International Women's Day March 2026 - London
The Magicians: Women Leading CX
4 min read
“70% of the people who run customer experience are women. 12% of the people who lead it are. We spent a London afternoon sitting in that gap.”
That line came from one of the panellists, a CX leader at a global activewear brand, midway through our London morning. It was advice for anyone in the room debating whether to ask for a raise, a promotion, or a seat at a table they weren't sure they belonged at. And it captured the spirit of the conversation: less polished, more practical, and visibly built on the experiences of women who've been navigating CX leadership in rooms that haven't always made space for them.
I'd come back from maternity leave six months ago, and hosting the London half of DigitalGenius' International Women's Day morning was the kind of thing I'd told myself I wanted to do this year. As female leaders, we have very little time for ourselves. Lots of time for to-do lists, families, teams, children. Almost none for being in a room of women, hearing each other's stories, and giving ourselves permission to take that hour back.
The morning opened with a statistic that anchored everything that followed. 70% of the CX workforce is female, and only 12% are in leadership. That gap shaped the rest of the conversation: how CX is undervalued as a discipline, how women specifically pay the cost of that undervaluation, and what changes when leaders stop treating CX as a cost centre and start treating it as the heartbeat of the business.
The invisible labour of CX leadership. One panellist at a beauty subscription brand offered the morning's most quoted image. "We look cool and calm on the surface like a swan. Underneath, we're pedalling and doing multiple things at the same time." There's a lot of work CX teams do that nobody outside CX sees. Catching problems upstream before they reach the customer. Translating customer pain into language other departments will actually act on. Protecting their teams from work that shouldn't have landed there. All of it is strategic, and all of it gets overlooked when CX is treated as a safety net rather than a strategic function. She'd renamed her team's mission internally from "voice of customer" to "voice of action" to drive the point home. "It's only voice of customer if we're going to do something about it."
Mentorship, Queen Bees, and the rooms women aren't in. The second panel went deeper on what genuine career advocacy looks like. The takeaway: the manager who says nice things to you matters less than the person willing to say your name in rooms you're not in. As one leader at an iconic footwear brand put it: "Nine times out of ten, your mentor isn't your manager." She also named Queen Bee syndrome, the pattern of senior women pulling the door closed behind them once they've fought through. Her own answer was reverse mentoring, where the most valuable mentorship in her career hasn't been from someone senior, she said, it's been from people on her own team.
The day closed on advice many of us wish someone had given us earlier in our careers. The panellist had chosen who to bring from their team deliberately. Not the three loudest, but rather the ones who don't naturally raise their hand. She wanted them in the room, hearing from her, that they didn't need to become someone louder to be taken seriously. "It's okay not to be the loudest woman in the room and still be intentional. Still be powerful."
This recap is one of two from the CX Collective's International Women's Day events. Special thanks to our partners at Aftership, and Triple Whale who made this day possible.
