Why Women Don’t Stay. The Industry We Need For The Future.

At this year’s AGDA Annual 2026, our founder Kylie Gould stepped on stage to talk about something we don’t often stop to examine. Not the work. The system behind it.

Her keynote, Why Women Don’t Stay: The Industry We Built and the One We Need, wasn’t a typical design talk. No case studies. No craft breakdowns. Just a clear look at the structure of our industry and who it’s really built for.

What we didn’t expect was the reaction.

Afterwards, people didn’t talk about the slides. They talked about how it felt.

“I finally feel seen.”

“I was holding back tears the whole way through.”

“How do I do this in my own business?”

That response stayed with us.

This isn’t about entry. It’s about staying.

Women are not underrepresented at the start of their careers in design. In fact, they make up around 60% of people entering the creative industry. But that representation doesn’t carry through.

By the time we look at leadership, the picture has shifted significantly. Globally, only around 11–24% of senior creative leadership roles are held by women.

So the issue isn’t attracting talent. It’s what happens next.

As Kylie put it:

“Women are not leaving because they lack talent or ambition. They’re leaving because the system stops fitting their lives.”

The drop-off happens in the middle

It’s not random. It happens mid-career. The point where expectations increase at the same time life becomes more complex. Kylie described it as the “messy middle”. And once you see it, it’s hard to ignore.

This is where the talk moved beyond the data. Adelle Chang joined Kylie on stage, sharing her lived experience in a way that made the conversation real. You could feel it land in the room.

Because while no one designed the industry this way on purpose, it was designed.

Most creative careers still operate on a few underlying assumptions:

• that people are endlessly available

• that careers are uninterrupted

• that leadership is defined by endurance

When those assumptions meet real life, people start to fall out of the system. Quietly. Consistently.

There’s a line from Eloise Bridgerton that stayed with us:

“The entire system is designed so that we cannot possibly succeed.”

And while it’s fiction, it raises a real question. If the system isn’t working, what would it look like to redesign it? Because that’s what designers do.

Designers know how to fix systems

This is where the conversation shifted. We identify friction.We improve journeys.We build better outcomes. So why wouldn’t we apply that same thinking to our own industry? “Awareness alone doesn’t change outcomes. Design does.”

What needs to change

• Designing for real lives

  Building systems that work alongside life, not in conflict with it.

• Redefining leadership

  Valuing clarity, empathy and impact, not just endurance.

• Building real support

  Creating environments where life can happen without it being held against someone’s ambition.

• Valuing experience

  Because when people leave mid-career, we lose the leaders our industry depends on.

The industry we need next

This is cultural. But it’s also commercial. When people stay, experience compounds. Leadership develops. Teams stabilise. And the data is clear. More balanced leadership leads to stronger performance.

Kylie closed with something simple:

“The industry we built got us this far. But the industry we need next must be different.”

Because this isn’t about who enters the industry. It’s about who is enabled to stay. Every studio is already designing something. Through the expectations we set, the behaviours we reward, and the cultures we build.

The question is whether we’re designing for short-term output, or long-term sustainability.

Because when women stay, everything improves.

Leadership improves.

Culture improves.

The work improves.

And that’s an industry worth building.