With her petite frame perched in a chair within a vast boardroom in one of Nairobi’s most prestigious business addresses, Isis Nyong’o looks an unlikely candidate for the title of vice-president and managing director of Africa for InMobi.

With one leg tucked under her as she twirls a pen, it would appear that the 34-year-old, who has been chosen to run the African operations of the world’s second-largest mobile advertising firm, has finally broached the mythical glass ceiling.

She disagrees: “There have definitely been several advances, but for many of us in the industry there are too few of us women in leadership positions in African ICT.”

Rising profile

On a shaky telephone connection from her offices at Google’s South African headquarters, Ms Nyong’o’s former workmate, Ms Ory Okolloh, agrees.

“There are still very few of us in the industry. I still look around at major conferences and see very few women, there are very few corporate heads of ICT firms in Africa,” said Ms Okolloh, the policy manager for Africa.

However, in Ms Nyong’o and Ms Okolloh’s recent appointments at Google and InMobi, analysts see the beginnings of a new trend that is seeing young educated Kenyan women take on roles with large responsibilities for large multinationals.

In a growing number of multinationals, Kenyan women are taking up top positions in a global reversal of trends that have seen the number of females in top positions at such firms slow down.

According to the recently released Women in IT survey by the Center For Women & Technology, Kenya is no different from many other countries in the world, where women hold just 10 per cent of corporate offices in the ICT industry.