Anna Louise Holm-Nielsen and Louise Modigh both work at Warner Bros. Discovery. Anna Louise is Programme & Broadcast Planning Director Nordics; Louise is Operations Director Streaming Creative. Today they are colleagues, collaborators, and – if Louise’s recent LinkedIn post is anything to go by – genuine friends.

They first met at a Women in Tech Sweden conference.

That detail matters, because it means that when Women of WBD Nordics organized their International Women’s Day event in Stockholm this March, and invited Women in Tech Sweden co-founder and Creative Director Elin Eriksson to speak, it wasn’t a cold booking. It was a full-circle moment: the community that brought two women together, now standing in the room they helped build.

The talk: From Brand Manager to Movement Builder

Elin’s session took the audience through the journey from her first encounter with the Women in Tech initiative in 2015, then as Brand Manager at Bonnier Group, to co-founding the organization that today brings together 30,000+ community members and runs the largest tech conference for women in the Nordics.

The talk didn’t shy away from the uncomfortable data. Sweden ranks 6th globally for gender equality, and yet – as McKinsey research published earlier this year makes clear – high national gender equality scores do not automatically translate into gender-balanced tech teams. Women hold just 21% of executive roles in European tech. Entry-level positions for women in software engineering fell 13% between 2024 and 2025. 82% of women in tech say they must prove themselves more than their male colleagues.

The numbers landed. But so did something smaller.

“Even if you are the only woman in the room, make sure to make space for the next one.”

Anna Louise and Louise both point to this line when asked what stayed with them.

“I think we all left with this statement tattooed to our minds,” says Anna Louise, “because sometimes you need to drive the change you want to see, for others to enjoy.”

Why an International Womens’ Day event?

We asked Anna Louise and Louise what drove the decision to make this a priority for their team.
Women of WBD is empowering, motivating and inspiring all employees to be more inclusive and have a diverse team for all tasks and projects,” they explain. “Tech is the core of everything we do, and we need to keep pushing for equal opportunity and visibility, especially in the areas where the female/male ratio is not 1:1.

That framing, tech as core, not peripheral, is significant. Warner Bros. Discovery is, at first glance, a media and entertainment company. But streaming infrastructure, broadcast planning, data and product: the company runs on technology, which means the gender balance of its tech-adjacent teams shapes everything from what gets built to who builds it.

For organizations still weighing whether to make space for these conversations, Anna Louise and Louise have a clear answer:

“Our events are always aimed at both experienced female and male leaders, as well as the younger generation. We can help shape their perception of their own capabilities and help them verbalize what they need – and also help them draw boundaries. It is also important to flag the progress that’s been made when it comes to inclusion, as well as the areas we still need to develop and improve.”

That last part is worth pausing on. Flagging progress alongside the gaps isn’t optimism for its own sake – it’s what keeps people in the conversation rather than overwhelmed by it. The goal is not to make anyone feel helpless. It’s to make the path forward feel real.

The room

The event took place on a Monday afternoon, gathered around the lunchroom tables in WBD’s Stockholm office, the kind of setting that feels more like a real conversation than a keynote and with people who had made a point of being there. And notably, several of them were men.
That matters. The work of building a more equal tech industry doesn’t happen in rooms where everyone already agrees or are the same – it happens when people who hold leverage decide to show up too.

There was also, it should be said, an exceptional cart of Swedish lösgodis. Anyone who has ever stood at a pick-and-mix counter deliberating between cola bottles and sour ribbons will understand that this is not a small detail. It sets a tone. It says: we wanted you to feel welcome here.
Sometimes the most effective inclusion work looks exactly like this, a Monday afternoon, a thoughtful host, real conversations, and a cart with candy that someone chose with care.

This is what it looks like when a company decides the conversation is worth having.