Women in ecommerce | why getting women involved was never the hard part
In July, we filled a room at Swan London with 80 women in ecommerce for an afternoon that wasn’t simply a networking mixer with great canapes. It was a live panel, an anonymous Q&A and facilitated breakout sessions, run as part of Meet Magento UK. No stage lighting to hide behind, and no names attached to the questions that actually mattered to the people in the room – meaning, we could be as candid, honest and open as we like.
We run Women in Ecommerce, because we know first hand the conversations women are having, in different rooms, with different women, at different stages in their careers. We also know that ecommerce has more women in the industry than people assume – and far fewer of them in roles that set direction. That gap is what Women in Ecommerce is about: whether women want to work in the industry was never the question. It’s whether the industry makes room for them once they’re in it that is.
Women in ecommerce as a first-time attendee
Marketing Manager, Vicki, joined JH about a week before Meet Magento UK. This was her first time at MMUK, and her first time at a Women in Ecommerce event.
Vicki has worked in marketing for almost two decades, most of it inside tech-driven, male-dominated businesses and industries.
“I’ve worked with a disproportionate number of men, in comparison to women,” she says. “Most women-centric events I go to are women in roles like mine. So Women in Ecommerce may have been a brand new experience for me, but the stories being told on the day weren’t.”
In marketing, Vicki explains that the barrier to entry – and in particular the barrier to growth – comes down to the same thing: marketers spend so much time and energy justifying its own existence, before they get to do their job.
“At the beginning of my career in particular, it was a hard slog to prove that marketing was strategic, not decorative,” she says. “Proving that I belonged in the same meeting rooms as product, engineering or finance was hard. No one questioned their presence – mine was constantly.”
Put that in a male-dominated room, and the justification doubles. Vicki has sat in rooms where men have made points that Vicki had made previously, and it has been accepted without follow-up questions. For Vicki, that wasn’t the case.
“Ultimately, it was fine, because I got my own way. But the lack of credit where it was due was harmful to my career development, for sure.”
What made Women in Ecommerce so energising – not just for Vicki – was so much more than the panel, hosted by Nicole Donnelly, featuring Suzanna Chaplin, Be Kaler and Elena Savvides, as useful as it was. It was the realisation that the room was full of women who’d been doing the same thing for years:
- Working out how to phrase something so it would land
- Deciding which battles were worth having that week
Hearing that echoed throughout the day, from people who’d built excellent career despite it, rather than around it, did more for Vicki and the women in attendance than any amount of reading about representation gaps ever has.
Ecommerce’s problem isn’t getting women in
Women make up 29% of the UK tech workforce and around 25% of STEM roles overall. Those numbers have been improving, slowly, for a decade. The number that hasn’t moved anywhere near as much:
Women hold roughly 21% of senior tech roles, and at fast-growing UK tech scale-ups, women make up only 18% of board seats – with more of a third of those companies having no woman on the board at all.
Women in Technology’s 2026 UK report put it plainly:
“The central challenge is no longer entry into tech. It’s progression, retention, and equitable access to leadership.”
Ecommerce doesn’t sit outside of this pattern; it sits right inside it.
You can see the same shape in the pay data. Programmers and software developers – a role that’s 81% male – carry a 15.7% gender pay gap. Professional, scientific and technical services sit at 16.4%.
Call it what it is: a promotion and pay problem dressed up as a hiring problem – and ecommerce inherits that wholesale, because it borrows its org charts and its career ladders straight from tech.
That’s not a reason for pessimism. It’s actually useful information, because it tells companies where to actually put the effort. Recruitment drives and women in tech panels at careers fairs address a problem that’s already easing. Sponsorship, transparent promotion criteria and leadership pipelines address the one that isn’t.
Ecommerce already has the people it needs
Traditionally, ecommerce has a habit of hiring for its own image. Job specs ask for candidates who’ve done ecommerce before, which ultimately filters out anyone whose experience came from elsewhere – retail, hospitality, publishing, fashion buying, or even running their own online shop. That experience is directly relevant to customer behaviour, merchandising or operations at scale.
Antonia Ellis, writing for WeAreTechWomen, makes the case that a non-linear career is an asset, rather than something to apologise for. Her own path went through art and fashion before commercial leadership at Christian Dior and Sainsbury’s, and she argues the industry jumps were the accelerant:
“The unexpected turns, industry jumps, leaps of faith and moments that feel like detours often become the greatest accelerators.”
That matches Vicki’s experience, and the experience of a lot of women already working in the ecommerce space. Almost none of them planned a route, they simply moved sideways through marketing, operations, customer service or running their own store on a platform they later ended up building on professionally.
The skills gap the industry worries about: digital merchandising, conversion, customer experience etc. gets solved faster by recognising the people already doing adjacent work, rather than by waiting for more computer science graduates to arrive.
That’s also true of the Magento space. A platform community built up around developers doesn’t automatically make room for the people running the storefronts, campaigns and customer journeys on top of that code. Those roles are ecommerce roles too – and where a lot of women already sit – often without the title or recognition to match.
Hiring for potential over pedigree takes more work up front. You read a CV without the familiar keywords, you then have to actually think about what the experience translates to. But the agencies and retailers that figure this out first, get first pick of a talent pool that everyone else is ignoring – which is as much as competitive advantage as it is the right thing to do.
Where women in leadership actually end up
Global data from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph, analysed by the World Economic Forum, shows women hold about a quarter of C-suite roles overall, but that number hides where they land:
- Chief HR Officer: around two thirds women
- Chief Marketing Officer: about half women
- Chief Financial or Operating Officer: roughly a quarter
- Chief Technology Officer: under 9%
- Chief Executive: just over 19%
Ambition and capability don’t explain that spread. When functions get treated as a runway to the top job, and which get treated as support, explains it far better. Ecommerce leadership draws heavily on the functions sitting on the wrong side of that line: technology, operations, P&L ownership, so the same pattern shows up at the top of ecommerce org charts, even in businesses with plenty of women further down.
Mentorship helps someone understand the game. Sponsorship gets someone put forward to play it, a senior person spending their own credibility to get a name into a room they wouldn’t otherwise be in. The panel and anonymous Q&A at events like ours at Meet Magento UK are good for the first. Moving the numbers above takes a lot more of the second – and it has to become a habit rather than a one-off gesture.
What we learned from Women in ecommerce at Meet Magento UK
The format mattered just as much as the content. Anonymous Q&A exists because plenty of the honest questions – about pay negotiations, about being the only woman in a leadership meeting, about how to push back on a decision without being labelled difficult – don’t get asked outloud when there’s a name attached. That says more about the environments these women go back to on Monday morning than it does about the women themselves.
It’s also why events like this need to keep existing, growing and building, rather than becoming a one-off box ticked in a diversity calendar each event season. Most of what gets shared in that anonymous Q&A, or over a glass of wine in the breakout groups, is the sort of thing a woman usually carries alone.
“I did that for years,” says Vicki. “Even when I talked to other women. Their response was: well, what can you do? The assumption is that it’s a personal problem, not a structural one. Women in Ecommerce flipped that narrative for me this year.”
Indeed, problems said out loud in a room of eighty people who nod along, it stops being personal and becomes a pattern – and patterns are the thing you can actually organise against and grow from.
The Magento Diversity Initiative, running since 2018, set out to make diversity efforts in the community measurable rather than aspirational. It tracks conference speaker line-ups and attendee data in public, rather than leaving it as a private good intention. Its founder’s frustration was simple: plenty of communities say they care, but far fewer publish the numbers that prove it.
That’s a model worth repeating: something you can point to a year later and ask whether it actually changed anything, rather than another well-meaning statement nobody checks up on.
What we do at JH, and why we’re committed to more
We’ve run JH with flexible and remote working built in as standard since 2016. It’s not a perk to negotiate for, because we’ve seen too many good people get pushed out of the industry by rigid hours that had nothing to do with the job getting done. It’s one of the reasons our team looks the way it does – and we’re glad about that.
We’re also realistic in the sense that we know our working policy wont’ move an industry-wide number. What moves it is that every hiring manager who reads a CV with an unconventional route into ecommerce – or none at all – sees potential instead of a gap. Every leadership team that tracks promotion data by gender the way it tracks conversion rate, and every event that’s willing to hand the floor to the people that make up a huge portion of the audience.
We’ll be running more Women in Ecommerce events in 2027 – not just as a fringe event for Meet Magento UK. And we want them to be shaped by the people they’re actually for. If you were at Women in ecommerce in July – or wish you had been – there’s a form below. Tell us what you want the next one to cover: what format works for you, and what would make it worth a few hours out of your day.
Differentiation gets talked about a lot in ecommerce. We want representation to be talked about more than once a year.
We’ve been asked a lot of questions about our next event. Let’s shape what that looks like together. Fill in this form, and we’ll go from there.
Women in Ecommerce at Meet Magento UK 2026 was organised by JH, alongside Nicole Donnelly at Hello Moxie and Sara at The Women’s Domain. Lead sponsors: ShipperHQ, Adobe, and Corefinity. Co-sponsored by the Magento Association and Hello Moxie.
