2025-09-25 –, Orbit
Thirteen years ago, I walked into my first programming class as one of a few women among seventy men and the numbers haven’t shifted much despite all the bootcamps and “Girls Who Code” posters promised. Today, women still make up under 30% of the tech workforce and even fewer in leadership. This talk blends personal experience and data to explore why that matters: companies with more women in leadership perform better, women are built to thrive under pressure, and when women are missing from tech, their perspectives are missing from the data too. Diversity isn’t charity or PR, it's how we build better systems.
Thirteen years ago, I walked into my first lecture as a computer science student, a classroom of seventy men, with only a few women among us.
That classroom was my entry point into tech and it turns out, the ratios haven’t changed much. Women still make up under 30% of the tech workforce, and even fewer in leadership. This talk connects that lived experience to the bigger picture: how the absence of women shapes the systems we build. Companies with more women in senior leadership see stronger culture, higher engagement, and even higher profits. Biologically, women are wired to handle stress, countering the myth that they’re less suited for high-pressure leadership. And when half the world is missing from the teams designing our products, their perspectives are missing from the data which means the systems we build are biased by design.
I’ll share what it takes to stay in a field that keeps quietly asking if you belong and why I stayed anyway. Because diversity doesn’t just change who’s at the table; it changes the quality of what we build.
Basak Eskili is a Sr. Machine Learning Engineer with over 7 years of experience building ML systems across banking, retail, and travel. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, and currently works at Booking.com. She is also the co-founder of Marvelous MLOps, where she creates online courses and writes about MLOps.