Why a separate practice area at all
A reasonable objection: leadership is leadership, so why treat coaching for women in tech as its own thing? Because a meaningful share of what comes up in these sessions is not explained by seniority alone, and coaching that ignores that spends the first several sessions establishing context the client should not have to argue for.
The themes below recur often enough across engagements to be worth naming. None of them are universal, and part of the coaching work is separating what is actually happening in your situation from a pattern you have read about.
The over-proving loop
Many women in senior technical roles describe preparing three times as much evidence as they expect to need, because experience has taught them their conclusions will be probed more than a peer's. The tax is real and it is also self-reinforcing: the more thoroughly you pre-empt every objection, the more your authority appears to rest on documentation rather than judgement. Coaching works on both the external pattern and the internal habit.
Visibility versus volume of work
Technical women are disproportionately assigned the work that holds an organisation together and does not appear in a promotion packet: onboarding, incident coordination, cross-team glue work, mentoring. Coaching here is concrete. It covers what to decline, how to decline it without becoming the difficult one, and how to make consequential work legible to the people who decide on promotions.
The double bind on directness
The same clear disagreement in a design review can be received as leadership from one person and as attitude from another. Coaching does not pretend this resolves by adjusting your tone. It builds a repertoire — when to absorb the cost of being direct, when to route through allies, when to put it in writing — so the response is a deliberate choice rather than a reflex.
Being the only one
Being the sole woman on a leadership team is isolating in a specific way: there is no one to check your read of a room with, and raising that fact is itself risky. A coach outside your organisation is a place to think without managing anyone's perception of you.
In short
- Coaching here covers standard leadership work and the extra load specific to being a woman in engineering.
- The coach has led engineering teams at scale, so technical context needs no translation.
- Sessions are confidential and outside your employer's reporting line.
- It is not therapy, and it is not advocacy — the goal is your judgement and your agency.
What this is not
It is not confidence training. The premise is not that women need fixing in order to succeed in engineering; most clients arriving here are already highly capable and accurately perceiving their environment. Nor is coaching a substitute for organisational change — a coach cannot repair a biased promotion process. What coaching can do is help you decide, clearly, how to operate inside the organisation you have while deciding whether to stay in it.
Who this suits
- Senior ICs moving into management — staff and principal engineers taking on people leadership for the first time.
- Engineering managers and directors — growing scope, more matrixed influence, less direct control.
- VPs and heads of function — often the only woman at that table, with fewer peers to think alongside.
- Returners — re-entering technical leadership after a career break and recalibrating.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be in a leadership role already?
No. Clients include senior individual contributors weighing a first move into management, as well as directors and VPs. What matters is being at an inflection point rather than holding a particular title.
Is this different from a women-in-tech mentorship programme?
Yes. A mentor shares their own path and offers advice from it. Coaching is not advice-giving: it uses structured questioning to help you reach decisions that fit your situation, which matters because what worked for someone else's career often does not transfer. Many clients keep a mentor and a coach at the same time for different purposes.
Will we talk about bias and discrimination?
If you bring it, yes, and without asking you to justify that it is happening. The coaching focus stays on what you can decide and control: how to respond, what to escalate, what to document, and whether this organisation deserves more of your career. Coaching is not a legal or HR process, and for anything that needs one, you would be pointed there.
Does Deepti only coach women?
No. Supporting women in tech is a specific commitment of the practice, but clients include engineering leaders of all genders.
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Deepti Agrawal
Deepti Agrawal is an ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) and the founder of Insight Out Consulting. She previously built and led high-scale platform and engineering teams at Flipkart.