The diversity conversation in technology tends to focus on workforce representation. How many women are on the team? What percentage holds leadership roles? Whether the numbers are improving.
These are legitimate questions. But for a technology buyer or project manager, they point to a more practical one: does the composition of a development team actually affect the quality of what it produces?
The short answer, based on available research, is yes. And the mechanism is more specific than most people assume.
What diverse teams do differently
Boston Consulting Group’s research on management diversity found that companies where women make up more than 20% of the management team generate approximately 10% higher innovation revenues than male-dominated peers. The effect is not attributed to individual capability but to the range of perspectives in the room when decisions get made.
In software development, that range matters at a very practical level. Assumptions get built into products early, in requirements gathering, in interface design, in how edge cases get prioritised. Teams whose members share the same background, context, and expectations are more likely to share the same blind spots. Those blind spots end up in the code.
This is not a hypothetical risk. Facial recognition systems that perform significantly worse on darker skin tones. Health algorithms that underweight symptoms more common in women. Voice recognition that struggles with accents, the training team did not have. These are documented outcomes of systems built without sufficient diversity in the teams that designed and tested them.
The Southeast Asia picture
In Southeast Asia, women make up 32% of the technology workforce, higher than the global average of 28%, according to BCG and Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority. Singapore sits at the upper end of the regional range, around 40%. Indonesia sits at 22%.
What makes the regional numbers notable is that they exist alongside a different figure: women make up 56% of university graduates across Southeast Asia. The gap between qualification and workforce participation is not explained by a shortage of trained people. BCG and IMDA’s research identifies three points where women exit the pipeline: degree selection, first job entry, and early career retention.
The result is a technology industry that is drawing from a narrower talent pool than the available pipeline would suggest, and producing products that reflect that narrowing.
What this means for technology buyers
Most vendor evaluation processes assess cost, technical capability, timeline, and past delivery. Team composition rarely appears on the scorecard.
That is a gap worth reconsidering. Not because diversity is a procurement checkbox, but because the range of perspectives on a development team has a measurable relationship to what the team produces. A vendor whose team reflects a narrow demographic slice is more likely to make unexamined assumptions about users who fall outside that slice.
Practically, questions worth adding to a vendor evaluation:
- What does the composition of your development team look like?
- How do you surface and challenge assumptions during the design phase?
- Can you show examples of how you have built for users whose contexts differ from your team’s?
These are not soft questions. They are product quality questions.
The bottom line
The research does not suggest that a diverse team automatically produces better software. It suggests that diversity in the people making product decisions reduces the likelihood of systematic blind spots making it through to the final build.
For technology buyers in Southeast Asia, where the workforce gap between graduates and tech workers is significant and documented, the composition of a vendor’s team is a reasonable indicator of whose experiences informed the product and whose did not.
On International Women’s Day 2026, the data is worth sitting with not just as a problem to solve but as a recognition of what women in technology across Southeast Asia are already doing with less structural support than they deserve. The graduates are there. The professionals are there. The ones who stayed and built careers in an industry not always designed to keep them deserve to be seen clearly, not just counted.