Why I'm writing this

As a Scrum Master and Agile coach, I'm often the only woman at the table. Not because I'm looking for that, but because in IT it's still more often the rule than the exception. I've learned that this position brings something with it: you look at a team, a system, a change, just a little differently. Less focused on who shouts the loudest, more on what a team actually needs to get moving again.

I recognise that same way of looking in the history of tech itself. Not the history you hear on most stages, but the foundations laid by women who saw what a system needed and simply built it. Their way of working isn't a distant past. It's the lens I bring into transformation work every day: bringing structure without losing the human element, and making change succeed because people carry it themselves, not because a process prescribes it.

This piece therefore starts with that history, moves on to what IT is truly worth to an organisation like Essent, and arrives at what that means today for my work as a transformation specialist. In the coming period I'll be writing more often about IT within Essent it feels fitting to bring along a piece of history.

The mothers of tech that no one put on the stage

When you think of "the history of tech," names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg probably come to mind. But IT wasn't invented by one man in a garage. The foundations we still build on today were laid by women who rarely got the stage they deserved.

Did you know that Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm ever, back in the nineteenth century? For a machine that hadn't even been built yet. She saw something no one around her saw: that a calculating machine could one day do more than calculate. That insight lies at the base of everything we now call "software."

Grace Hopper built the first compiler and made programming accessible to people who weren't mathematicians. Without her work, we'd still be speaking to computers in machine code instead of readable language. She's also the one who helped bring the term "debugging" into the world, after a literal moth caused a malfunction in a computer.

Hedy Lamarr was known as a film star, but between takes she developed frequency hopping: a technique to secure signals against interference and interception. That principle underlies wifi, bluetooth, and GPS technology you're probably using right now, while reading this.

Radia Perlman wrote the spanning tree protocol in the 1980s the "traffic rules" that networks still use today to keep data flowing reliably, without the system getting stuck in endless loops. She's known as the "mother of the internet," a title she'd rather not carry herself, as she explains in an interview: "Don't call me the mother of the internet." Worth a read.

What these women have in common isn't that they sought recognition. They saw what a system needed and built it. That's exactly the kind of work still needed today: not the loudest stage, but the sharpest eye for what genuinely moves an organization, a team, or a technology forward.

What IT is really worth to an organisation like Essent

In many organisations, IT is still too often seen as a supporting department: something that runs, until it doesn't. But at an organization like Essent where energy, data, and systems change at breakneck speed IT isn't the back office. It's the organisation's nervous system.

A few places where that value becomes concrete:

Reliability as a basic requirement. Just as Radia Perlman's protocol keeps a network from getting stuck, good IT keeps the organisation running, even when something goes wrong. That's not a "nice to have" t's the condition on which all other value is built.

Speed of adaptation. The energy transition demands organizations that can continuously adjust: new regulations, new customer needs, new technology. IT teams that work in an agile way aren't following a trend they're building the organization's capacity to stay agile in a market that never stands still.

Data as a compass. Decisions once made on gut feeling are now grounded in data about consumption, about networks, about customers. IT makes those insights possible, but only if the systems behind them are sound and the people working with them understand each other.

People, not just systems. The biggest failure factor in transformations is rarely the technology itself. It's the way teams work together, build trust, and accept or resist change. That's where transformation work, agile coaching, makes the difference between a system that looks good on paper and an organisation that's actually better off for it. "People leave people, not organisations" is a well-known saying for good reason.

So IT doesn't just deliver infrastructure. It delivers the organisation's capacity to keep moving.

What that history has to do with today

Back to Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Hedy Lamarr, and Radia Perlman. What they did wasn't just technical pioneering. It was something else too: they built foundations in a world that wasn't built for them, and did so with a perspective that was just a little different from those around them.

That's exactly what women still bring to IT and transformation work today not as a quota, but as added value. Connecting systems and people. Bringing structure without losing the human scale. Seeing what a team needs to get moving again, not just what the process prescribes on paper.

As a Scrum Master, Agile coach, and transformation specialist, that's precisely where I make the difference: not by imposing a format, but by looking at where things are genuinely stuck in the systems, in the collaboration, in the trust between people. Transformation doesn't succeed because a board is full of sticky notes. It succeeds because people feel ownership of the change and that only happens by truly listening to people and carrying the change together. When I started at Essent my manager was also a woman, for the first time I experienced a change in my growth because she see me gave me full trust.

As you've seen, IT has always had many mothers. The question is no longer whether women belong there that's long settled. The question is how we give those insights, that connecting perspective, a central place again in today's teams and organisations. At Essent IT, and beyond.

And this isn't a story of women versus men. The best teams I've seen transform were the ones where that connecting perspective attention to the human alongside the system was carried by everyone, regardless of who brought it in. Ada Lovelace needed her mathematical sparring partners, Grace Hopper her colleagues at the Navy, Radia Perlman her team at DEC. Transformation is never the work of a single perspective. It gets stronger as more people, women and men alike, learn to look through that combination of structure and connection.

That might be the concrete insight from this piece: the next breakthrough in your team probably isn't hiding in a new framework or process, but in the question of who isn't being heard yet, and what they see that you're missing.

For the women reading this who recognise themselves in it: within Essent and E.ON there's Women in Digital Tech, a group that facilitates exactly this kind of connection. As a member, you get access to workshops and gatherings where you connect with other women in tech on the substance of the work, on wellbeing, and on how to give your own perspective a place within a larger organisation. Curious? Look up the group on the internal network, or send me a message and I'll connect you.

Do you recognise this in your own team or organization, or would you like to talk through what a transformation like this looks like in practice? I'd welcome that conversation.