FUTURE IN
MOTION
WOMEN
LEADING TECH
AWARDS 2026
WINNERS
EDITOR'S
LETTER
Cast your mind back over the past 12 months. How many headlines, articles and self-indulgent LinkedIn posts have you seen lamenting the state of the tech industry in Australia and abroad? We shudder to think about how many we’ve seen.
But while many spend their days watching stock prices, comparing the revenue run-rates of the largest tech firms, unpicking exactly who is where in the ‘AI arms’ race and pontificating about the role and fate of Taiwan in all this, we think they lose sight of what makes the sector’s explosive progress possible: the people.
And, to be clear, we aren’t talking about Messrs Musk, Pichai, Altman or Zuckerberg. We’re talking about the people—the women—at the coalface, doing the hard yards and making users’ experiences better, more seamless, more integrated and more innovative every single day.
That’s why we continue to hold the Women Leading Tech Awards. When many in the industry have turned their backs on ideas of progress for fear of being labelled ‘Woke’ and ergo shunned by the man in the White House, we believe that an industry composed of everyone will work better for everyone.
So please take a moment to read why each of the women below took home an award this evening. And please take another moment to ponder where the industry might be if they had chosen a different path. Here at B&T, we are grateful for their work. As we are too for the time our judges kindly provided and for the support of our sponsors—we’re pleased that you boldly believe in and support this cause when others have forgotten it.
Tom Fogden
Editor
Woman of the Year
Maddie King
MagicBrief
This year’s Grand Prix winner is the utterly remarkable Maddie King. Her impact on MagicBrief and its rapid acceleration from founding in 2022 to $20 million+ acquisition by Canva less than three years later has been profound.
“When Maddie joined MagicBrief, we were a small startup where every hire mattered. Very quickly, it became clear that she was operating at a level well beyond her role,” the business’ co-founder said.
“I could see the influence Maddie had on other women in tech early on. She became a visible role model in the community, and our investors often commended her dedication to showing up and supporting female founders and operators across their portfolios.”
That visibility matters. As she said, “too many women still feel forced to choose between ambition and reality”.
But King is far from short on ambition. After beating cancer, she founded her own business at 20 making headscarves for other women who had survived the disease. After this, she joined MagicBrief in early 2024, the sixth hire at the early-stage startup. She eschewed the typical SaaS playbook and grew the brand rapidly with limited budget, adopting a creative and education-led approach that built its brand recognition and credibility rapidly, leading it to attract clients including Oats Overnight, Koala, and JS Health. King even spearheaded MagicBrief’s expansion into the US.
King believes the tech sector has a “persistent problem” with narrow definitions of success.
“Leadership is often framed as technical, specialised, and linear, which can discourage women whose strengths lean more into creativity, community, and commercial execution,” she said.
King’s wide-ranging expertise and experience have led her to become a true trailblazer in the industry.
As one client put it:
“I have worked with founders and teams across the Australian tech ecosystem for a decade, and I do not say this lightly: Maddie King is the most exciting emerging leader I have seen.”
It doesn’t get much better than that.
Adtech
Georgia Brammer
Innovid
Innovid’s APAC general manager is flipping gender inequity on its head.
In an industry that is 78 per cent male dominated, nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) of Innovid’s technical team are women, including 78 per cent of the ad operations unit.
Half of the leadership team are women, which not only bucks the trend, but sets new benchmarks that were previously unimaginable.
Georgia Brammer has crafted this change through intentional hiring, promotion and succession decisions that ensure women are progressing into roles of influence.
Her leadership style is grounded in participation, not optics. She mentors women across the business, creating environments where they can build confidence, set boundaries and lead authentically.
She has also set up initiatives that allow for candid conversations about leadership, ambition, mental health and career longevity.
In 2025, Brammer led Innovid APAC, and adtech platform, to 31 per cent revenue growth, well above the global market rate of 6 per cent in the sector.
Her team has grown by 25 per cent, including huge increases in India, leading to her promotion to general manager in the past year.
A highlight of Innovid’s success has been a partnership with the Indian Premier League, helping cricket’s most watched tournament track an average of 900 million daily impressions per match day, which peaked at more than two billion impressions and 49 million concurrent viewers in the final.
Brammer is described as the “complete package” by one of the most influential women in Australia’s adtech landscape.
“She understands how the industry really works. She has built on that foundation to become a senior leader known for strong commercial judgement and the ability to drive complex, high-impact outcomes.
“She is a trusted leader with deep relationships across her team, clients and the industry, and her perspective is genuinely sought-after.”
That’s high praise indeed. And we thoroughly concur.
AI Pioneer
Utkarsha Ghule
Quantium
In what has become a race to define the future of artificial intelligence, Utkarsha Ghule is proving two things at once: that groundbreaking AI can transform entire industries – and that more women deserve a seat at the table building it.
As lead data scientist at Quantium, Ghule has become one of the driving forces behind the company’s AI transformation. When she joined the organisation’s newly formed AI team in 2022, she was the only woman in the group. Rather than accepting the status quo, she focused on doing what great technologists do best: solving hard problems so well they can’t be ignored.
Her work has delivered exactly that. From building enterprise AI agents to modernising complex infrastructure planning with computer vision and generative AI, Ghule has consistently pushed the boundaries of what AI can achieve.
One standout example was her work with Telstra InfraCo, where she helped develop an AI-powered system that analyses infrastructure routes and construction feasibility using street-level imagery. What once took engineers two months to assess can now be done in under a day, with over 97 per cent accuracy.
But Ghule’s impact doesn’t stop with technical innovation.
Determined to ensure more women can enter the field, she created AI Masters, Quantium’s internal course designed to teach data scientists how to build advanced AI applications. The program has already trained 61 data scientists, including 14 women, helping create a new pipeline of female AI talent.
Her influence extends to the wider industry too. As an organiser and speaker at AI.Con 2025, she helped ensure stronger female representation on stage while sharing her own work building enterprise AI systems.
As Quantium’s chief AI officer Ben Chan puts it, Ghule has a rare ability to combine deep technical expertise with strategic thinking.
And with every system she builds—and every woman she helps into AI—she’s redefining who gets to shape the future of this technology.
Business Support
Natasha Markham
Year13
Natasha Markham’s career demonstrates the power of non-linear pathways and the impact of leadership built on determination, curiosity and capability.
In a short period of time, Markham has emerged as one of the most promising young leaders in the technology sector, reshaping perceptions of what leadership should look like.
During the eligibility period, Markham progressed from Year13’s first leadership operations hire to the organisation’s chief of staff, becoming both the first female and younger leader to hold the role.
Her presence in senior leadership environments has provided visible representation for young women across the business, reinforcing that contribution and meaningful impact matter far more than traditional credentials.
Markham played a monumental role in Year13’s evolution into a global organisation through the launch of its international brand, Anyway.
She translated founder vision into operational reality, helping coordinate strategy, execution and fostered international collaboration whilst simultaneously ensuring the Australian business had continued momentum.
Her work enabled the company to move faster, build international acceleration and establish a reputable presence in the highly competitive American market.
Beyond her organisational impact, Markham is a stark advocate for young women within the tech industry. She shares the details of her journey, from finishing school to navigating university to building an exceptional career. In making her personal experiences visible, she expands the scope of what success can look like for women in tech.
Markham continues to inspire belief, create opportunity and carve out new pathways for the future generations of women in technology.
Champion of Change
Franca Moretto
Canva
Franca Moretto by the very definition is a Champion of Change.
By day Moretto is a technical product manager, tasked with hands-on technical leadership, large-scale community building, and sustained advocacy for underrepresented genders in technology. By night (and day, if we’re honest) she is raising a four-year-old and empowering the women around her.
She is a leader who walks the talk in actively building inclusion in technology through implementing systems, communities and opportunities that allow women to thrive.
As an organiser for DevOps Represen—a provider of great technical training and community for marginalised genders—Moretto has generously been the primary driver behind many of its most impactful initiatives.
She has grown a Slack community of more than 650 members that serves both as a support network and an industry-wide volunteer base. She has raised more than $24,000 for not-for-profit organisations, including Indigitek and Palestine Children Relief Fund. And she led community partnerships that have provided attendees with over $10,000 worth of free access to technical learning.
A defining element of Moretto’s impact has been her commitment to making high-quality technical education accessible to those who are often excluded from it.
She has designed and delivered workshops from the ground up on complex engineering topics such as cloud networking, infrastructure-as-code and cloud network security. These are all seen as disciplines that are frequently perceived as inaccessible or gatekept within the technology industry.
She is no stranger to B&T’s Women Leading Tech Awards either, and adds this Champion of Change triumph to her 2023 Engineering award.
Customer Success
Helena Barroso Zarco
impact.com
Customer success managers are the lifeblood of any tech organisation. But Helenda Barroso Zarco brings much more to her role than simply happy clients. She leads Impact.com’s Customer Success team across Southeast Asia, Japan and ANZ, 65 per cent of whom are women.
And rather than simply leading from the front, she empowers her team. At the company’s regional flagship iPX conference, for example, she stepped back from presenting and instead coached her team across Melbourne and Singapore to take the stage and lead client roadmap presentations.
That advocacy runs deeper, too. She is part of the LUCY Mentoring Program at Macquarie University, which matches senior leaders with female undergraduate students to help identify the skills they need to become future leaders and map out their career paths. She is an active member of Gals en Australia, a network of Latin women in media and marketing and supports Girls in Tech through event participation and networking and she volunteers with Thread Together, an Australian organisation providing new clothing to people in need.
Frankly, it’s a wonder that Barroso Zarco has the time to fit it all in. Especially given she’s playing a key role in driving double-digit revenue growth for Impact.com as well as smashing her targets and bringing in new clients.
“Helena exemplifies excellence in client services,” said one client. We couldn’t agree more.
Cyber Security
Scarlett McDermott
Longitude Advisory
Scarlett McDermott has more than 12 years of experience as a cyber security expert who provides outcomes-focused technology guidance to companies and not for profit organisations in the government supply chain.
Furthermore, she is a leading mentor of women in the cyber security space, providing guidance on secure digital transformation that enables female-led organisations to grow.
She is not only a lead consultant at Longitude Advisory, but also a board member of the Australian Information Security Association (ASIA), which shapes policy, governance, strategy and the development of cyber security professionals across Australia.
In the past year, McDermott ensures women at all levels are empowered in the cybersecurity sector by embedding women into decision-making roles, advisory boards, industry events and leadership pipelines.
Longitude achieved over 50 per cent year-on-year profit growth in the past year, and McDermott’s fortnightly ‘Leading Digital’ cyber security newsletter now reaches more than 500 Australian organisations.
At ASIA, she helped secure funding of nearly $2 million to professionalise the cyber-security industry, with a clear focus to elevate diverse voices and women in a male-domanted sector.
“Her work has made cyber security accessible to people beyond the industry, creating clarity in a space often defined by complexity, fear and overwhelm. Scarlett’s ability to translate risk into strategy and confusion into confidence is what truly distinguishes her leadership in cyber security,” Longitude client Natalie Turmine said.
Data Science
Fan Jiang
Atlassian
When the world’s biggest tech companies are racing to build smarter AI, someone has to figure out how to measure whether it actually works. At Atlassian, that someone is Fan Jiang.
As Data Science Manager, Jiang has been quietly shaping how the company evaluates and launches some of its most cutting-edge AI products, while simultaneously building pathways for more women to thrive in the field.
One of her biggest breakthroughs came while working on Atlassian’s developer AI tools. Faced with a fundamental question: How do you measure if AI-generated code is actually good enough? Jiang led the creation of Atlassian’s first “LLM-as-a-judge” code quality metric, a system that uses AI to evaluate AI-generated code against human standards.
The result? A step-change for the business. According to one senior leader, the innovation became “the cornerstone metric empowering my 60+ engineering team to run daily experiments improving our code generation agent”. The work even led to publication at the prestigious International Conference on Software Engineering.
But Jiang’s impact goes well beyond algorithms.
Passionate about lifting others as she climbs, she founded Atlassian’s Women in Data Science community, creating a space for women in the company to share challenges, build confidence and support each other’s careers. Her mentorship has already helped more than 15 women navigate pivotal moments—from PhD researchers entering industry to colleagues returning from parental leave and successfully earning promotions.
As another senior leader put it: “Fan doesn’t just improve—she fundamentally transforms”.
Whether she’s redefining how AI products are measured or ensuring more women have a seat at the table building them, Jiang is proving that great data science isn’t just about insights—it’s about impact.
Delivery
Katya Matavilava
Woolworths Group
Katya Matavilana has built a reputation as the kind of leader who’s able to turn ideas into real-world impact. As a senior delivery manager at wiqLABS, Woolworths Group’s AI innovation hub, she works at the intersection of people, strategy and technology, delivering some of the organisation’s boldest AI initiatives, producing tangible results across a workforce of more than 200,000 employees.
In an industry where AI can be intimidating, she has the aptitude for making complex technology feel useful and accessible for all teams.
Her work on the B2B sales partner AI solution is the perfect example.
Matavilana helped redefine a previously manual workflow into a data-driven engine for growth, by simplifying the process for sales representatives and educating the teams around her.
Her influence goes far beyond her 200,000 colleagues at the Woolworths Group. Matavilana is passionately dedicated to ensuring the next generation of AI and tech leaders mirrors the diversity of the communities that these technologies serve. Through initiatives like technical bootcamps, AI certification programs and Women in Data events, she helps create impactful opportunities for women, encouraging everyone to confidently step into leadership roles.
She has earned widespread admiration from her peers and colleagues as Woolworths Group CIO Richard Cohen puts it Matavilana “seamlessly connects AI strategy with production-ready execution,”. A powerful endorsement, especially from a leader so high up at one of Australia’s largest organisations.
It is this perfect balance between leadership and technical excellence that defines Katya Matavilana’s impact on the industry.
Design
Chloe Schumacher
Plus Also Studios
Few people embody the spirit of innovation in technology quite like Chloe Schumacher.
As senior product designer at Plus Also Studios, Schumacher has helped redefine what a modern creative technology studio can achieve.
Over the past year, Schumacher has been the driving design force behind nine AI-powered products, including plugins for Figma and Adobe Creative Suite and bespoke web tools for clients.
These tools now support 254 users, 54 daily active users and more than 2,000 daily usage actions, delivering efficiency gains of up to 80 per cent for creative teams.
The impact on the business has been extraordinary, generating $12 million in new business in a single year.
Her design leadership also extended to the Sydney Jewish Museum’s ‘Incommon’ campaign, where her accessible, user-centred website helped power a movement that reached millions of young Australians—175 million to be exact—contributing to global moderation policy change on TikTok, making the platform safer for all minorities.
This dedication to helping people extends into the media, marketing and advertising industry.
Devoted to helping like minded women, Schumacher deliberately made herself the first point of contact across both Howatson+Company and Plus Also Studios (PAS), carefully constructing guidance on product and digital design.
Her “genuine human empathy” and unwavering commitment to lend a hand created an environment where women feel comfortable asking for knowledge, feedback and support.
Developer
Sarah Federman
Canva
Sarah Federman is one of the most important members of the Canva engineering team because of her exceptional work in accessibility and the support she provides to the rest of the business.
During the past year, she took on one of the most technically complex and historically overlooked problems in modern design tools: enabling people with disabilities to independently create and edit designs using assistive technologies. Her work addressed long-standing barriers to equitable access in Canva and established a clear path toward WCAG AA compliance, supporting enterprise and education adoption.
Making Canva’s design tools fully accessible using screen readers and other technology required a complete rewiring of its backend while navigating legacy editor architecture, a parallel rendering re-architecture, and strict performance constraints. This work has literally changed the lives of users.
Federman also mentors two women engineers, helping them gain the skills to move beyond just executing and into strategic leadership by navigating ambiguity, defining milestones and communicating technical strategy with confidence. She also speaks at conferences, including the highly regarded A11y Camp, and meetups around the world on accessibility engineering and inclusive design, using her platform to amplify both the work and the people behind it.
“Sarah has gone the extra mile over her career to make software products more accessible and inclusive,” said one referee. We hope others will be inspired by her drive and determination to do the same.
Education/Research
Amanda Hogan
Girls' Programming Network
Amanda Hogan is leading the charge in training the next generation of women leading technology.
In the past year, her initiatives for the Girls’ Programming Network, which helps teach girls in high school programming, directly impacted 1,000 students and more than 50 teachers nationally, with policy and process changes that embed equity into tech education.
In the past year, Hogan has reframed content creation as both an educational and leadership-development opportunity through contribution pathways, mentoring structures and collaborative design processes.
She lives by the principle ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’, and ensures that women are represented equally in STEM subjects at high school and tertiary education.
Through her endeavours at events like SydPy, a monthly Python meetup, she is offering pathways for women to get into what is a traditionally male-dominated industry.
According to government data, only 22 per cent of university students in STEM courses are women or gender diverse, a figure that Hogan is determined to improve on the information and communication technology front.
“Amanda’s leadership of technology and education communities creates scalable, community-driven impact across schools and tertiary pathways,” Girls’ Programming Network chief executive Renee Noble said.
“Her ability to translate technical depth into inclusive educational practice sets a national benchmark for women-led leadership in tech education.”
Hogan’s deep understanding of why girls feel disengaged from computing, and the encouragement to make it an attractive career, are paying dividends.
Her learning projects reached close to 2,000 students in 2025, and she is at the forefront of training the next generation of women leading technology.
Employer
Zip Co
Creating a workplace where women thrive doesn’t just happen by accident, it takes hard work, intention, structure and someone who is going to push the agenda forward.
Zip’s strategy has helped spotlight and support a recruitment approach that’s delivering real, measurable change for women in tech and leadership. The ASX-listed fintech has set ambitious, Board-approved gender representation targets of 40 per cent women, 40 per cent men and 20 per cent any gender across the organisation—ensuring equality isn’t just talked about, but tracked too.
The results speak volumes. In FY25, almost half of all new technology hires were women, helping lift women’s representation in tech roles from 15 per cent to 27 per cent in just two years. Across the wider business, Zip now boasts 40 per cent women in leadership roles, 50 per cent representation on both the Board and Executive team, and 44 per cent across the total workforce.
But representation is only the start. The business has created initiatives that ensure women entering Zip actually stay and thrive—from inclusive hiring practices and diverse interview panels to internal communities includig Fearless Women@Zip and Women in Tech.
The impact can be felt across the company. Product manager Tabitha Withers said the culture has been pivotal to her growth: “I’ve never felt pushed to fit a certain profile to progress, I’ve been trusted with real responsibility and supported to grow through doing the work”.
And for newer hires like associate director of strategy Rosie Bradley, that culture is just as evident, as she shared: “I felt a strong sense of trust and inclusion from the beginning”.
With strong pipelines, visible female leadership and policies designed for long-term success, Zip Co. is proving that building a more equitable tech industry is absolutely achievable.
Engineer
Tara Tjandra
Atlassian
Tara Tjandra’s career is more of a masterclass in transformative leadership. Since joining Atlassian in 2017 as the only woman amongst her 40 person team, she quickly realised how essential visibility would become for her future.
“I needed to become a visible, technically capable leader to prevent doubt from impacting others,” she said.
Since those early days, Tjandra’s focus has been much about delivering pristine code and creating opportunity for others.
Fast-forward to the present, she’s a principal engineer shaping the backbone of Jira, Atlassian’s project management software, where she’s in charge of handling 65 billion requests every day.
Beyond technical feats, Tjandra has facilitated a culture built on inclusion, mentoring, coaching and amplifying those she feels have been underrepresented.
Her influence also stretches beyond the cloud. She partnered with the NSW state government and UNSW to help deliver open-source tools that evaluate renewable energy hubs, used by other major organisations including the Korean Government to validate green ammonia and hydrogen projects.
You ask what sets Tjandra apart? That rare blend of pragmatism, wit and ambition that she brings along with her to face every obstacle. She drives the mechanics needed to get things done aiming to bridge the gap between operational reality and strategy.
Tjandra is living proof that leadership and technical excellence are inseparable, and that paving the way for the next generation of female engineers is a job she takes extremely seriously.
Entrepreneur/Founder
Sorrel Kesby
EvenBetter.ai
Sorrel Kesby is a trailblazing entrepreneur and is redefining gender equality through AI Innovation.
In January of 2025, Kesby was determined to solve the structural and bias-led barriers preventing women from progressing in businesses around the world. So, she founded EvenBetter.ai, Australia’s first AI-powered platform purpose-built to identify and reduce gender-based pay inequality.
She identified that organisations understand that gender pay gap exists, but lack the tools to diagnose it accurately, model risk and action plan outcomes, and act with confidence.
Kesby saw this as an opportunity to apply AI in a practical, responsible way, enabling leaders to understand the implications of decisions before they are made, mitigate risk through the reduction of systemic and unintended bias, and minimise regulatory exposure and reputational harm, all while supporting sustainable workforce outcomes.
The AI tech warrior is reasonably fresh, but it is already having a mega impact. In just over a year Kesby has worked with the likes of Knight Frank, Dyno Nobel, Qoria, Fuji Australia, and Teachers Mutual Bank.
Not to mention that beyond these partners, Kesby continues to battle the injustice of inequality by speaking across HR conferences, Webinars and federal government roundtables.
Kesby models the exact values she advocates for, making her the perfect leader. She actively supports women’s progression in technology through her platform and direct mentorship, and leads with resilience, accountability, and focus.
Executive leader
Miranda Ratajski
Westpac
Miranda Ratajski leads from the front in all matters.
Over the past year, she led large scale, complex digital transformations for seven of Westpac’s 11 Group Executives who are responsible for more than a third of Westpac’s entire workforce. One transformation was an enterprise-wide digital procurement platform that saved more than $2 million per month.
But to focus on her remarkable technical achievements would only show one side of Ratajski’s impact on the bank. In addition to her role as CIO, she leads Westpac’s Technology DEI team which is tasked with increasing the representation of women across the Technology Division and Westpac Tech DEI’s FY30 Strategy. Since taking the reins in her current role, she has increased women in leadership and ensures a ‘women in leadership’ lens over all organisational design decisions.
She has also worked closely with Talent Acquisition on improving internal mobility resulting in nearly three-quarters of roles in her business unit being filled through internal promotion, rapidly outpacing the rest of the business, and supporting the retention of female talent.
Ratajski has also sponsored and delivered two transformative programs: Rising Women and EmPOWER UP. The former accelerates women into tech leadership roles. The latter supports individuals re-entering the workforce after an extended career break.
We could, genuinely, go on. But it’s this kind of advocacy and work that has led Ratajski to be not only a worthy winner but a worthy inductee to the Women Leading Tech Power List.
Finance & Accounting
Lara Wright
Arinco
Lara Wright is a finance chief who has played a pivotal role in the success of Arinco through one of the most significant organisational changes in the company’s history, In October, Arinco and D6 Consulting, both under the Connectico umbrella merged into one single entity to make it simpler for customers to engage with Arinco as a single, end-to-end partner for AI-led transformation.
She played a critical role in championing the merger to the board and shaping the financial strategy that underpinned the transition. This involved marrying the two companies’ strategic, financial and commercial strategies.
Wright took leadership over integrating a predominantly female team working in a silo under D6 Consulting into a much larger and broader skilled Arinco.
As a result, Arinco appointed its first female practice lead and two female supporting managers.
Over the past year, Wright has personally supported team members through formal qualifications, on-the-job learning and career progression, including developing and elevating a female team member with no formal finance qualifications to become a payroll and reporting manager.
In two male dominated sectors—the intersection of finance and tech—Wright is a trailblazer who actively creates opportunities for women to grow, lead and thrive.
Two-thirds of her finance team are women, due to a supportive, flexible and high-performing environment where people are assessed on capability and potential, not background or traditional hours worked.
“Through her strategic influence and people-first leadership, Lara has helped position Arinco for sustained success, contributing to more than 20 per cent year-on-year growth together with strong margins and a stronger foundation for the future,” one Arinco senior leader said.
She is also the epitome of a leader who leaves a lasting impression on not only the women she actively manages in the workplace, but also their families and support networks.
Glass Ceiling
Jade Loyzaga
Canva
Some people climb the ladder. Jade Loyzaga prefers to rebuild it so more people can climb with her.
As senior engineering director at Canva, Loyzaga has smashed through one of tech’s most stubborn glass ceilings—becoming the first woman to operate at this level of engineering leadership at the design giant. But if you ask those around her, the real story isn’t just the ceiling she broke. It’s the doors she’s opened behind her.
Technically, her résumé is formidable. Loyzaga spearheaded the engineering build of Canva Sheets, one of the platform’s most ambitious launches—a collaborative, visual spreadsheet designed to rethink how people work with data. When the feature debuted to the world at Canva Create in Los Angeles in 2025, it quickly became one of the platform’s most-loved tools.
Today she leads engineering across Canva’s massive search and content discovery ecosystem—a team of more than 570 engineers navigating the rapidly evolving world of generative AI.
But while she’s building products used by millions, Loyzaga is equally focused on building leaders.
As global lead of Canva’s Women’s Collective, she founded an Engineering Taskforce designed to make Canva a destination workplace for women in tech. The initiative introduced promotion-readiness programs, mentorship pathways and more equitable hiring processes. The results are tangible: representation of women in her engineering group has climbed from 21 per cent to 26 per cent, while senior developer representation has risen from 16 per cent to 21 per cent.
And the impact is deeply personal for those she’s mentored. Staff engineer Claire Kent says simply: “So much of my career, and the careers of dozens of other women, would not have happened without Jade.”
At Canva, Loyzaga hasn’t just cracked the glass ceiling—she’s making sure it never seals shut again.
Innovator
Brittany Fox
Nevam
Brittany Fox is redefining what it means to lead in customer experience and enterprise tech.
In just three months, she managed to transform a prototype into a solution for major Australian liquor chain BWS, mapping more than 90 friction points across customer journey whilst integrating platforms from Adobe, Google and Meta. A complete game changer for teams previously operating in silos.
She doesn’t stop at insight. Nevam, which Fox founded and leads, works to close the loop by linking all findings directly to operational systems, turning data into action. The result? Months of formerly invisible backlogs now uncovered, improving cross-team efficiency and saving money.
Fox is also recognised as a trailblazer for women in the tech industry. Whilst being a doting mother to two young children, Fox is a solo founder, proving that high-growth leadership and family life aren’t mutually exclusive. Her ambition is obvious. She believes Nevam will become the go to platform for enterprise insight, human-centric design and customer experience visibility all whilst simultaneously providing a model for women to innovate in tech.
As Kirstin Hunter Brown CEO Birchal put it, Fox is “the perfect mix of expertise and innovation, confidence and coachability, hustle and reality.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by the enterprises who’ve seen the ground breaking work Fox and Nevam can do.
She hasn’t just built the platform, she’s paved the way for the next generation of female tech leaders.
Marketing
Jun Lee Sia
carsales.com.au
Jun Lee Sia is the kind of marketer every organisation hopes to have in their inventory.
She is a trailblazer by instinct and a natural-born leader by practice, combining strategic clarity with creative conviction to deliver work that looks superb and drives real business transformation.
Sia’s leadership of the most significant brand refresh in carsales’ 25-year history stands as a defining example. She led the full brand refresh for Carsales and its family of marketplace brands.
The objective was to modernise and future proof the identity, make the brands more approachable, and create a coherent family of marketplaces that deliver a stronger and more intuitive customer experience.
The refresh delivered measurable brand and business outcomes. It prompted brand awareness to reach 93 percent. As well as awareness increased during the campaign period, with strong gains across key growth audiences including a 10 per cent uplift for Gen Z, an 8 per cent uplift for women and increases among newcomers to Australia.
The work materially also shifted business performance. Total users to the site increased by seven per cent, and new users increased by 29 per cent, demonstrating improved resonance with growth audiences.
During Carsales’ biggest refresh in 25 years Sia also found time to be an active member of the carsales mentoring program. Thanks to her guidance and mentoring, two of her mentees were able to secure junior roles in marketing having previously been in different disciplines.
Martech
Effie Athanassiou
Plus Also Studios
The world of marketing technology can sometimes feel aloof and it often feels cold. But Effie Athanassiou is working to change that at a break-neck pace.
As the creative director for Plus Also Studios, the AI startup spun out of leading Australian ad agency Howatson+Company, Athanassiou is responsible for bridging the gap between creative craft and the speed required by modern martech stacks.
For example, one of Plus Also’s major clients possessed a litany of tools from a customer data platform and CRM program to apps and websites but putting that knowledge to use through marketing material was hindered by a fragmented production model. The manual workflows could not keep up with the demand for personalised, data-driven content required to fuel their digital channels.
In response, Plus Also Studios designed a “Performance Innovation Loop”. This model shifted the focus from traditional volume-based delivery to value creation. Athanassiou ensured the creative output was directly tied to the client’s martech infrastructure, creating smarter, crafted executions to drive results across all platforms.
Described as having a “rare duality” in her voracious appetite for applying artificial intelligence to commercial challenges and remaining a “steadfast” custodian of creative excellence, Athanassiou is a pioneer in more ways than one. Her journey began far from the world of enterprise technology, her family having owned fish and chip shops. She has opened the door for other women to follow in her footsteps, with initiatives such as Cannes Lioness and direct action to dismantle boys’ clubs wherever she finds them—even in client work.
Mentor
Renee Noble
Girls' Programming Network
Renee Noble isn’t just a leading mentor for girls and women in technology, she is setting new systemic benchmarks for the development, retention and progression of women and gender-diverse people in technology.
Through her role as the CEO and national director of Girls’ Programming Network, she has designed and led a full-pipeline mentoring model that guides girls from primary school through to senior leadership.
In the past year, Noble’s focus has been on embedding a new leadership team structure and upskilled ten GPN volunteers to become committee members. This has allowed them and GPN to work more effectively, deliver higher-quality programs for students and create a more supportive and rewarding experience for volunteers.
“Renee has made me a better mentor, leader, and person. I am privileged to call her my mentor and my friend. She exemplifies the mentorship women need to thrive in technology,” said one colleague.
Noble is a leading national tech leader, educator and mentor of women.
Aside from leading GPN, she is CEO and chair of Tech Inclusion, founder of ConnectEd Code, and a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft.
Under her leadership, GPN has grown from a small Sydney-based program into a national initiative with 10,000 student enrolments and more than 1,000 volunteers come through in this time.
She has been named Women in Digital’s Champion of Change, ICT Educators NSW Leader of the Year, and featured in the AFR’s 100 Women of Influence.
People and Culture
Jane Adams
Commonwealth Bank
Building a more equal tech industry isn’t just about hiring more women—it’s about building the systems that help them stay, grow and lead. And that’s exactly the work Jane Adams has been driving at the Commonwealth Bank.
As executive general manager for HR in Technology, Adams sits at the centre of the bank’s push to reshape the talent pipeline for one of Australia’s largest tech workforces. And the strategy is anything but surface-level.
One of the flagship initiatives is EmpowerHer, a sponsorship program designed to help high-potential women step into senior technology leadership roles. Unlike traditional mentorship programs, EmpowerHer pairs participants with influential senior sponsors who actively advocate for their progression. The result? Strong promotion outcomes and a program so successful it boasts a 4.7/5 recommendation score from participants.
Adams has also helped scale the bank’s Women in Technology Network, now more than 640 members strong, creating a powerful internal community where women can connect, learn and build leadership confidence.
Crucially, the focus starts well before someone lands the job. Recruitment programs like CommBank’s Career Comeback Program are designed to attract talent returning to the workforce—a pathway that has already helped 65 women transition back into meaningful tech roles.
The impact is visible across the organisation. Today, more than half of CommBank’s workforce are women, supported by policies that prioritise flexible work, equitable pay and strong parental leave uptake.
For employees like cyber analytics leader Briana Wade, that environment has been transformative. She credits the bank with giving her “the trust, support and autonomy to turn belief into a meaningful and scalable capability”.
At a time when the industry is still grappling with gender imbalance, Adams is helping prove that real change happens when inclusion is engineered into the system itself.
People's Choice
Arsha Abayasingam
Canva
After a hotly contested race with more than 12,000 votes, Canva’s Arsha Abayasingam took the win in the Women Leading People’s Choice Award.
In the end, software engineer Abayasingam would prove no match for the competition, receiving a third more votes than her nearest rival. It isn’t hard to see why.
Working in Canva’s Ecosystem team, Abayasingam works on customer-facing platform services such as Connect API and the Canva MCP. Through this role, she contributes to externally launched capabilities that enable developers and AI systems to programmatically interact with Canva designs, placing her in a position of visible technical leadership.
Outside her technical role, Abayasingam assists interns, junior engineers and new hires, as well as mentoring multiple team members through onboarding and early project ownership. This has been explicitly recognised by peers, who described her as an “amazing person to work with” and making them “feel very welcomed and comfortable”.
Abayasingam even volunteers for Our Big Kitchen, which provides meals to disadvantaged people in Sydney. Here, she put her software skills to use leading a small team to develop a donation coordination system designed specifically to reduce operational fragility and improve reliability for a resource-constrained organisation. This work led to Our Big Kitchen doubling its large corporate contributors and charity partners, significantly improving the consistency and volume of food donations.
That work doesn’t go unnoticed by peers and the wider tech community. Abayasingam is a worthy People’s Choice Award winner.
Product
Terisa Roberts
SAS
Terisa Roberts is that a successful career in tech isn’t just spreadsheets and algorithms. She mixes strategy, sass and savvy in equal measure. Based in Sydney as global director of risk modelling, decisioning and governance at SAS, she oversees a tremendous portfolio of award-winning solutions that power some of the world’s largest banks, turning drawn out credit processes into near-instant experiences.
In 2025 alone, her personal innovations helped a client approve 70 per cent of credit card limits, bypassing the hassle of human intervention and boosting accuracy by 23 per cent.
Roberts’ influence goes far beyond career excellence. She is the executive sponsor of SAS’s Women’s Initiative Network (WIN) and an outspoken champion of women in tech. She often hosts roundtables, ensuring women entering the industry have visible role models.
Her thought leadership is equally global. Roberts has chaired a Risk Minds International roundtable on responsible use of AI, speaking on fairness and ethics and accelerated SAS’s alignment with the EU AI Act through model risk assessments and automated explainability. The solution Roberts and her team develop are trusted by many Global Systemically Important banks.
At the core of her career, Roberts believes that technology has evolved to serve society. In her realm, creating and developing AI solutions goes hand in hand with building inclusive, encouraging teams and developing a legacy that is as remarkable as it is ethical.
Public Relations
Celia Harding
LEOPRD
Celia Harding has emerged as one of the most important and forward-thinking figures in modern public relations, redefining how the communications industry operates in the age of artificial intelligence.
After two decades in PR working with global giants like Google, Diageo and Mastercard to underground festivals and upstart founders, Harding spotted a golden opportunity.
She discovered large language models (LLMs) were selecting who gets seen, heard and trusted. Meaning, if a brand doesn’t have credibility, isn’t shown a lot in the media and isn’t visible in all the right places, they don’t exist on LLMs.
That’s where Harding and her PR agency LEOPRD came in to save the day.
LEOPRD, the world’s first advisory dedicated to ‘LEO’ (language engine optimisation) is focused on not only helping brands get found, but also cited and trusted inside AI.
Flexischools, an Australian technology platform providing digital ordering, payments, and management for school canteens nationwide, was one of the first brands to take advantage of Harding’s tech genius.
The all-in-one school canteen, tuckshop, uniform, fundraising and events platform played a critical role in school operations, but was often overlooked as essential technology.
Harding stepped in, leading all aspects of the campaign and the results speak for themselves: 104 pieces of earned media coverage; 22.5 million total potential audience reach; 51 broadcast segments, including national television; and average domain authority of 79, strengthening long-term digital credibility.
But most importantly, high-authority editorial coverage strengthened Flexischools’ long-term AI visibility, with trusted media sources continuing to be cited in AI-generated responses.
Rising Star
Maddie King
MagicBrief
Maddie King joined Magic Brief in early 2024 as its marketing lead. At the time, she was the sixth hire at the ambitious startup. Initially, it lagged in brand awareness. But thanks to King’s exceptional work leading its marketing, customer acquisition and go-to-market execution, Magic Brief would build inexorable momentum and would be acquired by Canva for more than $20 million.
She achieved 10x annual recurring revenue without increasing marketing headcount. She onboarded hundreds of customers end to end, while driving sustained inbound interest from leading brands and agencies. She built and scaled MagicBrief’s Agency Partner Program.
She threw herself into the business so fully that she became the brand’s face and point of view across all its channels. People began to notice, the posts went viral and people started to ask how they could “be a Maddie on LinkedIn,” recognising the value of a visible, human leader behind a tech brand.
Seizing the moment, King launched Internet Ads Club, a creative strategy newsletter, and travelled to New York to spearhead MagicBrief’s expansion into the US market.
That King would prove to be such a dab hand in growing the business should not have been surprising. After surviving cancer, she built her first business at 20 years old, making headscarves for women who had lost their hair to the disease.
Her ambition is to keep making the tech business more inclusive, creative, flexible and human without requiring women to sacrifice their ambition.
Sales
Eliza Lewis
Fabulate
There are few sales executives more successful and inspiring as Eliza Lewis.
She plays an instrumental role in the success of Fabulate, the Aussie influencer marketing platform that is making real waves in the industry.
Lewis leads a high-performing sales team of 14 people, which is a 92 percent women-led function.
Under her watch, the Fabulate sales team expanded from Australia to 13 markets across APAC and beyond, supporting sustained international growth.
Her success is matched by the numbers. Lewis’ people-first approach saw her team deliver a 91 percent Net Promoter Score (NPS) across clients, which is remarkably high.
She is also a popular and well regarded leader; maintaining an 89 percent retention rate, which is incredibly high in the cut throat tech sales sector.
How does she do this? Partly by designing and implementing Fabulate’s internal mentoring programme, which connects team members with senior mentors both inside and outside the organisation.
She also introduced personalised development plans for all of her team, which provides clear progression goals across technical capability, commercial performance, and leadership development.
Over the past three years, Lewis has driven 450 per cent revenue growth, according to Fabulate co-founder Ben Gunn.
“This growth has been achieved with remarkable discipline and efficiency, increasing revenue 4.5 times while operating with only a twofold increase in capital expenditure,” he said.
“Under her leadership, sales efficiency per salesperson has increased by 140 percent, demonstrating her ability to build scalable systems rather than relying on individual performance alone.”
Lewis provides women with the support, dedication and mentoring that has helped Fabulate become one of the premier content creator marketing platforms not just in Australia, but globally.
The Women Leading Tech Award for Society
Alison Wong
Girls' Programming Network
If technology is about solving the big problems, then Dr Alison Wong has picked a few of the biggest.
By day, the University of Sydney senior lecturer and computational astrophysicist-turned climate technologist is helping tackle one of the planet’s most pressing challenges: methane emissions. After completing her PhD in computational astrophysics, Wong pivoted her expertise toward climate tech, leading a multidisciplinary team building a low-cost, ultra-precise methane sensor designed to detect emissions across industries from agriculture to gas infrastructure. Considering methane is responsible for roughly 45 per cent of recent global warming, the implications are pretty enormous.
Her work has already attracted serious backing, with Wong securing a highly competitive $500,000 grant to help transform the technology into a commercially viable product. As her colleague, Professor Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney puts it: “I firmly believe this work has the potential to be transformative for sustainability, with far-reaching applications in environmental monitoring and emissions reduction.”
But Wong’s impact doesn’t stop at the planet, she’s just as equally focused on the people who will shape its future.
As Chief Academic Officer of the Girls’ Programming Network, Wong helps run free Python workshops for high school girls and gender-diverse students across Australia, a program she once attended as a teenager herself. Today, the initiative reaches thousands each year, with Wong spearheading expansion efforts, including launching a new Brisbane node at the University of Queensland.
She’s also co-founder of Wattle Education, building desperately needed resources for the NSW HSC Software Engineering syllabus – already adopted by more than 25 schools.
As educator Amanda Hogan puts it: “Alison makes an extraordinary contribution to both the technology and education communities.”
From climate innovation to coding classrooms, Wong isn’t just building tech, she’s building a better future too.
