recent years that using them is liable to get me cancelled but I’ll risk it because I believe this is an important discussion. 

These terms are not used here to refer to male and female human beings - please release any conditioned response to those words. They form a vocabulary which helps us elaborate a set of principles present in all of nature: yin/yang, plus/minus, seed/soil, material/immaterial. The dominant culture in business environments is predominantly still shaped by “masculine” principles such as linear thinking, competition, logic, and control. Principles such as these have built dynasties - this is an indisputable fact. Powerful, successful systems rely on masculine energy, which, by definition, is rigid, protectionist and vulnerable to blind spots. 

What many women bring to the table is a genetic predisposition for disruptive qualities: layered, intuitive intelligence; emotional nuance; an ability to see the big picture and the subtle threads running beneath it. This disruption vision is what enables them to see the blind spots in the system, and submitting to that subtle power presents a big challenge to those invested in preserving the status quo.

It’s not that women don’t know how to play in the dominant paradigm. It’s that they’re often operating in a bandwidth that others in the room aren’t even tuned into.

This disruptive quality is seldom recognized as brilliance. It gets interpreted as noise, distraction, or “lack of clarity.”

In a bid to stay relevant, we over-explain. We edit ourselves. We dim down.Sometimes, we choose to step away and try again somewhere else.

The Sounding Board That Doesn’t Exist

I spend a lot of time doing what you could call networking, but maybe not the conventional kind. I talk to people, mostly on Zoom, about what I’m working on and what they’re working on. I get a great deal of benefit from vocalizing my thoughts in a space where someone is just listening to me. They're not invested in my ideas or trying to jump in and fix or shape them. They're just present—listening to hear where I’m onto something, where I can go deeper, where I’m second-guessing myself.

It’s in these moments that I hear myself articulate something clearly for the first time, even if I’ve been circling the idea internally for weeks.

These conversations are an integral part of my creative process. 

But most women—especially those working in high-performance or male-dominated fields like STEM and deep tech—don’t have access to this kind of space.

In the tech world, for example, you can’t just bounce ideas around casually. Disclosure issues and proprietary boundaries are everywhere. Sharing freely outside the company can be risky. And inside the company? Your equally brilliant colleagues are ready to shape your idea before it even leaves your mouth. They don’t mean to do it - it’s the intellectual version of what’s colloquially known as a “pissing contest”.

The result is that many women never get the chance to just hear themselves think.

We’re Not Missing “Support.” We’re Missing Space.

It’s not necessarily that women in business need more support. It’s that we need a particular kind of space—a space where the feminine codes of intelligence aren't filtered, redirected, or repackaged to fit a linear mold.

We need places where it’s safe to say:

• “This doesn’t feel aligned.”

• “It won’t make sense on paper, but it’s coming through clearly.”

• “I don’t have it yet, it’s still gestating.”

We need spaces where we don’t have to prove the validity of our inner knowing in order for it to be taken seriously.

 And yes, sometimes those spaces need to be women-only.

The Cognitive Bias That Hides in Plain Sight

The bias I referred to above is essentially a cognitive bias against right-brain ways of knowing.

Intuition. Emotional synthesis. Energetic tracking. 

These aren’t fluffy concepts—they’re forms of intelligence that don’t come with footnotes and data trails.

And because they don’t fit neatly into the linear, proof-driven frameworks that dominate corporate culture, they’re often brushed aside or reinterpreted through a masculine lens. What gets lost is the essence of the insight.

And women are done with internalizing the belief that their native intelligence isn’t valid unless it’s translated. 

We Need More Right-Brain, Multidimensional Spaces

We don’t need “safe” spaces for women in business - this is a misnomer. We need spaces where multidimensional leadership is not only accepted—it’s expected.

Spaces where:

• Spirit and strategy are in conversation.

• Linear metrics aren’t the only markers of success.

• The unseen is honored as much as the seen.

Until these kinds of spaces are normalized in the wider business ecosystem, women-only environments remain critical for creative and cognitive activation.

They’re not places of retreat. They’re places of calibration and attunement.

We’re Building New Tables

The most visionary women I know are done asking for permission and trying to fit into outdated systems. They’re busy building new ones that hold genius, soul, ethics, and power all at once.

But it’s slow work in a vacuum and time is of the essence.

Visionary women need other women who know how to listen, who can hold space for the gestation of ideas not yet formed, words not yet spoken, systems not yet born.

This is why women-only business spaces matter - it’s not because we can’t compete or want to divide. 

The future needs women to come together and mirror, network and mastermind our way back into the existing blueprint with a clear mandate to contribute the unfiltered best of ourselves instead of a pale copy of what we might be bringing forth.