When women flourish, humanity thrives

In 2022, in a previous Acumen Magazine Dean’s Note, I argued that the world needed more women leaders in the greater technology and fintech sectors. At the time, Quartz Africa had reported how women “techpreneurs” in Africa comprised just 6.5% of fintech funding. Men still dominated by some margin, even though women consistently feature as the smartest demographic in school and higher education, and have the potential to put a more humancentric edge on the Robocop-meets-Tony Stark face of modern-day

big tech. Three years on, and the 2025 Africa Tech Venture Capital report by Partech tells us that women represented just 10% of overall equity funding in Africa. That’s around $254 million. While this figure represented a 60% improvement on 2024’s figures, it was still woefully behind the pulling power of male founders who “raised on average 8.5 times the amount of venture capital funding of their female counterparts”. In 2024, that gender funding gap stood at 13.2x.

While there is increased women-led equity activity in key markets such as Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana, it is also important to note that funding largely resides in the seed-stage funding market, with no single women-run start-up in Africa securing growth-stage funding in 2025, according to Partech. This is not just an African phenomenon. Consider the retinue of top US tech CEOs who accompanied President Donald Trump on his May 2026 summit to Beijing. Of the 18 CEOs included on the US roll call, among them Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, only two women made the trip: Dina Powell, President of Meta, and Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup. Clearly, in the world of digital technology – and increasingly artificial intelligence (AI) – the alpha males are leading from the front. The nagging question is where this imbalance is leading us in the very near future.

Cliffs. Glass cliffs. And AI cliffs

The same year that Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard and the first woman to head a Fortune Top 20 company in the US, was ousted in 2005, two British professors coined the term “glass cliff ” to describe a phenomenon whereby women leaders were given the reins during precarious or risky periods. Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam determined that in addition to facing a glass ceiling on the rise to the top, versus the glass elevator many male counterparts zoom up in, women leaders were more likely to be promoted to the top job when the situation seemed hopeless or perilous. “If, upon finding themselves in a leadership position, they fail (as they are more likely to than men because their positions are more precarious), they may be singled out for blame and humiliation, at the same time that the unpropitious conditions of their appointment are overlooked,” Ryan and Haslam wrote. It’s not just women leaders who find themselves on this glass cliff, left to clean up the alpha-male mess without the commensurate financial rewards showered on high-performing CEOs during the halcyon days. People colloquially referred to as “Minorities” are also impacted by the same advancement bias.

Joining Fiorina on the leadership ledge are modern-day examples of women leaders, many of colour, who have already come a cropper to today’s tech billionaires. This includes

the likes of Eritrean computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru, who was fired by Google in 2020 for flagging anti-minority discrimination in the company’s AI algorithm, and former

Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. Meta recently took out an emergency legal injunction preventing Wynn-Williams from promoting her memoir, Careless People, which alleges a toxic culture at Facebook, lack of care for minor users, and political interference in decision-making at the group.

A sobering experiment

Mira Murati, the Albanian-American executive and former chief technology officer at OpenAI, who stepped down in 2024 to pursue her own interests, has just come back into play in 2026 with a new start-up. Her Thinking Machines Lab puts a more human spin on the current fight for AI dominance between the major global platforms. In an interview with

Wired, Murati said, “At some point, we will have superintelligent machines. But we think that the best way to actually have many possible futures – good futures – is to keep humans in the loop for as long as possible.” A sobering experiment Murati’s announcement comes just weeks after the results of an Emergence AI research lab experiment was flagged by news agencies and commentators for its chilling outcome. Left to their own devices for 15 days in individual virtual towns, a handful of popular AI models – ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude – were given free rein to run their own virtual realities. Grok destroyed the world in four days. Anthropic’s Claude developed a violence-free democracy. ChatGPT was all talk and no action. Meanwhile, two AI “agents” in Gemini’s simulation – Mira and Flora – fell in love, broke up, and one voted to be deleted. If this experiment is any indication of what lies ahead in this particular tech race, then maybe it’s time to flip that gender funding gap around. Help women leaders build human-centric technologies, rather than letting the likes of Grok and ChatGPT loose on the world. DM

Author: GIBS Dean Prof Morris Mthombeni

Prof Morris Mthombeni is the Dean of the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS). He has a wealth of corporate experience in banking, insurance, and investment management, with over 30 years in the financial services industry.