At Damilah, 48% of our 149 employees are women, and 22 women hold senior roles: Principal Product Owners, Delivery Directors, Tech Leads and Principal Engineers. In an industry where women make up around 29% of the workforce and as little as 5% of senior leadership, we are an outlier. And we have achieved this without a dedicated D&I department,
without a ring-fenced budget, and without formal quotas.
Women are taken seriously at Damilah. Our Principal Product Owners run multi-million-pound client programmes, Delivery Directors are accountable for P&L, and Tech Leads make architectural decisions on complex enterprise builds. It’s no wonder that our average tenure for women is the same as men’s at Damilah. Compare this to the broader tech industry, where women’s tenure is on average a third shorter than men’s.
We are nominated for the Diversity Teams Award because our “diversity team” comprises our leadership, our hiring managers, our engineers… everyone at Damilah.
Real results, no programme
There are three key ways we have achieved a balanced gender workforce:
1. Women on every hiring panel, at every level. Candidates meet women in technical and leadership roles from first interview. Women applicants see people who look like them making real decisions about the business. This creates a self-reinforcing pipeline: women join, women stay, women recruit.
2. Equal ownership of hard problems. Women at Damilah are given the same technical stretch, the same difficult clients, the same high-stakes delivery as their male peers. One of our senior engineers, Fikrije Stafai, was trusted with leading a major delivery early in her career and has grown into a leadership role. Her story is just one example of many and leads to our high retention of the best female talent.
3. Grassroots initiatives led by our people. We have no formal D&I function, but our people build inclusion into their everyday work. Olgica Strezoska, one of our product leaders, founded ProdACT, a peer community for product practitioners that has become a visible platform for women in product. Our whole team celebrates International Women’s Day by sharing stories, gifts and praise for the women working at Damilah. This video captures some of our female leaders’ perspectives in their own words: youtu.be/nac8zEIIUnU
Why this deserves recognition
The Diversity Teams category exists to honour teams that “make effective change regardless of what barriers are in place.” Our barrier is an industry-wide one: tech remains structurally hostile to women at all levels.
Our CEO, Iain Bishop, says: “Thanks to the women working at Damilah, we find a cultural balance in the office that I never see with teams that are predominantly male. In my opinion our teams are more open and collaborative because of this.”
Our CTO Aleksandar Karavasilev adds: “The women at Damilah often make up for the lack of gender diversity on our clients’ teams, providing alternative perspectives and bringing a different energy to client meetings.”
We are a mid-sized tech business, competing with much larger organisations that have huge D&I budgets. The 2025 winner, YHA, showed that impact beats resource. We offer a similar lesson, in a sector where it is needed most.
What comes next
We are now working to formalise what has so far been cultural. Winning this award would give that work a platform and give the women who built this culture the recognition they have earned.
