Leadership Intensive, 2026

Senior technical women carry a load that doesn't show up in a performance review. They're on call. They're often the only woman in the architecture review, the incident bridge, or the promo committee packet. They're expected to deliver as individual contributors while absorbing mentorship, hiring, and culture work that rarely gets counted. The people who do this well are the ones companies can least afford to lose, and they are leaving technical tracks at the exact career stage where the investment in them has just started to compound.

The Summit is a 2-day residential program for women at the senior IC, staff, and design- & engineering-management levels. It is built on the premise that sustained technical judgment is a physiological and social achievement, not just an intellectual one.

The curriculum runs on three tracks that meet daily:

Professional development

Facilitated sessions on topics like influence without authority, technical decision-making under ambiguity, negotiating scope and staffing, building a promotion case, and the specific mechanics of moving from senior to staff or into management. Small-cohort format, capped at ten (10) participants, with working sessions where attendees bring a live problem from their orgs.

Community and peer network

Structured cohort groups that persist after the event, matched by level and domain. Most participants arrive as the most senior woman in their function and leave with a dozen peers doing the same job at other companies. This is the durable asset: a benchmarking and sponsorship network that no internal program can manufacture.

Physical and cognitive recovery

Protected sleep, movement, nutrition, and nervous-system regulation built into the schedule rather than offered as optional add-ons. Framed and taught as restive infrastructure for people in high-interrupt, high-stakes roles, with practical protocols they can run at home during on-call weeks and launch crunches.

Participants leave with a written development plan, a peer cohort, and a set of practices they can actually sustain. Employers get back a design lead, an engineer or manager who has made a considered decision to stay and build.

Three value propositions, for employers and attendees

Retention at the most expensive point in the curve

Replacing a senior technical employee costs a large multiple of salary once you count recruiting, ramp time, lost institutional knowledge, and the productivity drag on the team absorbing the gap. (SHRM cites the cost of replacing an employee to be as much as 200% of her salary. SHRM, 2025) Additionally, employee engagement is among the lowest it's been in a decade, at 31% (Gallup, 2025). Attrition among technical women concentrates at mid-to-senior career, right after the company has finished paying the ramp cost and before it has collected the return. This Intensive is a targeted, low-cost intervention at that exact inflection point.

For the attendee: a reason and a plan to stay on a technical track rather than exiting to something less rewarding.

Sustained capability in high-load roles

Burnout doesn't usually show up as resignation first. It shows up as degraded decision quality, slower incident response, avoidance of hard conversations, and withdrawal from the mentorship and hiring work that senior people are supposed to carry. Recovery skills are performance skills for anyone who owns a pager.

For the attendee: relief that is legitimate to ask for, plus techniques that work in the actual conditions of the job.

Leadership pipeline and external benchmarking

Companies that want women in technical leadership need those women to have sponsors, peer networks, and a visible sense of what "good" looks like outside their own org. A cross-company cohort supplies all three at a fraction of the cost of building an internal program.

For the attendee: the network is the career asset with the longest half-life.

If you sign your own checks

Founders, consultants and independent contractors

You don't need anyone's approval. You need the time to be worth what it costs you to be away.

Thinking time you cannot get at your desk

When you own the business, the work that compounds — positioning, pricing, which clients to stop taking, what to build next — is the work that never gets a calendar slot. The Summit's working sessions are structured to produce a decision, not a reading list. Bring the question you have been deferring.

The room is the asset

The cohort is senior technical women who buy, specify, recommend and hire. That is not a pitch environment and we protect it from becoming one — there is no sponsor floor and no recruiting programming. It is, reliably, where the referrals that matter later start.

Operating capacity is your actual constraint

With no team to absorb a bad month, your energy is the company's single point of failure. The recovery track treats that as an operating risk with practical controls, not as self-care.

Ready to register?

Reserve a seat See the full program

Still thinking about it? Use this packet to convince your manager to support and even pay for your attendance. Reach out to us at info@blackcomputeHER.org.