Women in IT Contracting | Building something I wished had existed

The thread I couldn't ignore.

Thirteen years in a perm IT roles will teach you a lot. I went from IT Service Desk to Service Delivery Manager to heading up departments for brands like Harrods, Selfridges and VMO2. I learned the technical side. I learned how organisations work, how people work, and how to lead change in environments that do not always make it easy.

In 2023 I made the decision to go and work for myself, and since then I have worked with the likes of John Lewis, BT and Charlotte Tilbury.

But throughout all of it, across every role, every sector, every room I sat in, there was a thread I kept seeing. Women in tech, specifically women contracting or considering it, were navigating something genuinely hard without much of a map. Not because the capability was not there. It absolutely was. But because the community, the confidence, the connections that make the difference between struggling alone and building something sustainable, those things were harder to find.

I kept waiting for someone to build that space. And then I decided it was going to be me.

Building from zero

In January 2026, I launched Women in IT Contracting with no audience, no existing community and no template to follow. What I did have was a clear sense of what it needed to feel like: real, warm, useful and just the right amount of no-nonsense. And that right there, is the why. The purpose.

After the strategy planning (which, I think you'll understand why I am not sharing it publicly), then came the branding. Deep forest green and white. Fonts that felt considered rather than corporate. A tagline that said exactly what we were about: "The glass ceiling called. We put it on mute." The language across everything was deliberate, because the way you speak to a community shapes how safe people feel inside it.

From there I built the architecture: a Linkedin group, a WhatsApp group for the day-to-day conversations, free monthly roundtables for the community to show up and connect, a newsletter to keep everyone anchored, paid learning programmes covering personal branding, commercial confidence and market visibility, and a podcast currently in the making. Every pillar was built around the same three things: confidence, connection and craft.

Where we are now

Six months in, we have over 50 women in the community, starting from a standing zero. The newsletter is growing at 20% month on month. The LinkedIn page picked up 70 new followers in 30 days, a 105.9% increase, from a page that did not exist before January.

But the number I care about most is not on any dashboard. It is the number of women who have told me they found us at exactly the right moment. That is the one worth building for.