By Natasha Lomas, 1 December 2008 11:00
COMMENT
The lack of women in tech risks alienating IT departments from the wider business, says Natasha Lomas, which is why addressing the issue should be a priority for every CIO.
Should there be more women in IT? The UK tech industry seems oddly coy when it comes to the 'fairer sex'. Sector skills body e-skills UK says only around one in five of the IT workforce is female. But should we care that the IT department is more likely to resemble an all-boys club than unisex salons? In the end, does it matter there's a gender imbalance in IT?
Let's consider an imaginary - and stereotypical - scenario from another famously sex-skewed industryÂ…
A woman is dismayed when her car develops a strange knocking noise. She needs to get it fixed but dreads the trip to the garage where the all-male cast of car mechanics will leer at her before telling her the work will cost at least £450 plus VAT… So what does she do? Ignore the noise, carry on driving and put off getting any work done for as long as possible - depriving the local repair shop of her business and potentially causing serious damage to the car.
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OK so that's fiction - but do a spot of Googling and it won't take long to find plenty of complaints from women about the kind of customer service they receive in garages. The point to be made here is customer service is about serving all comers, not just people like you. (Are all the people your IT department deals with men? I didn't think soÂ…)
One way of getting closer to that goal is ensuring your department contains a mix of people who are representative of the business/population as a whole. In an ideal world that would mean not just more women - but more ethnic minorities and a healthy mixture of age groups too. Diverse people bring diverse skills - and therefore make for a more flexible, creative and dynamic team, and one that is well equipped to engage with anyone/everyone from outside its own four walls.
As it stands, UK IT departments are unable to do that - certainly when it comes to recruiting women. Yet the majority of respondents to this year's silicon.com Skills Survey agree a lack of women is bad for IT.
Being unrepresentative means IT departments are at risk of alienating and isolating themselves from the rest of the business - at a time when it has never been more important for tech workers to eloquently broadcast their ideas beyond the server room. Let's not forget: gender balance outside IT is likely to be much better than a one-to-five ratio and, in many business arenas, it's getting better still.
By contrast IT's gender balance is getting worse - and that only perpetuates the problem. The fewer women there are in the industry, the more women outside will view IT as a male-only bastion. It's a vicious cycle, as a silicon.com reader pointed out in a recent Reader Comment: "There aren't enough women attracted to IT because there aren't enough women in IT!"
Another serious issue affected by the lack of women in IT is the tech skills crisis - e-skills UK has warned more than 140,000 new IT & telecoms recruits will be needed annually to keep up with industry demand. But a recruitment starting point that can't include the lion's share of half the country's population inevitably means that assembling a team of talented people is far harder than it should be.
So the simple answer is yes: IT departments should care about attracting more women.
But if that conclusion is easy, finding a way to do it can seem much more complex - not least because there's also evidence IT has trouble holding onto the women it does have.
Of course the problem of having a male-oriented culture that discourages women is by no means an IT-only issue.
Just take a look at the gender balance in Parliament. In some countries, where the ratio of male to female MPs is especially poor, positive discrimination and all-women shortlists have been used or considered. But forcing the issue in such a way can cause its own problems - and did not appeal to the majority of respondents to this year's Skills Survey as a fix for UK tech.
So what should IT chiefs be doing to get more female bums on seats?
There are less heavy-handed ways of helping IT's culture to evolve. Publically embracing and encouraging flexible working for one.
According to the British Computer Society's Women's Forum manager, Dr Jan Peters, the rise in women leaving IT is largely due to a lack of flexibility on the part of employers around things like career breaks to have children and care for relatives. Yet the technology is there to enable home and mobile working - so what's needed most is management will.
Telco BT, which won Best Company Advancing Women in Technology at this year's BlackBerry Women & Technology Awards, shows it is entirely possible to manage a large workforce of flexible and home workers (63,000 and 12,000 respectively). The company has even managed to save money by reducing office space and cutting travel costs. So the 'it just can't be done' argument doesn't wash.
Management must take the initiative and move forward with progressive policies. CIOs that do this may well find it brings other benefits too - such as more general staff retention and increased productivity. After all, organisations that shout about work/life balance are places where anyone - male or female - would wish to work.
And if this year's silicon.com CIO50 list - of the top 50 heads of IT in the UK - is anything to go by there is some cause for hope: almost a fifth of the top 50 were women, with two women making the top 10.
More females at the top has to be an encouraging sign, able to influence IT's culture from the inside out. So perhaps an agent of change is already knocking on IT's door.
Question is, can you hear her?
Comments
There are 15 comments. Join the discussion
1. Anthony Hunt
Why force women into IT?
They're not keen on it, or they'd be here. Whether it's perceived as a "mans" job, being technical, or just not interesting I have no idea.
Women can be very good at IT, but very few even try. Men are not discouraging women from IT, far from it. So why are there so few? Ask a women.
If pushed for a reason, then maybe social interaction is lacking. You can't chat with a computer. Men don't feel the same need to discuss everything.
When all's said and done, men and women ARE different and as a consequence they will have different abilities and interests.
All we can do is encourage those women who are interested in computing to take up the profession. While it would be nice to have them, I think it is rose-coloured thinking to say we need them.
2. M Rizzo
This article makes it sound like IT is dominated by blokes who don't want women around them. This couldn't be further from the truth - if anything a lot of techie blokes are frustrated that there don't seem to be many women who take an interest in IT, and worse that many women perceive IT people as boring geeks.
Sure the industry could do more to attract women, but please don't make it sound like there's some deliberate attempt to keep women out. Nobody is stopping women from taking CS at uni - so why do so few women choose to take it ?
3. Michael Hart
Equality and sameness are not synonymous. There is certainly equality of opportuity, with no employer discouraging talent whatever the sex or race of the candidate. Indeed, 'pushing' women into IT may exacerbate rather then solve the problem.
To get more women into IT all you have to do is get more women to like IT, then get them to prioritise work over family when it comes to calls on their time.
Not easy, but is it even desirable? To me, it smacks of communist-style social engineering which I'm definitely not a fan of.
4. dom
Yet hairdressing is women dominate.
Go to any hairdresser salon in you'll see that they are mostly dominated by women . Yet I don't believe the hair dressing industry prevent men working as hair dresser.
In the end I so much would love it if there were more women working in IT but I feel IT is just not the type of
job that appeal to women...
5. anonymous
Encouraging women to work in IT from school through University (or apprenticeship etc) would be good. The may just realise in the real world (or at least with small businesses) it’s hectic. No (small) budgets for new equipment (trying to keep 6 year old PC’s going for another year), new technology and old (that you cannot get the funding or time off to train for [OK evenings at home…..]). It goes wrong, and its always important to have it fixed NOW etc, very lucky to get thanks keeping it all going for 99.5% of the time.
Thinking of moving into beauty therapy (now lots of openings for males, can do nails (L&P, tips etc) want to train for waxing), doing work which pleases, and where customers are pleased and return because they want to, along with my fitness and health related qualifications.
There can be a large amount of knowledge to acquire to cover all IT (platforms, operating systems, packages, licensing, networking, database design, mobile convergence…), more than most other professions, which for the remuneration, job satisfaction and life/work balance may not be considered worth it… could be that women have already analysed this…
6. Drew Stephenson
But is the proportion of women in IT representative of the proportion of women applying for IT positions?
7. NKAWTG
I disagree, with just about everything Natasha says. First, there are career fields that women are not attracted to as a whole, so how are you going to get representative numbers of women in those career fields if they don't want to be there in the first place. Second, most men are not Neanderthal's leering at women and ripping them off so don't stereotype men Natasha. Third, I don't care who fixes my computer, or my car if they are qualified to do so.
8. Tracey
i'm a woman with 15 years experience in IT - a varied path involving tech support, sysadmin, development, business/systems analysis, process management/improvement and strategy.
being the only woman (or one of) in a team of men has occasionally worked in my favour - you're more visible as a minority and sometimes your opinions are more likely to be heard. at other times it's been frustrating and annoying, dealing with bigotry and put-downs from male colleagues seemingly unable to accept having a woman with technical knowledge/skills ('surely she's just playing at this and will disappear soon to have a baby or her hair done') on their patch.
interestingly the two places i've found less of the latter are in the media and the not for profit sectors, at organisations where the proportion of women in senior and management positions has been high.
My other female friends/colleagues in IT have experienced much the same. none of us wanted to be hairdressers, beauticians or any of the clich?mentioned by others. we are smart, innovative, highly organised problem solvers, who for the most part happen to have great social skills to boot (like several of the men in IT i've been lucky to work with). we're also extremely fussy about where we'll work and for whom.
i'm currently working on an agile software development project that's 50/50 male/female. our team is the most cohesive and highly functioning i've come across to date, with an emphasis on good and open communication alongside efficient delivery of a high quality product. it's a challenging, exciting project and we have fun delivering it. we've already been joined by one woman from the business side who'd never considered a career in IT, just by making software development look more attractive and showing her that her skills - both hard and soft - would be welcomed.
perhaps the picture that's being painted of life in IT just isn't that enticing to many women: monotonous work done by boring people in grey cubicles and dingy server rooms. then again that's not exactly attractive to a lot of men i know either. change the image of IT and perhaps more women will be attracted to it.
9. anonymous
Yes, I think we do need more women in IT. The male bias tends to be towards how the machine does the job it's doing, the female bias towards what it's doing and why. Males are typically good at narrow focus, high specific achievement, whilst females typically have a broader perspective. Without in any way wishing to imply that either sex is limited to one mode or the other, it's surely right that both perspectives are indispensable to healthy IT development.
10. Jori
women need no help to choose their carer. not anymore in the civilized world.
this article makes me think that the author is a chauvinist that is searching for every opportunity to put women down (or anyone) with the patronizing excuse of alerting the community. "Oh! look at them, isn't that a shame?... they look terrible, don't they?" and so on.
To the editor: choose your fights wisely!
11. drew stephenson
Funny thing is, our HR department is almost exclusively female, but there are no articles highlighting this and suggesting that this is an imbalance that needs to be addressed. Different people tend towards different jobs. Let it be. As long as you're hiring the best person for the job it really shouldn't matter.
And by best person for the job i don't necessarily mean the one with the best technical skills, as Tracey points out, "soft" skills may be equally important.
12. anonymous
I am a woman, worked in IT for years and loved it.
The women I worked with also tended to be better at their jobs than their male counterparts, seemed to work harder and were just considered to be the best at what they knew in their areas of specialisms.
In fact many of these highly skilled women have gone on to achieve great many things in their lives.
There is no doubt that women would benefit from entering a career in IT as there is a shortage of IT skills in general, and there's an opportunity to be really successful financially and to achieve a lot personally.
However it takes something unusual to make it work, and that seems to be one of the reasons its not got the same appeal as other types of work.
Working with IT systems in any type of role requires a certain method of thinking and working, an ability to take in a lot of detail for internal analysis and comparison and it is often about dealing with customers at their absolute, most stressed, worst.
A woman working in this environment will require nerves of steel, cool confidence and the ability to overlook almost continual aspersions cast upon her intelligence by male colleagues and end users, in order to feel a sense of achievement and success.
However there is no doubt that more of that will bring about a radical improvement and upliftment to the industry as a whole.
13. Radical Meldrew
I once worked briefly in a female dominated IT environment - the help desk of a large health care company. Every server had a name and sported a little teddy bear with a different coloured ribbon around its neck to identify it. I was highly amused by this but had to take my hat off to the high level of applied expertise. This proved beyond doubt that women can be highly effective as techies whils still maintaining a feminine aspect. Bring it on girls!
14. Richard Sarson
My best managers have been women. They treat computers as tools and not boys' toys. They recognise what the job to be done really is.
They let you do your own thing, but if you get out of line, they whiplash you.
What most people involved in this debate are too young to realise is that back in the 1950s, it was women who did the programming, a job that was below men, who were deemed to understand what business was all about. So the men were bosses and the women who were the skivvies, doing the skivvy job - programming.
Now it is the nerdy men who do the skivvying job. The time is right for women to claim they are above all that, and go for putting the skivvy-nerdymen in their proper lowly place in the overall management picture.
15. Richard Reece
Isn't this just plain old biological gender differences playing out in the statistics of preference? Boys prefer interacting with things, girls with people, type thing? As one of the other posters mentioned, I doubt this is men trying to keep women out, more likely that Y9 girls choosing their GCSEs are less likely to enjoy fiddling with shiny objects. Hence presumably why many women in IT gravitate towards the roles which require superior people and organisational skills, e.g. project management and team leadership.
I've heard it suggested that the "exciting and challenging" hours that are involved in being a techie don't suit. I'm not completely convinced about this, dodgy hours are really only a big concern for people with small children, which is usually well after you choose your career. (The fact that you're normally expected to work them unpaid is not a gender-specific issue!)
It surely doesn't really matter which gender tends to choose what, the most important thing is to ensure that any opportunity is equally available to anyone who wants it, based on merit, and rewarded fairly.