On 9 August 1956, 20 000 women marched to the Union Buildings. They did not gather to encourage one another. They did not organise workshops on confidence. They carried petitions to the institution that held the power to change their circumstances, and they demanded that it do so.
Seventy years on, that distinction has become easy to forget. Every August, women are urged to be bolder, more resilient, more ambitious: apply for the promotion, ask for the raise, put yourself forward. The advice is well-intentioned. It also assumes that the principal obstacle still lies with the individual.
The women of 1956 made no such assumption. They knew courage was not the scarce resource. Institutional change was.
That matters this Women’s Month, because the theme, 'Building Resilient Economies for All', invites a question we have largely avoided. Not why more women are not entering technology, but why so many organisations continue to lose the women they have already hired. That is not only a question of diversity. It is a question of economics.
South Africa is asking the wrong question
Employers across the public and private sectors report that they cannot find enough experienced digital professionals. Programmes are launched, graduates recruited, scarce skills lists extended. The conversation almost always turns on how to produce more talent. Far less attention is paid to what happens afterwards. How many stay? How many build long careers? How many reach the positions where strategy is set and budgets are decided?
A country that continually replaces capability rather than retaining it will always appear to have a shortage, however many new professionals it trains. Every experienced person who leaves takes more than technical knowledge. They take institutional memory, trusted relationships, professional judgment and years of investment that no appointment simply restores. In technology, where knowledge compounds through experience, those losses accumulate quietly until organisations find themselves rebuilding capability they once had.
Resilient economies do not continually replace capability. They keep it
Retention is not simply an HR metric or a diversity metric. It is a measure of organisational capability and, increasingly, of economic resilience.
The evidence tells a different story from the one we usually tell
South Africa’s employment equity data shows women entering organisations and progressing through the early stages of their careers, then thinning out as seniority rises. The Commission for Employment Equity’s 24th Annual Report recorded women holding 48.1% of professionally qualified and middle management positions, 37.7% of senior management positions and 26.9% of top management positions. Its 26th Annual Report, covering the 2025 reporting cycle, found that progress at lower and middle management had not translated into substantial gains at senior and executive level.
The global evidence tells the same story. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 found the gap between women’s representation in middle and in top management stuck at 5.4 percentage points since 2020, and described it as evidence of persistent drains in the leadership pipeline.
Pipelines do not leak by themselves. Organisations create the conditions under which people stay, progress or leave.
It is sometimes argued that this is history working itself through, and that time will resolve it. If that were so, successive Employment Equity reports would by now show stronger movement into senior leadership as representation improved below it. They do not. Participation has increased. Progression has not kept pace.
The most revealing statistic is not about women
ISC2’s 2026 study of women in cyber security asked what prevents women from staying and advancing. Nearly half of the women surveyed, 45%, identified work-life balance and caregiving demands, against 29% of men. A third, 34%, identified pay or promotion inequity, against 19% of men.
The next finding matters more. Asked what barriers they had observed for women in their own organisations, 42% of men reported that they were unaware of any significant barriers at all. Among women, 17% said the same. The same study found that 24% of women in entry and junior roles rarely or never see women in leadership or technical positions, compared with 15% of men. Colleagues in the same building, describing different workplaces.
This is not about intent. It is about visibility. People decide on the information in front of them, and leaders who do not see a barrier will not measure it. What follows is not deliberate exclusion but something harder to detect: systems that look neutral while producing unequal outcomes.
Organisations rarely lose experienced women through one dramatic decision. They lose them through hundreds of ordinary ones: who receives the stretch assignment that leads to promotion, who is assumed to be available for travel, whose potential is recognised before their experience, whose flexible working request is read as commitment or as compromise, who is invited into the conversations where strategy is actually formed.
No single decision explains the outcome. Together, they shape careers.
The sector is also overlooking the talent it already has
There is a second constraint, and it is self-inflicted. Cyber security depends as much on governance, regulation, risk assessment, business continuity, communication and crisis management as it does on engineering. Those capabilities already exist inside most organisations: in the compliance specialist who interprets regulation, the internal auditor who evaluates controls, the business analyst, the project manager, the privacy professional and the risk practitioner who advises the board.
The Women in IT Chapter published its Cybersecurity Career Development Pathway Framework in May 2026 to make exactly this case, setting out structured routes into the discipline from business functions, adjacent technology roles and governance. Too often, organisations search the external market for capability they already employ. That is not a talent shortage. It is a failure to recognise capability.
Three questions every employer should answer before calling it a skills shortage
This Women’s Month we are asking employers to examine their own evidence rather than restate their commitment. Three questions that form the WIIT Organisational Resilience Test:
How many of the women you recruited five years ago are still with you?
At what level does women’s progression consistently begin to slow?
Who makes your most consequential technology decisions, and what evidence is in front of them when they do?
If an organisation cannot answer those questions, it has not identified a skills shortage. It has identified a leadership blind spot.
The work of 1956 is not finished
South Africa has made real progress. More women are studying technology, entering digital professions and leading innovation than ever before. But if women continue to disappear as organisational influence increases, the problem that matters most remains unsolved. The measure of an inclusive digital economy is not how many women enter technology. It is how many are still there when the decisions that shape our organisations and our country are made.
Let us honour the legacy of 1956 in the spirit in which it was forged: not by asking women to become braver, but by asking institutions to become better.
Because resilient economies are not built by finding more talent. They are built by keeping it.
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