The numbers say Nigerian women are among the world’s most entrepreneurial, but their lived experiences tell a more complicated story.

It is around nine in the evening when Morayo Ojikutu, founder of the EduTech startup Flow, returns home after a long day of work. During the Uber ride, the conversation with the driver takes an unexpected turn: “Are you married?” the man asks her. When she replies no, the driver begins dispensing unsolicited advice, urging her to stop working so much because “men don’t like that.” With a mix of disdain and sarcasm, the man asks her if she intends to “marry herself,” claiming that by that hour she should already be home “preparing for a husband” and warning her that no man will want her if she continues to come home so late because of her career.

For many women building their careers in the Lagos tech sector, exchanges like these are routine. It’s a reminder that no matter how many pitch decks you perfect or how many grants you land, Nigerian society measures a woman’s worth against a clock that has nothing to do with product-market fit.

I’m a Social Anthropologist, and over the past two years, as part of LAGOSTECH, I spoke with founders, developers, product managers, corporate executives, digital workers, and even phone repairers across Lagos’ tech hubs, incubators, markets and co-working spaces. What emerged is a picture far more layered than the usual “women in tech” success stories, one where individual tenacity collides daily with barriers that no amount of “leaning in” can resolve on its own.

A paradox of numbers

Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s highest rate of female entrepreneurs, with 27 percent of the female adult population engaged in early-stage business creation, a rate nearly doubles the global average. Nigeria sits at the forefront of this activity; while historical benchmarks placed female participation at 41 percent (compared to 29 percent for men), the share of female-led enterprises rose to 48 percent last year. According to 2025 data, 83 percent of Nigerian women now consider themselves an entrepreneur.

On paper, women in Nigeria are among the most entrepreneurial people on the planet. Follow the money, though, and the picture changes. Female-led businesses receive just 2 percent of total tech startup funding across the continent and face a $42 billion financing gap. Most female-led ventures operate in sectors where the lack of property rights and childcare infrastructure forces nearly half again as many business closures for women as for men.

The women who do break through into the tech spotlight are, by definition, exceptions. The ecosystem tends to treat them as proof that the system works, rather than asking why it works for so few, or how.

The audacity problem

In March 2025, I visited a women-focused panel in Yaba, at CcHUB, where the conversation among female founders kept circling back to a familiar paradox. Ojikutu put it bluntly: a man will apply for a job meeting two out of ten requirements; a woman will hesitate even with nine. She called it a gap in “audacity” — the willingness to knock on doors without an invitation. To overcome her own hesitations, she had studied hundreds of pitch videos online to learn how to move her hands, how to end a sentence, how to hold a room.

Yet, audacity comes at a cost. Ojikutu recalled crying the first time she had to fire someone, struggling to reconcile her genuine emotions with the cold arithmetic of being a CEO. Another co-founder at the event was even blunter: sometimes you have to act like a “witch” just so people take your decisions seriously.

These testimonies reveal something that common panel titles like “Empowering Women in Tech” tend to gloss over. The problem is not that women lack ambition. It is that the tech sector in Lagos asks them to perform a particular kind of toughness — the relentless optimism, the emotional detachment, the round-the-clock availability that define Silicon Valley’s ideal founder (or whatever people imagine that ideal to be) — while simultaneously punishing them for it at home, in traffic, and sometimes even within their own teams.

The texture of everyday exclusion

The barriers have changed since the 1990s, but they have not disappeared. A senior female executive at MTN recalled being told in 1998 that the company did not hire female radio network engineers because “women can’t climb towers.” She responded by working, in her own words, three times harder than her male peers just to be seen as competent.

Today the exclusion is subtler but no less wearing. Eniola, a returnee tech founder, described it plainly: “As a woman in this space, I’m constantly getting comments like ‘Oh, you look very beautiful today,’ or ‘That outfit is stunning.’ I always find myself thinking: would you ever say that to your male boss?” She told me of a client who didn’t even believe she was the CEO of her own company. Fatima Audu, a tech product manager, reported similar friction: male developers who refuse to follow timelines set by a woman, and official correspondence addressed to “Dear Sir,” because the default assumption remains that a tech leader is male.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the texture of gendered cultural assumptions woven into broader Nigerian society. Perhaps no longer outright gatekeeping, but a daily accumulation of small indignities that drain energy, erode confidence, and force women to spend emotional labour on problems their male counterparts never have to think about. As many women in Lagos tech know all too well, they must constantly negotiate a social context that continues to place them at a disadvantage relative to men.

The inclusion business

To be fair, things are way better these days. The number of women at tech events has visibly grown in recent years. Male tech founders now consciously hire more women. Some believe the African continent is uniquely positioned to close the gap.

The reasons behind the progress, though, deserve a closer look. Much of the private sector embraces inclusion largely because it has become a “business case.” Companies seeking international funding, Environmental, Social, and Governance compliance, or partnerships with global tech giants know they cannot afford to look exclusionary. The result is a kind of performative inclusion: diversity measured in headcounts and panel invitations, but not in retention, pay equity, or the emotional toll of being the only woman in the room. Paradoxically, some leading female figures in Lagos tech now find themselves clashing with HR departments that insist on hiring specifically a woman — not because of the candidate’s competence, but to tick a box.

Meanwhile, the dominant narrative still puts a structural problem on individual shoulders. Ojikutu herself admits that being a “Black woman founder” has become a strategic asset for international grants. That may be a positive sign, yet it is also a frank acknowledgment that identity now functions as currency in the global funding market, one that can mask the cultural forces underneath.

Job number two

Even for women who break through, the workday does not end at the office. Many tech founders described what they call “job number two”: after managing engineering teams, they go home to cook, clean, and care for children and husband, because much of society still expects that when a man comes home, he can simply sit down and scroll through his phone. People like Audu are forced to coordinate their children’s schedules through organizing apps like FamilyWall, toggling between prayer times and homework while managing Slack calls with clients in different time zones.

Historical scholarship on Nigerian women’s entrepreneurship confirms that none of this is new. Women have long had to navigate patriarchal expectations and social constraints while finding strategies to maximize whatever opportunities they can. What is new is the specific shape the double shift takes when the workplace runs on Silicon Valley hustle culture. The round-the-clock availability, the evening networking events, the pressure to stay visible online: it all sits on top of deeply rooted domestic expectations.

Who gets to dream

There is another layer that “women in tech” narratives routinely ignore: geography and class. Lagos’ tech sector is not representative of the rest of the country. Many of the women I met at tech events in Victoria Island or Lekki (founders, executives, developers, project managers) are overwhelmingly urban, educated, middle-class, and southern. Instead, in northern Nigeria, even women with tech backgrounds often face expectations to stay home.

Celebrating Nigerian women in tech as a single, uniform story risks hiding the profound material and social inequalities that determine who can truly envision starting a company. Access to elite schools, the right social networks, the right neighborhood are the invisible filters that separate the founder on stage from the woman who has never touched a laptop.

Something of their own

What makes the Lagos story different from a generic narrative about women’s inclusion in Silicon Valley, though, is the agency these women assert. At tech events across the city, I watched women wearing well-tailored corporate attire alongside the typical techie uniform of jeans and a t-shirt, paired with flawless makeup and immaculate braided hairstyles or traditional but fashionable outfits. These are not random fashion choices. They signal a willingness not just to adopt global startup culture or community, but to shape a distinctly African version of it.

These choices go beyond personal style; they speak to how these women define themselves. They are building tech-oriented lives that are globally oriented and dynamic while also remaining committed to local values. By carving out a space in the global startup scene, they are taking a lead in shaping the future they want. The women building Lagos’ tech scene are not just importing Western feminism wholesale. They are creating something of their own, drawing on community organizations like She Code Africa, funding vehicles like FirstCheck, and church-based networking groups to build tailored support systems, while simultaneously securing or redefining their economic and social status.

What comes next?

The future of women in Lagos’ tech sector is not a simple progress narrative. It is a negotiation between competence and cultural expectation, global branding and local reality, the founder on stage and the woman navigating her daily Uber ride home.

Many of the people I met are convinced that women are going to change Nigeria, that the future of the country and its tech sector is bound up with women’s leadership. Perhaps they are right, but that future will not arrive through discussions about audacity alone. It will require an honest and collective reckoning with the social and material structures that make audacity both a luxury and a burden — and with the question of who even gets to be audacious in the first place, and the extra efforts this requires.

About the Author

Davide Casciano (PhD) is a PostDoc European Marie Curie Fellow, Research Associate at KU Leuven University, Belgium. Some names have been pseudonymized or omitted for privacy purposes. This article draws on fieldwork conducted for the LAGOSTECH project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101104921. Views expressed are only the author’s own.

Learn more at https://www.lagostech.eu