Women in Tech Global Conference 2026: 4 Days, 700+ Speakers, & 1 Unmissable Opportunity to Shape the Future of Tech
The question of what it means to be a woman in technology in 2026 is not a narrowly demographic one. It is a question about who shapes the systems, products, models, and policies that are increasingly governing how the world works. The most powerful AI systems being deployed today were designed by teams. The governance frameworks being written to regulate them are being written by people.
The organisations deciding which AI applications to build and which to hold back are being led by executives who are making consequential choices every day. The Women in Tech Global Conference 2026, running from May 12 to May 15 on a virtual-first platform with in-person networking events, is built around a single conviction: that the future of technology is determined by who is in the rooms where these decisions are made, and that the rooms need to be bigger, more diverse, and better connected than they have ever been.
With 700 speakers, 183 confirmed sessions, 100,000 expected attendees across 172 countries, and four thematically distinct summits spanning executive leadership, AI and emerging technology, career growth, and startup innovation, the 2026 edition is the largest gathering of women in tech that the WomenTech Network, now operating across 172 countries with more than 12,500 ambassadors globally, has ever organised.
Why This Conference Exists and Why 2026 Is Its Most Significant Edition Yet?
The WomenTech Network was founded on a premise that has become more urgent, not less, as the technology industry has grown: that diversity in tech is not a pipeline problem to be solved by encouraging more women to study computer science, but a systemic challenge embedded in how organisations hire, promote, and value people, and that addressing it requires community, information, visibility, and access to the networks where opportunities actually form. The Women in Tech Global Conference was created to be all four of those things simultaneously, in a single event that happens to be the largest of its kind in the world.
The 2026 edition is taking place at a particularly consequential moment. Artificial intelligence is reshaping job descriptions, organisational structures, investment priorities, and the very definition of what technical expertise means. The executive women who are navigating these shifts, the engineers building the systems, the product managers deciding what gets shipped, the founders raising capital for their companies, and the career professionals trying to understand where they stand in a rapidly transforming labour market are all facing versions of the same question: what do I need to know, who do I need to know, and what do I need to do differently to succeed and lead in this environment?
The four summits at WTGC 2026 are each designed to answer a specific dimension of that question for a specific audience, while the shared platform, the network, and the community that surrounds the event make every attendee a connection point in a global professional web that extends well beyond four days in May.
“To create a more diverse and inclusive tech world, we need to inspire and empower the next generation of female role models. It’s a process and it’s not always straightforward. It takes time, action and support.” – Anna Radulovski, Founder, WomenTech Network
Four Summits, Four Audiences, One Conference: The Complete 2026 Programme
The structural innovation at the heart of WTGC 2026 is its organisation into four dedicated summits, each running on a dedicated day and each targeting a distinct but overlapping audience. A single registration accesses all four, making the conference not a single-topic event but a four-day immersion across the full range of challenges and opportunities that women in tech face in 2026.
- May 12, Tuesday, Chief in Tech Summit
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- Designed for C-suite executives and senior leaders navigating the intersection of AI strategy, digital transformation, board governance, cybersecurity, and organisational culture change. Tracks cover AI governance, data sovereignty, responsible AI, ESG, the path to the C-suite, and executive presence. Sessions are delivered by CTOs, CDOs, CEOs, and non-executive directors from global organisations including DHL, HP, Globe Telecom, Checkout.com, MSQ DX, and Victoria University.
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- May 13, Wednesday, AI and Key Tech Summit
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- The technical summit covers the full AI stack: agentic AI, LLMs, generative AI, MLOps, cloud and DevOps, cybersecurity, IoT, robotics, quantum AI, multimodal systems, edge computing, and decentralised technologies. Industry AI playbooks for vertical sectors. UX and conversational design. Software engineering leadership. For engineers, data scientists, AI practitioners, and technical leads working at the frontier of what is being built.
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- May 14, Thursday, Career Growth Summit
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- The career and professional development summit for women at every stage: those searching for their first role, those returning after a career break, those navigating salary negotiation and promotion decisions, those building personal brands and professional networks, and those seeking mentorship and sponsorship relationships. Eight distinct tracks covering pivots, reskilling, leadership, job search preparation, compensation, advocacy, and inspirational career stories from leaders across the industry.
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- May 15, Friday, Startup and Innovation Summit
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- For founders, early-stage investors, and operators building and backing companies. Tracks cover product-market fit, fundraising and investor readiness, go-to-market strategy, startup talent and hiring, legal and IP strategy, venture trends, cross-border scaling, corporate venturing, and startup vertical spotlights. Live startup demos. Tools showcases. Fireside chats with investors and founders on what it takes to build a venture-backed company in the AI era.
The conference also includes in-person networking events across multiple cities under the WIT Connect Summit, bringing the community together face-to-face around the edges of the virtual programme. These events, which have historically been one of the most valued elements of the WomenTech conference experience, provide the kind of relationship-building that video platforms enable partially but cannot fully replicate. For attendees who can access an in-person gathering, these sessions represent the highest-density networking opportunity in the conference’s programme.
The Speaker Roster: 700 Voices from the Organisations Building the Future
The quality of a conference is ultimately determined by the quality of its speakers and the specificity of what they are willing to share. The WTGC 2026 speaker roster reflects both the breadth of the programme and the seniority of the community that WomenTech Network has built over the years it has been operating. Across all four summits, speakers hold positions at organisations that include Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, Meta, HP, Oracle, IBM, JP Morgan, Qualcomm, Netflix, Salesforce, Verizon, Bloomberg, Reddit, Mastercard, EY, Deloitte, Cisco, Arm, LinkedIn, and dozens of high-growth startups and research institutions.
The session topics these speakers are presenting reflect the specific questions that practitioners and leaders are wrestling with in 2026. Andrea Hofmann of DHL is presenting on architecting agentic workflows at the speed of AI. Linh TRAN from the French Ministry of Economics is addressing why AI is no longer a tech topic and why women CEOs are essential to getting it right.
Onur Korucu is covering AI governance in the C-suite: balancing risk, adaptability, and innovation. Gil Baram of the University of California Berkeley is presenting on how AI is reshaping cyber incidents and executive decision-making. These are not retrospective academic surveys. They are current practitioner assessments of live challenges by people who are in the room where the decisions are being made.
The Career Growth Summit: The One Day You Cannot Afford to Miss If You Are Building a Career in Tech
The Career Growth Summit on May 14 deserves particular attention because it addresses the dimension of the Women in Tech challenge that is both most personal and most practically actionable. Career growth in tech is not a single problem.
It is a cluster of related challenges that look different depending on where a person is in their professional journey: a software engineer at a large company trying to understand how to move into a management track; a professional returning to the workforce after a career break who needs to understand what has changed and how to position herself; a mid-career leader trying to negotiate a compensation package that reflects her actual market value; a technical professional who wants to build a public profile and thought leadership presence but does not know where to start.
The eight tracks of the Career Growth Summit address each of these situations with specificity rather than generality.
- Career Paths, Pivots and Reentry
- Skill Development and Lifelong Learning
- Leadership, Mentorship and Sponsorship
- Job Search, Resume and Interview Prep
- Career Advancement Strategies
- Personal Branding and Professional Networking
- Remote, Hybrid and the Future of Work
- Inspirational Career Stories
The sessions are being delivered by practitioners at companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, HP, Vanguard, Barclays, Bloomberg, LinkedIn, Lloyds Banking Group, ING, Cardinal Health, Mastercard, and Qualcomm, alongside coaches, founders, and independent practitioners who specialise in the specific career transitions and challenges the summit addresses.
Dr. Cindy McGovern, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and founder of Orange Leaf Consulting, is presenting. Jane Hanson, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and executive communication strategist, is speaking. Neelu Kaur, a speaker, author, and organisational psychologist, is addressing burnout and resilience in the AI era. The practical orientation of these sessions is not incidental. The Career Growth Summit is specifically designed to produce actionable outcomes, not inspirational sentiment.
Companies Hiring, Mentorship Programmes, and the Professional Network You Build Here
One of the features that distinguishes WTGC from a content-only conference is its active integration of career opportunities directly into the event experience. The conference operates a dedicated Jobs and Companies section in which organisations actively hiring at the time of the event display open roles and connect directly with attendees. The 2026 roster of hiring companies includes EY, Kyndryl, Akamai Technologies, Arm, New Relic, NTT DATA, Schneider Electric, Deloitte, Sage, and Criteo, among others, representing a range of organisation sizes, sectors, and geographies that reflects the diversity of the tech industry itself.
The WomenTech Network’s Mentoring Programme runs alongside the conference, matching attendees with mentors from the network’s global community of practitioners and leaders. The Professional Profile feature allows attendees to build a permanent presence within the WomenTech community, discoverable by employers, mentors, and peers, that extends well beyond the four days of the conference. The ambassador network, more than 12,500 strong across 172 countries, means that the community an attendee enters at WTGC 2026 is one with active nodes in virtually every country where a career in tech is being pursued.
The conference is a point of entry into that network, not the entirety of it. As seen in coverage by Forbes, Bloomberg, CNET, Reuters, and Fortune, the WomenTech Network and its conference have achieved a visibility and credibility in the global technology community that makes this network a genuinely valuable professional asset rather than a token membership.
How to Attend, What Tickets Are Available, and Why You Should Register Now?
The Women in Tech Global Conference 2026 runs from May 12 to May 15, 2026. The conference is virtual-first, with in-person networking events in select cities through the WIT Connect Summit. Attendance is open to anyone who registers, including women working in tech, those considering a career transition into tech, allies and advocates, founders, executives, investors, students, and anyone with a stake in the question of who shapes the technology being built and deployed. There are no geographic, institutional, or sectoral barriers to participation.
The conference has historically been attended by people from 172 countries, reflecting a genuinely global reach that most industry events, constrained by geography or cost, cannot approach.
- Full Access (All-Access VIP Ticket): Access to all four summits, all 183+ sessions, Main Stage keynotes, networking events, career marketplace, and all on-demand content. The complete WTGC 2026 experience.
- Teams and Companies (Group Tickets): Group registration for teams and organisations sending multiple attendees. Reduced per-head cost. Ideal for companies investing in their team’s development and visibility at the world’s largest women in tech event.
- Sponsors and Partners (Partnership Opportunities): For organisations that want to reach, engage, and recruit from a global community of 100,000+ women in tech and allies. Sponsorship packages include speaking slots, hiring marketplace presence, and branded content opportunities.
A scholarship programme is also available for attendees who cannot fund their own registration, ensuring that cost is not a barrier to access for those in the community who need the conference most. Applications are open at the WomenTech Network website. Volunteering positions are also available for those who want to contribute to the event in exchange for access.
The case for attending WTGC 2026 does not rest on sentiment. It rests on the specific, concrete value that 183 sessions of practitioner knowledge, a career marketplace integrated with companies actively hiring, a mentorship programme connecting attendees with experienced leaders, and a global professional network that spans 172 countries can deliver to someone who is serious about their career and their contribution to the technology industry. The conference opens on May 12. Registration is open now. The four days ahead are, by any measure, worth showing up for.