Across the technology landscape, women continue to shape innovation with resilience, curiosity, and vision. Their diverse perspectives—shaped by unique journeys, challenges, and triumphs, remind us that progress in tech is driven not only by expertise, but by the voices that dare to redefine what’s possible. This collection of insights amplifies those voices, celebrating the power of women who lead, inspire, and transform the future of technology.

International Women’s Day Comments

Sumaiya Muhammad, Sr. Marketing Specialist at Alteryx –

“My professional journey has evolved across hardware, software, telecom, and now data automation at Alteryx. Working across these domains has strengthened my adaptability and deepened my understanding of how data drives real business value. According to Alteryx research, 48% of leaders plan to increase spending on AI infrastructure and tools, signalling how rapidly enterprise priorities are shifting and how significant it is for women to build confidence in data and AI. A challenge I have consistently faced is navigating constant change in an industry where innovation cycles move quickly. I have realised that continuous learning and investing in upskilling is crucial in this industry.

This International Women’s Day, I encourage aspiring women professionals to step forward boldly and actively shape the future of technology.”

Merhan Gaballah, Construction Technology & PropTech Consultant at PlanRadar –

Throughout my career in construction technology and PropTech, my journey has evolved from commercial roles into strategic advisory positions supporting digital transformation across the GCC.

One of the key challenges has been building credibility in traditionally male-dominated environments, where technical leadership is often predefined. Overcoming this required resilience, preparation, and consistently delivering measurable impact.

Today, I see strong momentum for women in tech. Digital transformation is redefining leadership, placing greater value on collaboration, adaptability, and data-driven thinking—areas where diverse perspectives are essential.

On International Women’s Day, I hope we move beyond recognition toward sustained inclusion, where women are not highlighted as exceptions, but empowered as equal contributors shaping the future of technology.

Alexandra Gartrell, VP and EMEA Legal Lead at Cloudera –

“This year’s International Women’s Day theme, Give to Gain, is a reminder that investing in women’s advancement at work delivers returns for everyone. Diverse teams broaden talent pipelines, improve decision-making, and build workplaces where people are more engaged and more likely to stay.

AI systems inherit the assumptions of the environments that build them. When development teams skew toward a single demographic, bias doesn’t only show up in datasets. It can also appear in which problems are prioritised, how success is defined, which edge cases are tested, and what risks are accepted. In the agentic era, autonomy raises the stakes: small weaknesses in data, design, or oversight can be amplified once decisions are made at scale.

As AI becomes embedded across core business functions, coding ability is no longer the sole marker of technical contribution. Engineers need business acumen, communication skills, and the ability to collaborate across functions because responsible AI depends on context and judgment, not just models.

True inclusion means having diverse voices shape product direction and decision rights and not just representation in organisational charts. Practically, this means auditing datasets for representation gaps, testing models for unequal outcomes, stress-testing edge cases, and involving a diverse panel of human reviewers throughout the AI lifecycle.

According to Cloudera’s WLIT 2025 report, 91% of women leaders in the Middle East remain optimistic that gender equality in AI leadership will improve within five years. When women are given resources, opportunities, and authority in AI development, organisations gain better AI systems that work for everyone. In the agentic era, diversity in leadership and oversight should be treated as part of AI risk management.

Organizations that formalize cross-functional approaches, create transition pathways, and recognize emotional intelligence as a technical capability will build better AI and advance gender equity.”

Fatma Al Naggar, Senior Relationship Manager, Saxo Bank MENA –

“In times of uncertainty, women have consistently proven to be natural problem-solvers and stabilisers, leading their homes, workplaces, and communities with empathy, adaptability, and a profound sense of responsibility.
While women naturally take on the role of emotional anchors due to their deep attunement to the needs of others, it is crucial that providing this support never comes at the expense of their own well-being. Sustainable resilience requires setting boundaries, prioritizing self-care, and establishing personal rituals that help maintain a positive mindset and focus on what can be controlled amidst the external noise of today’s fast-paced digital world.

As women progress in their careers and redefine leadership across industries, they are bringing a more collaborative, empathetic, and purpose-driven approach that prioritizes transparency and inclusivity over traditional authority. In highly competitive fields, particularly male-dominated sectors like finance and technology, technical expertise may open doors, but it is the mastery of soft skills such as emotional intelligence, relationship building, and strategic thinking that sustains advancement and leadership credibility.

Furthermore, living and working in a multicultural environment like the UAE significantly amplifies this professional growth. The country’s strong emphasis on safety, opportunity, and diversity provides an unparalleled space where women from all backgrounds can pursue their ambitions with confidence, learn from diverse perspectives, and foster inclusive, globally minded innovation.

Yet, achieving true gender equity demands ongoing progress to ensure equal access to leadership roles, mentorship, and career development, while continually challenging outdated perceptions about women’s roles. An ideal workplace must actively promote equality, respect, equal pay, and flexible work options, empowering every woman to reach her full potential.

On this International Women’s Day, my message to all women, especially young girls carving their own paths, is to believe in your abilities, embrace curiosity, and never hesitate to pursue challenging opportunities. By recognizing our inherent strength, owning our expertise with authenticity, and leading with resilience, we can collectively shape a more inclusive and high-performing future for our communities and industries.”

Laura Heisman, CMO, Dynatrace –

The rise of AI isn’t just a call for women to adapt, it’s an opportunity for women to lead. With an estimated 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 yet to be created, AI is not only reshaping roles, but entire career journeys. Traditional paths are breaking down, opening doors for women to step into emerging opportunities – and redefining what’s possible for soon-to-be graduates and school-aged girls alike.

This is our moment to help define the future of work and pave the way for generations to come. But progress isn’t automatic. Without intentional action and human connection, women risk being sidelined in this transformation. Learning, experimenting, and getting comfortable with AI isn’t optional. It’s how we remain active participants in shaping what comes next.

The future will be shaped by what and who we invest in today. When we support women and future generations through mentorship, intentional recruiting, training, and shared learning, we don’t just advance opportunity – we build better technology, stronger businesses, and a more inclusive future. It starts with choosing to learn, experiment, and grow with AI. That is the spirit of this year’s International Women’s Day focus, where we “give to gain.”

NETSCOUT® SYSTEMS, INC. (NASDAQ: NTCT), today released its second half of the year 2025 Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Threat Intelligence Report, revealing sophisticated attacker collaboration, resilient botnets, and compromised IoT infrastructure that drove more than eight million DDoS attacks worldwide – some as large as 30 terabits per second (Tbps) – marking a new era of hyper-scale, coordinated threat activity that continues to outpace global takedown efforts. Meanwhile, the accelerating growth of DDoS-for-hire services is empowering a broader range of threat actors, intensifying operational risk to digitally connected organizations and enterprises.

Implications for security professionals extend far beyond volumetric concerns and include reconnaissance and adaptive evasion which challenge traditional defense paradigms. Organizations must match adversarial innovation with intelligent, autonomous defenses, or risk operational disruption at levels previously considered theoretical.

“Threat actors identify organizations that haven’t invested in the right defenses to stay ahead of sophisticated and coordinated DDoS attacks to take down critical infrastructure,” stated Richard Hummel, director, threat intelligence, NETSCOUT. “Traditional security defenses are no longer working, and with attackers hitting new attack size and complexity ceilings, implementing automated and proactive defenses has become a business-level risk mandate – not just a technical concern for security professionals.”

Key research findings include:

• Massive attacks on a global scale – More than eight million attacks were identified across 203 countries and territories globally.
• Continued Use of Multi-Vector Attacks – approximately 42% of DDoS attacks employed two to five distinct attack vectors, with some adapting dynamically throughout the attack to complicate detection and mitigation.
• Outbound Attacks Impact Broadband and Mobile Services – Extensive direct-path attacks revealed that compromised IoT and customer-premises equipment can generate outbound floods exceeding 1 Tbps, creating liability, service, and reputational risk for broadband and mobile providers.
• Critical Infrastructure Targeted – High‑value services such as NTP and DNS continue to face sustained attack pressure, emphasizing the need for resilient, globally distributed architectures to maintain service continuity.
• Threat actors scale up collaboration – A surge of more than 20,000 botnet-driven attacks in July 2025 exemplified how coordinated threat activity can rapidly overwhelm defenses and disrupt critical government, finance, and transportation services.
• Threat actor persistence – Despite international law enforcement dismantling multiple DDoS-for-hire platforms, hacktivist groups and botnets remain resilient, exerting increased pressure.
• AI integration accelerates operations and collaboration – AI has transitioned to an operational reality, with large language models (LLMs) on the dark web accelerating vulnerability exploitation and botnet expansion, and underground forums documenting a 219% increase in mentions of malicious AI tools. Groups like Keymous+ have demonstrated how partnerships between threat actors amplify attack power, with bandwidth increasing nearly fourfold.

NETSCOUT maps the DDoS landscape through passive, internet vantage points, providing unparalleled visibility into global attack trends. For more than 15 years, NETSCOUT has delivered trusted, consistent DDoS Intelligence based exclusively on directly observed, verifiable attack traffic. NETSCOUT does not aggregate multiple alerts or geographically distributed events into composite peak values, ensuring accuracy, repeatability, and true comparability across reporting periods. Peak metrics reflect single-second maximum bits-per-second (bps) and packets-per-second (pps) rates measured at defined mitigation and monitoring points.

NETSCOUT protects two-thirds of the routed IPv4 space, securing network edges that carried global peak traffic of over 800 Tbps, covering 376 industry verticals and 12,698 Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) in the second half of 2025. It monitors tens of thousands of daily DDoS attacks by tracking multiple botnets and DDoS-for-hire services that leverage millions of abused or compromised devices.

Dr Heba El-Shimy, Assistant Professor (Data and AI), Heriot-Watt University Dubai

At its core, the term “digital transformation” refers to the systematic integration of digital technologies into how organisations operate, deliver value, and interact with their customers. McKinsey defines it as the rewiring of an organisation to continuously deploy technology at scale, while IBM frames it as a business strategy that modernises processes, products, and operations through digital tools. The common thread in both definitions is that digital transformation is not an IT upgrade — it is a structural change in how decisions are made, how services reach end users, and how entire industries reorganise around data and automation.

On that front, the GCC, and particularly the UAE, have moved far beyond the planning phase. The UAE ranked first globally in government AI readiness in 2024 (Oxford Insights) and ninth in the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Index 2025, up from eighteenth in 2017. Over 90% of the UAE’s government services are now digital. Saudi Arabia has digitised 98% of its public services and has climbed to sixth worldwide in the UN E-government Development Index. With the IMF estimating that full digitalisation across MENA could unlock $1.6 trillion in long-term economic gains, the scale of ambition is matched by the scale of opportunity.

One of the region’s most significant and underutilised strategic advantages lies in its female STEM talent. In the UAE, 61% of STEM graduates are women. 77% of computer science students are women, compared to under 20% in the UK, France, and Canada. Bahrain was ranked first globally for female digital skills training and STEM education by the Economist’s Internet Inclusive Report. In Saudi Arabia, the share of women in communications and IT has risen from 7% in 2017 to 35%, exceeding the European average. The GCC is producing technically trained women at rates that most developed economies would find difficult to replicate.

When this talent reaches positions of genuine authority, the results are striking. Ebtesam Almazrouei, an inspiring Emirati, serves as Executive Director, Acting Chief AI Researcher, and Founder of the AI Cross Center Unit (AICCU) at the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi (TII), where she oversees the development of the Falcon large language model and chairs the UN AI for Good Impact Initiative. Deemah AlYahya, a Saudi tech diplomat and digital economy expert, became the first Saudi woman to head an international organisation as Secretary-General of the Digital Cooperation Organization (DCO). These are appointments based on capability and merit for women making consequential technical and strategic decisions.

What these examples point to is a broader principle. In a conversation with Global Woman Leader Magazine on the topic of humanising digital transformation at scale, Juliana Rios, CIO of LATAM Airlines Group, made an observation that resonates here: that digital transformation succeeds not when organisations deploy technology, but when the people building those systems deeply understand the context in which they operate. Her argument — that technology must be shaped by human understanding, not just technical specification — speaks directly to what women engineers, data scientists, and domain experts bring to the table. The women leading AI research, engineering cloud architectures, and developing diagnostic algorithms in the GCC are not contributing a complementary perspective to someone else’s technical work. They are doing the technical work, and their fluency across domains like healthcare, policy, and data science is precisely what humanises digital systems at the point of design, not as an afterthought.

Digital transformation demands more than deployment, it demands that the systems themselves are technically sound, contextually appropriate, and fair. Women in the GCC are contributing across all three. They are training large language models, architecting cloud migration strategies, developing computer vision systems for clinical diagnostics, and writing the algorithms behind smart city platforms. They are also, critically, among the researchers identifying and correcting bias in AI systems — work that has direct consequences for whether these technologies serve populations equitably or replicate existing blind spots at scale. When an AI hiring tool penalises candidates because its training data reflected a historically male-dominated applicant pool, or when a facial recognition system performs significantly worse on women than on men, the failure is not one of intention, it is a failure of team composition. The engineers who catch these flaws are those whose own experience makes the flaws visible. The composition of the teams building these systems is not a secondary consideration. It directly shapes the technical integrity, fairness, and ultimately the adoption of the technology.

The GCC is better positioned than most regions to act on this, because the foundation has already been laid. The region has invested heavily in digital infrastructure and in a STEM education system that produces technically trained women at globally exceptional rates. It has also produced cases where that talent has operated at the highest technical and strategic levels and delivered measurably, as the examples in this article illustrate. What makes the GCC’s position distinctive is that these are not isolated stories; they are consistent with the direction the region has already chosen.

From where I sit, teaching computer science, particularly AI, to the next generation of engineers in Dubai, the momentum is real and the talent coming through is exactly what this transformation requires.