NDA’s Andy Oakes recently posted a story about senior women in adtech being pushed out of the market and what that meant for the industry. We had a huge response, including this piece where the contributor has asked to remain anonymous
Every few months, someone in this industry poses the same question, usually with genuine puzzlement: where did all the senior women go? The conversation that follows tends to circle familiar, comfortable territory: ageism, the motherhood penalty, a leaky pipeline, unconscious bias in hiring. All of that is real. None of it is the whole story.
The part we don’t talk about is darker, and it’s the part that actually explains the pattern once you start looking for it.
I’ve had far too many conversations with senior women in this industry who were mistreated, underpaid and overworked relative to their male peers, pushed out, and in some cases humiliated or sexually harassed by the very men who had positioned themselves to benefit from their talent and their relationships. I’ve watched a specific and ugly pattern repeat itself: an executive woman, often the number one or two on a leadership team, is pushed out, and her replacement is a younger woman hired at a lower title and a lower salary. The company gets to say it still values women in leadership. It just doesn’t have to pay for the experience it lost.
Then there’s what happens after these women leave.
Many are offered minimal severance and asked to sign agreements that effectively prevent them from ever speaking about what happened to them. Meanwhile, the men whose careers and companies they helped build go on to raise capital, lead new businesses, sit on boards, speak on panels, and get profiled in the trade press, often with a PR firm driving the narrative. They become the industry’s “thought leaders.” The women who helped get them there are left stripped of the professional identity they built, and often too afraid to speak because they know how small this industry is, and how real the consequences of speaking up can be.
I’ve personally heard men brag about their ability to backchannel and blackball women so they can’t land another opportunity. That detail is the one that unsettles me most, because it means we’re not simply looking at women quietly exiting a hostile environment. In many cases, they are being actively kept out of it.
So when we ask where the senior women went, we need to ask a harder set of follow-up questions: who pushed them out? Who benefited from it? And who is making sure they don’t come back?
This isn’t a hypothetical for me. Over the last six months, I’ve had these conversations with more frequency and more specificity than ever: the same stories, different names, echoing across ad tech. And the more I hear, the more convinced I am that this problem sits well below the surface of pay gaps and hiring practices. There is a systemic power dynamic running underneath this industry that we are nowhere near comfortable enough confronting directly. Women aren’t just leaving. They’re being legally silenced from telling anyone why.
That’s the part that should alarm all of us: not that women are exiting, but that they’re being contractually gagged on the way out.
And that’s what scares me most about where this goes next. The women leaving the industry right now are often exactly the women who could mentor the next generation through it, the ones who could name the patterns, flag the people, and help younger women navigate around the landmines. But if they’ve been legally silenced, professionally blackballed, or simply exhausted into walking away, none of that knowledge gets passed down. The next generation walks in blind, repeats the same experiences, and the industry gets to keep telling itself that each case is an isolated incident rather than a system working exactly as designed.
So what actually breaks the cycle?
I keep coming back to one idea: what if there were a way for women to document, anonymously, the people and organizations that repeatedly silence, underpay, push out or blackball women? I suspect we’d see the same names surface again and again. We already have a loose, whispered sense of who some of these men are. And yet, year after year, their businesses grow, their personal brands grow, they’re welcomed into the most exclusive rooms in the industry, and their influence compounds, with essentially zero consequence. Meanwhile, the women they pushed out are left questioning their own worth and quietly figuring out how to start over. That asymmetry, total impunity on one side, devastating personal cost on the other, is the thing we actually need to confront if we’re serious about fixing this.
And as an American, there’s a part of this that troubles me even more. We are watching one of the most vivid examples of this exact dynamic play out at the highest levels of our government, in real time. When powerful men operate with no visible consequences, it sends a message about what behavior is tolerable, and that message doesn’t stay contained to Washington. If impunity is normalized at the top, we shouldn’t be surprised when some version of it trickles down into our boardrooms, our leadership teams, and our industry events.
When there’s no accountability at the top, why would we expect it anywhere else?
The industry doesn’t have a mystery on its hands. It has a pattern it has chosen not to look at too closely. Naming that pattern, out loud, specifically, and without waiting for the perfect, legally bulletproof moment, is the only way the cycle breaks.
