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By Sarah Left, 10 November 2000 18:00

NEWS At the Women in IT conference held at the Microsoft campus in Reading, speakers agreed that the UK could solve its skills crisis if more women were attracted to IT jobs. According to the latest Office of National Statistics figures, only 24 per cent of IT workers in the UK are women, down from 29 per cent six years ago. Speaking at the conference, Baroness Margaret Jay, Minister for Women, said that UK businesses would be forced to recruit more women as they struggle to find workers. Jay said: "I think it is beginning to filter through to even the more male-dominated management boards that if they don't recruit women, it's going to affect their bottom line - it's about their own economic well-being." With numbers of women in IT falling rather than rising, both the government and the IT industry are scrambling to encourage girls to take up IT studies. IBM, Microsoft and Sun have all been targeting girls with awareness campaigns in an effort to close the skills gap. Microsoft's director of human resources, Steve Harvey, called on the industry to work together to interest girls in IT careers. He said: "We all recruit from the same pot and right now we are just upping everybody's salaries by trying to recruit from the same pool of resources. But at the same time we're not working together to increase the overall size of the pot. And that seems a crazy, short-term logic." Rebecca George, IBM's head of human resources, said the IT industry should target girls as young as five. IBM has been running roadshows that promote IT to girls. "We've found that if you haven't persuaded a girl by the age of 14 that IT is interesting, then you have probably lost her," George said.