Thirteen years ago, I walked into my first programming class as one of a few women among seventy men and the numbers haven’t shifted much despite all the bootcamps and “Girls Who Code” posters promised. Today, women still make up under 30% of the tech workforce and even fewer in leadership. This talk blends personal experience and data to explore why that matters: companies with more women in leadership perform better, women are built to thrive under pressure, and when women are missing from tech, their perspectives are missing from the data too. Diversity isn’t charity or PR, it's how we build better systems.