Women hold roughly 8 to 15 percent of CTO and CIO roles worldwide, and the numbers have barely moved in a decade. Researchers who study the pipeline describe the problem as a “broken rung” rather than a glass ceiling: women don’t fall at the top of the ladder, they get filtered out at every step on the way up. First promotion. First technical leadership role. First company. Which makes Saima Mushtaq a useful case study, because over twenty years she has climbed every one of those rungs, engineer, researcher, executive, founder, and lately author, and the interesting part is how.
The First Rung
The statistics say girls disengage from technical tracks early. Saima did the opposite. As a teenager in Gujranwala, she was earning Microsoft professional certifications and finishing first among roughly twenty thousand students in her district, a result recognized with a gold medal and an award from the President of Pakistan. She went on to study computer science at FAST NUCES and a master’s at LUMS, and co-authored peer-reviewed research on classification algorithms for loan eligibility recommendation on financial data and on improving quality of service in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Her work on classification algorithms for real-time domains was presented at the 2007 IEEE RIVF conference in Hanoi. Most careers never produce a peer-reviewed publication. Hers had several before it properly began.
The Rungs Where Women Stall
Mid-career is where the pipeline data turns grim, and it’s where Saima’s path gets instructive. At Techlogix, she led engineering teams shipping e-commerce recommendation products to fifteen top North American retailers, Intel, Yahoo, Amazon, Best Buy, and Staples among them, when recommendation engines were still exotic. Then she spent two years as Principal Consultant for NLP and machine learning at Polyvista, building production-level text mining systems a full decade before large language models made “NLP” a boardroom word. She wasn’t waiting to be sponsored into bigger roles. She kept picking technologies before they were safe bets and making them work.
Founder, More Than Once
Here is the rung where representation thins to almost nothing: starting companies. Saima has done it repeatedly. In 2015, she co-founded Ommatee, one of the first virtual reality e-commerce platforms in Asia and the MENA region. She later launched Wyngs Logistics, taking a machine learning-driven B2B logistics platform from a blank page to production in ten months and signing eighty clients in its first quarter. And in 2025, she co-founded Excology, a Delaware-incorporated venture applying AI to mental health, where she leads a multidisciplinary team spanning seven countries, engineers and data scientists working alongside psychologists, coaches, and psychometric specialists, translating clinical expertise into working software rather than the other way around.
Between those ventures, she spent seven years as co-founder and CTO of Kaagga Vision, running an organization of more than thirty engineers, integrating AI and blockchain into different commercial products. Founding is one skill; running an engineering organization for years is another. The pipeline loses women at both. She kept climbing at both.
The AI Chapter
Today, Saima is Chief Technology Officer of Dubai-based LeapSofts, where she has directed the firm’s transformation into an AI product house serving clients including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and grown the engineering team from three to twenty-five, which means she is now the one deciding who gets onto the ladder. From 2024 to 2025, she added a CTO role at Mint Rewards in the United Kingdom, delivering an AI-powered rewards platform that classifies recyclable waste collected from users in Pakistan and converts environmental impact into loyalty points, scaled past fifty thousand monthly active users. In 2025, she also completed Production AI: A Practitioner’s Guide to LLMs, RAG, Agents, and Real World Deployment, a technical reference distilled from the systems she has actually shipped.
Sending the Elevator Back Down
The research on fixing the broken rung points consistently at one intervention: women in senior roles mentoring the ones coming up. Saima has treated that as part of the job for her entire career. In 2013, she became the first to represent Pakistani technical women at Global Tech Women’s international VOICES conference, in a session titled “Talk Listen Connect: We Are Made of Pakistan.” She taught for years, teaching graduate-level distributed systems at LUMS, as a visiting faculty member at FAST NUCES, UCP, and GIFT University, and before any of the titles, she led volunteer mentors for an entire school of underprivileged students with The Citizens Foundation.
Today she is a Senior Member of Plan9, the Punjab Information Technology Board’s flagship startup incubator, a Mentor at the Al Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science at UET, and a Senior Member of Femington, an international network advancing women in technology and leadership. In 2025, she was at GITEX Africa in Marrakech, meeting the founders and investors building AI across African markets.
The industry’s statistics say the ladder is missing rungs. Saima Mushtaq’s career doesn’t disprove the data, one person can’t. What it shows is what the top of the ladder looks like when someone makes it all the way up and then spends her time building rungs for everyone else.
