Furkan Karayel
Inclusion programmes inside technology organisations have produced dashboards, networks and statements, but the lived experience of underrepresented engineers has not shifted at the rate executives expected. The gap between stated values and daily leadership behaviour is where attrition starts. Closing it requires a different kind of intervention, one written for the people running teams, not the people writing policy.
Furkan Karayel is a software engineer turned author who teaches technology leaders how to translate inclusion commitments into the daily behaviours that retain underrepresented talent.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Furkan Karayel
- She speaks to engineering leaders as a former engineer. Ten years across multinational tech firms in Ireland gave her a working vocabulary for the room.
- Inclusive Intelligence, her book, gives line managers a behavioural framework rather than a values statement. It is the artefact she leaves with leadership teams.
- She lectures on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Master’s programme at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. The academic grounding sits alongside the practitioner experience.
- She has been recognised by named bodies including the WomenTech Global Awards and the International Diversity Leadership Awards, and sits on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council.
Biography highlights
- Founder and Managing Director, Diversein.com
- Author, Inclusive Intelligence: How to be a Role Model for Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace
- Associate lecturer, EDI Master’s programme, Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology
- Board member, Women For Election Ireland
- Speaker of the Year, WomenTech Global Awards
- Member, Harvard Business Review Advisory Council
Biography
Most inclusion programmes inside technology companies are designed by people who have never written production code. That gap shows up in the language, the metrics and the interventions. Furkan Karayel started her career as a software systems test engineer in Athlone, then spent a decade across multinational tech firms in Ireland in DevOps, automation, integration and support roles. She founded Diversein.com when she realised that, in her words, the action piece behind the diversity vocabulary was missing.
The work that followed is documented in Inclusive Intelligence, a book written for line managers rather than chief people officers. It treats inclusion as a leadership behaviour, observable and learnable, not a values position. The framework has carried into her teaching on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Master’s programme at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, where she lectures alongside her commercial work.
Her credentials sit across academic, commercial and civic categories. She holds a seat on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, serves on the board of Women For Election Ireland, and was named in the EUClid Network’s Top 100 Women in Social Enterprise. Named awards include Speaker of the Year at the WomenTech Global Awards and the Diversity and Inclusion Role Model in Business honour from the International Diversity Leadership Awards.
For technology businesses that have already invested in DEI and want a more useful conversation than the one they have been having, Karayel offers a practitioner’s argument rooted in the realities of engineering culture.
Key speaking topics
- Inclusive leadership in technology organisations
- Women in tech retention and progression
- Cultural intelligence across multilingual teams
- Bias-free decision-making for line managers
- Authentic leadership development
- Female founder and entrepreneur enablement
Ideal for
- Engineering and product leadership teams inside multinational tech businesses
- CHROs and heads of DEI under pressure to convert programme spend into behavioural outcomes
- Women-in-tech networks and ERGs seeking content with technical credibility
- Conferences serving founders, female entrepreneurs and STEM professionals
Audience outcomes
- A behavioural definition of inclusion managers can apply on Monday
- Specific practices for reducing bias inside engineering and product decisions
- A clearer view of why technical women leave, and what changes the equation
- Language for inclusive leadership grounded in lived practitioner experience
Talks
A leadership keynote translating the book’s framework into observable behaviours for managers running diverse teams.
Key takeaways:
- A working definition of inclusive intelligence as a leadership capability
- Behavioural practices for everyday managerial decisions
- A model for measuring inclusion outcomes beyond representation metrics
A talk on closing the gap between diversity statements and operational change inside large organisations.
Key takeaways:
- Why most DEI programmes stall at the intent stage
- The leadership behaviours that move the needle on retention
- How to design inclusion interventions managers will actually use
A development session for emerging women leaders inside technology organisations.
Key takeaways:
- How to build technical and leadership credibility in parallel
- Navigating visibility, sponsorship and authentic positioning
- Practical role-model behaviours drawn from the speaker’s own engineering career