Limor Berman Gross Biography
Limor Bergman Gross is an accomplished executive leadership coach, international speaker, and former technology executive with over 20 years of experience building, leading, and scaling global engineering teams.
She focuses on helping engineering managers, directors, and rising women leaders in technology shift from execution-driven roles to positions of strategic influence and executive presence.
Professional Background & Tech Career
Before transitioning into executive coaching, Limor spent more than two decades in the tech industry, navigating male-dominated corporate environments. Her career began as a software engineer, and she steadily advanced through engineering management into senior leadership roles.
Engineering Leadership: She has managed fully remote, globally distributed engineering teams for prominent companies, including serving as Director of Engineering at DigitalOcean. She also held technical roles at organizations like VMware and Sun Microsystems.
Global Experience: Her leadership style is deeply informed by her real-world experiences navigating corporate growth, managing complex technical transformations, moving countries, and leading teams across multiple time zones.
Executive Coaching & Advocacy
In 2019, Limor pivoted from her corporate trajectory to address the “visibility gap” she had witnessed throughout her career, in which high-performing women were often overlooked for senior promotions despite delivering strong tactical results.
Coaching Practice: Through her practice, she partners with women in engineering and tech leadership, helping them master the “unspoken rules” of corporate advancement—such as managing up, establishing executive presence, negotiating authority, and increasing visibility without burnout.
Credentials: She is an International Coaching Federation (ICF) Professional Certified Coach (PCC).
Podcast & Media: She is the host of the popular podcast From a Woman to a Leader, where she shares practical, fluff-free leadership frameworks and speaks on career momentum, systemic changes, and diversity in tech.
Global Mentorship: Beyond her private practice, Limor actively mentors women and founders internationally through organizations like The Female Factor and Tech2Impact, and works with companies to design scalable internal mentorship and leadership development pipelines.
Education & Personal Life
Limor holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Accounting. Originally from Israel, she spent nine years living and working in the United States before returning to her home country. She balances her professional coaching and speaking schedule with her personal life as a mother of four and is an avid fitness enthusiast.
Talking Points for Women in Tech
A framing note before we start. This isn’t a piece about how hard it is to be a woman in tech. The women listening already know the terrain they live in. This is about what we plant for those coming up behind us, and why planting is the leadership act. Decision-makers in the room: this is also about you, because the seeds don’t grow in soil you don’t tend.
First, Define the Terrain: “Tech” Is Bigger Than the Big Five
Hear me on this before we go further: when someone says “women in tech,” most people picture five companies in California. That picture is the first thing we have to correct.
• Tech isn’t one industry. It’s a layer running through nearly all of them. That’s the real reason the workforce numbers swing so much; it depends on where you draw the line.
• Count it by sector companies whose core business is technology, and you get software and SaaS, hardware and semiconductors, internet and platforms, telecom, IT services, cybersecurity, fintech, AI and data, gaming, and the emerging edge: blockchain, climate tech, biotech-tech.
• Count it by occupation tech roles regardless of what the company sells and the field explodes outward: the software engineer at a bank, the data scientist at a hospital, the security lead at a retailer, the cloud architect in a defense program. That’s software development, data science, cloud and DevOps, cybersecurity, IT, technical product management, UX engineering, and AI/ML.
• And the representation isn’t even across that ground. Women sit near 30% in data science, but only about 18% in machine learning, and roughly 12% in cybersecurity. “Women in tech” hides real spread depending on which corner of the field you mean.
Why this matters for the decision-makers: the pipeline you’re responsible for tending isn’t only Silicon Valley. It runs through healthcare, finance, government, manufacturing, defense, retail, and education, every sector that now runs on software, which is nearly all of them. The seeds get planted across the whole field, not one orchard.
Opening Reflection: The Ground We’re Standing On
Hear me on this: the numbers haven’t moved the way the press releases promised.
• Women hold roughly a quarter to 28% of U.S. technology roles while making up close to half the overall workforce (high5, 2025; WomenHack, 2025).
• The representation thins as the work gets more technical and more senior, about 26% of computing roles, 16% of engineering roles (high5, 2025). The higher you climb, the lonelier the room.
• Half the women who enter tech leave the industry by 35 (Female Tech Leaders, 2025). That’s not a leak. That’s a field being abandoned mid-season.
Data note: These figures vary 2–28% by source depending on how “tech role” is defined (sector vs. occupation, global vs. U.S.). I’m using the conservative U.S. occupational range. Treat the exact percentage as directional, not precise.
Point One: The Broken Rung Is Where the Seed Gets Crushed
The glass ceiling gets the headlines. The broken rung does the damage.
• For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2025, only 93 women advanced, and just 60 Black women, 82 Latinas, and Asian women (McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org, 2025).
• This is the first promotion. Not the corner office, the first step into managing people. Miss it, and a woman never builds the leadership credibility the next rung requires. The gap compounds for a decade.
• Sponsorship is the water that rung needs: employees with sponsors are nearly twice as likely to be promoted, yet only 31% of entry-level women have one, against 45% of men (McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org, 2025).
Reflection for the decision-makers: you have been guarding the ceiling while the seedlings died at ground level. Move your attention to the first promotion. That’s the soil.
Data note: McKinsey’s own 2025 book The Broken Rung cites 81 women per 100 men using a different historical sample; the 93 figure is the current single-year pipeline number. Both are real; the lower figure is the longer trend. Cite the one that matches your point and say which.
Point Two: A New Fault Line: AI
A fresh inequity is being planted right now, in real time, and most people aren’t watching it.
• Only 21% of entry-level women are encouraged by their managers to use AI tools, compared with 33% of men (McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org, 2025).
• Encouragement matters: when employees are encouraged to use AI, they’re over 50% more likely to do so, and that’s how they build the skill (McKinsey & Company & LeanIn.Org, 2025).
• Women hold roughly 22% of AI jobs and 18% of machine-learning engineer roles (WEF, 2025; Stanford AI Index, 2025). If we don’t intervene at the encouragement stage, the next generation’s gap is being set today.
This is the seed nobody planted on purpose which is exactly how the worst inequities grow. Untended ground still produces a crop. Usually weeds.
Point Three: Sowing Is the Job, Not the Side Project
Here’s the turn. Every woman who made it through has a choice about what she does with the clearing she cut.
• Scarcity says: protect your seat, there’s only one. Abundance says: the woman you sponsor doesn’t cost you your position — she extends your line.
• Closing the first-promotion gap alone would add roughly one million women to management over five years (Fortune / LeanIn-McKinsey analysis). That’s not charity. That’s a talent pipeline most companies are leaving in the ground.
• More than half of women in tech say they lack a female role model in leadership (Comparably, 2024). You being visible is itself a seed. Sometimes the only one a younger woman gets.
The mentor you never had is the one you’re now equipped to be. That’s succession. That’s the whole assignment.
Data note: The “one million women” projection traces to the 2019 LeanIn/McKinsey study and a 72-per-100 promotion rate. The direction holds; the exact figure is dated. Frame it as illustrative of scale, not a current forecast.
Closing Reflection
Sowing seeds is slow work. You rarely see the harvest from where you’re standing. The officer who trained me never saw what I became, but I am standing on the ground she cleared. That’s the deal we make with the women coming up: we plant what we won’t personally pick.
To the decision-makers: stop measuring the ceiling and start tending the rung. To the women: the clearing you cut is not just yours to stand in. It’s yours to hand down.
The harvest belongs to whoever does the planting. So plant.
References
Comparably. (2024). Women in tech leadership representation survey. (As cited in industry compilations; verify against the primary Comparably dataset before publication.)
Female Tech Leaders Magazine. (2025, August 9). Women in tech in 2025: 50+ statistics point to a “bro” culture. https://femaletechleadersmagazine.substack.com
high5. (2025, November 25). 15+ women in tech statistics for 2024–2025, in the U.S. (Compiling BLS, NSF, and NCWIT data). https://high5test.com/women-in-tech-statistics/
McKinsey & Company, & LeanIn.Org. (2025). Women in the workplace 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/women-in-the-workplace
Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. (2025). Artificial intelligence index report 2025. (As cited in industry compilations; verify chapter figures against the primary report.)
WomenHack. (2025). Women in tech statistics 2026: Gender gap data, pay equity & trends. https://womenhack.com/women-in-tech-statistics/
World Economic Forum. (2025). Global gender gap report 2025. (As cited in industry compilations; verify against the primary WEF report.)
