CRN honored nearly 1,700 women in their 2025 Women of the Channel awards. That's a big number. It's also a weird one, because when I started asking around about the women who are actually driving decisions in this industry, a lot of the names I kept hearing weren't on the list.
Not because they don't deserve to be. Because they didn't submit. They were too busy running things.
I've spent the last few weeks talking to women at every level of the channel — partner CEOs, carrier VPs, sales leaders, engineers, the woman who runs operations at a 40-person MSP in Ohio and somehow keeps the entire business from catching fire every Monday morning. I wasn't looking for a "women in tech" story. I hate those stories. They always feel like they're trying to prove something that shouldn't need proving.
I was looking for something simpler: what does it actually look like, day to day, to be a woman building a career in the channel right now?
The answers surprised me. Not because they were about barriers — although those exist and everyone knows it. What surprised me was how little time these women spend thinking about gender and how much time they spend thinking about the work. Revenue targets. Hiring. M&A integration. Vendor negotiations. The same stuff everyone else in this industry thinks about, except they're doing it while occasionally being the only woman in a room full of guys who all went golfing together yesterday.
One partner CEO told me something I haven't been able to stop thinking about. She said: "Nobody gave me a playbook. There wasn't a 'women in channel' roadmap when I started. I just kept solving problems until they ran out of reasons not to promote me."
That's not a complaint. She said it laughing. But it's real. And it's a version of the same story I heard over and over. Women who built their credibility one deal at a time, one project at a time, one crisis handled at 2 AM at a time. No shortcut. No special program. Just competence, compounded.
The Alliance of Channel Women is announcing their 2026 awards at Channel Partners in April. I'll be there. I'm looking forward to it, not because awards ceremonies are exciting — they're mostly not — but because that room is full of people who know what it costs to build something in an industry that wasn't designed with them in mind, and built it anyway.
What I'm interested in going forward is the specifics. Not "women are underrepresented in tech" — we know that. I want to know how the COO at a $20M MSP structured her first acquisition. How the VP of Channel at a carrier rebuilt the partner program after the last one failed. How the founder of a security consultancy landed her first enterprise contract when nobody would take her call.
Those are good stories regardless of who's telling them. They just happen to be told by women, and that matters because there are a lot of women coming up in this industry right now who don't have anyone showing them what the path looks like. If I can do anything useful with this column, it's that.
If you know someone I should talk to — or if you're that someone — reach out. I'm not looking for the biggest title. I'm looking for the best story.