Speak Up 2025: How Women in Tech Weigh Office Returns and AI Alongside Their Leadership Ambitions

The results are in. Every year Ensono surveys 1,500 women in tech from across the US, UK and India to understand their experiences and expectations, and to explore what drives them, inspires them, and concerns them.

This year’s report, like the prior year’s, provides some interesting insights. We see a continuation of the positive trends picked up in 2024’s survey, including women’s willingness to advance their generative AI skills, and the impact of those skills in accelerating their careers. The data highlights generative AI as a powerful catalyst for career growth, with 89% of respondents agreeing that their AI skills have accelerated their careers — whether by enhancing performance in their current roles or unlocking new opportunities. This doesn’t come as a surprise considering that the number of respondents who ranked their skills as “expert” has doubled since last year’s report.

Most interesting than all of this to me, however, is the continued importance of flexibility to women in tech.

Returning to the office has clear benefits, but at what cost?

Right now, Return-to-Office (RTO) mandates are making the news all over the world, with many organizations requiring their employees to be on-site for anything from one to five days a week. But what’s the impact of this on employees who have caregiving responsibilities?

Back in 2023, the women we surveyed said there had been more career opportunities due to the rise in remote work. Ninety-five percent said remote work had improved their work/life balance. This year, 82% of the women we surveyed said they faced mandatory RTOs in 2024, with 36% of them having to be at the office five days a week.

Of course, there are some major benefits to working in the office—our respondents listed collaboration, productivity and growth opportunities as the top three—but at what cost?

This year, 49% of respondents said that balancing caregiving responsibilities with work was the biggest challenge when returning to the office (this was the biggest challenge last year too), with 20% reporting that they struggle to maintain breastfeeding while working in person.

The top challenges respondents experienced when working in the office in 2024 were:

1. Balancing caregiving responsibilities
2. Experiencing stress related to commuting
3. Taking on responsibilities outside their roles (e.g cleaning up after meetings, organizing office events, etc.), tied with experiencing more stress and anxiety in general
4. Struggling to concentrate in the office
5. Feeling uncomfortable or unsafe due to microaggressions or other forms of discrimination

Organizations must tackle these barriers head-on to better support all female tech employees, but especially those who are working in person.

Women are driven to lead, but wary of the tradeoffs

Leadership ambitions are strong among women in tech, with 76% of this year’s respondents aspiring to advance into people management roles. Beyond people management, most respondents have their sights set on greater responsibility — 85% say they want to advance into an executive leadership position during their careers. Intrinsic motivators like taking on new challenges and responsibilities and a desire to develop leadership and decision-making skills are driving interest in these roles. Others are more inclined to pursue leadership roles so they can increase their earning potential and represent women in leadership.

What about the women who are not pursuing executive leadership roles? Nearly half of these respondents say they are content with their current role and responsibilities. Really interesting to me is that half are opting out of the additional stress and pressure that come with leadership positions, and a little over a third value their work-life balance too much to compromise it.

Ensono’s view: Flexibility empowers our people to perform at their best, in all areas of life

At Ensono we value equity, flexibility and trust. We know that an RTO mandate would negatively impact a large percentage of our workforce (men as well as women), and so we are committed to continued flexibility and remote working wherever possible.

Interestingly, we haven’t seen any reduction in productivity since we embraced remote working during COVID lockdown, so remote working is not a weakness for Ensono at all. In fact, I see it as one of our biggest strengths as it enables us to attract the high-performing employees that we need in order to reach our ambitious growth goals.

We also understand that leadership isn’t a universal goal. Our career tracks reflect this. Ensono’s Fellows Program for example, enables expert technologists to grow into executive-level roles by focusing on innovation and excellence rather than having to take on people management responsibilities.

Read the full report

Speak Up 2025: How Women in Tech Weigh RTOs and AI Alongside Their Leadership Ambitions is available to download from our website at no cost. It goes into all the above findings (and more) in greater detail. I highly recommend having a read of it during your next coffee break!

You can also read our Speak Up 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2024 reports to explore the fascinating evolution of the conversations being had by women in tech.