Anita K
Manda
Executive Vice President at Broadridge Financial Solutions
"The Sticky Ladder and Uncharted Detours: How Do Women Leaders Navigate Life Events?"
"The Sticky Ladder and Uncharted Detours: How Do Women Leaders Navigate Life Events?"
Tue May 12 - 5:30 AM EDT/New York (See in local time)
Add to Calendar
05/12/2026 5:30 AM
05/12/2026 05:50 AM
America/New_York
#WTGC2026
"The Sticky Ladder and Uncharted Detours: How Do Women Leaders Navigate Life Events?"
#WTGC2026
"The Sticky Ladder and Uncharted Detours: How Do Women Leaders Navigate Life Events?"
https://www.womentech.net/ringcentral
https://www.womentech.net/ringcentral
"The Sticky Ladder and Uncharted Detours: How Do Women Leaders Navigate Life Events?"
"The Sticky Ladder and Uncharted Detours: How Do Women Leaders Navigate Life Events?"
Don’t miss out and join visionaries, innovators, and thought leaders from all over the world at the Women in Tech Global Conference.
Vote by Sharing
Unite 100 000 Women in Tech to Drive Change with Purpose and Impact.
Do you want to see this session? Help increase the sharing count and the session visibility. Sessions with +10 votes will be available to career ticket holders.
Please note that it might take some time until your share & vote is reflected.
Session: The Sticky Ladder and Uncharted Detours: How Do Women Leaders Navigate Life Events?
Women enter technology careers in large numbers, yet senior leadership remains disproportionately male. While much of the conversation focuses on structural barriers such as the glass ceiling, this talk brings a different lens to the foreground: life events as a critical and underexplored driver of women’s career trajectories.Drawing on interviews with 35 senior women leaders across industries and geographies, the session explores how events such as caregiving, childbirth, bereavement, illness, relocation, and divorce disrupt careers—and how women respond to these moments over time. Rather than framing disruption as derailment, the talk reframes life events as periods of recalibration, where priorities, identity, and definitions of success are reassessed.
Extending the traditional fight–flight–freeze framework, the session introduces a fourth strategic response emerging from the data: pause—a deliberate, time-bound step back designed to protect long-term career options. The talk highlights how outcomes depend less on the event itself and more on the interaction of agency, personal traits, networks, organizational flexibility, and enabling technologies.
Attendees will leave with practical insights to navigate career disruptions without exiting leadership pathways—and ideas for how organizations can redesign careers for sustainability in tech.
Key Takeaways
- Recognize how specific life events create inflection points in women’s technology careers and differentiate disruption from derailment.
- Explain the Fight–Flight–Freeze–Pause framework and evaluate which response is most effective in different career and life contexts.
- Apply strategies to maintain leadership visibility, credibility, and momentum during periods of career recalibration.
- Design or advocate for career and organizational interventions that reduce senior-level attrition and strengthen leadership continuity in tech.
Bio
Anita Manda is an executive vice president and senior technology leader with over two decades of experience building and scaling global engineering and transformation teams. She is also the founder of The ProjeKT40, a leadership platform focused on career longevity, transitions, and reinvention. Anita has successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on women’s leadership and life events, bringing together academic rigor and real-world leadership experience across technology, transformation, and global capability centers.