Women in IT: Inspiring the next generation

by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (Editor)

Overview

Gender diversity still poses a major challenge in the IT and telecoms industry, with women making up less than 20 per cent of the IT workforce. This ebook seeks to encourage more girls and women to consider a career in IT by showcasing the lives and careers of female IT professionals, entrepreneurs and academics. Its aim is not only to demonstrate the advantages of a career in IT to girls and women, but also to emphasise the proven benefits of gender diversity in the workplace

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780172880
Publisher:	BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
Publication date:	10/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN ... THESE ARE THE REAL FIGURES

Whilst many of the headline figures for 2014's Women in IT Scorecard report are still negative, there are some points of optimism in the thorny issue of gender diversity in IT. E-skills and BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, have updated their scorecard for gender representation in the IT industry – a robust and rigorous exposition of an issue that still surprises in the 21st century. Brian Runciman, MBCS, reports.

We need to start with setting out the problem. Despite the fairly high profile of this issue, the trend for representation of women in IT over the last decade is actually slightly down, with current figures showing just 20 per cent in the industry as a whole.

Drilling down to specialist areas it gets worse: within the IT sector itself only 11 per cent of IT specialists were women and the median gross weekly rate of pay for female IT specialists was 16 per cent less than the comparison figure for men working in IT roles.

Karen Price OBE, CEO of e-skills UK, says in her foreword to the report: 'No-one who is fortunate enough, as I am, to visit employer premises on a regular basis, will be surprised by the contents of this report – a simple glance around will invariably confirm that men are significantly in the majority in tech workplaces. While the scale of the gender imbalance itself is shocking, its persistence is no less so.'

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ISSUE

Quite aside from the obvious ethical dilemma, the IT and telecoms industry accounted for an annual gross value added (GVA) of £75 billion in 2012 according to the ONS Annual Business Survey – approximately eight per cent of the UK total in that year. Continued adoption of IT has the capacity to generate an additional £47 billion of GVA to the UK economy over the next five to seven years.

Likewise, IT accounts for a significant proportion of UK employment. In 2013 there were just under 1.4 million people working either in the IT industry sector or in IT roles within other parts of the economy (753,000 in the IT industry and 643,000 IT professionals working in other industries) according to e-skills' 2012 Technology Insights – and that doesn't include the 29.7 million employees who use IT in their daily job – these are the experts upon whom they depend.

The value of a gender-balanced work force in such a vibrant sector of the economy is considered self-evident by most; especially with the UK facing a challenge to keep up with IT demand. E-skills UK's recent employment forecasts, in partnership with Experian, identified that there is a need for around 129,000 new entrants a year into IT and telecoms specialist job roles through to 2015, with a minimum of around 22,600 likely to be filled by people joining from education.

WHERE ARE THE PROBLEMS?

Karen Price cites the societal influences that affect all STEM roles and the widespread misperceptions about IT careers – from the difficulty of the work to IT's undeserved antisocial image – but however much employers want to recruit women they can only choose from those who put themselves forward and have the appropriate qualifications. The report shows that employers strongly believe that the key to reducing the gender imbalance lies at an earlier stage – in schools, colleges and universities – which is where the gender divide starts.

Lower female participation rates exist at GCSE level, with the gap increasing at A-level and continuing into higher education and thus the IT professional workforce. The lack of females taking IT-related qualifications directly impacts upon the proportion of females that are employed today as IT specialists.

Given that the trend in the representation of females throughout ICT education and careers has been predominately downwards for some years, it suggests that the employment situation is likely to worsen further unless there are some significant and meaningful interventions. By 2013, of the 1,129,000 people working as IT specialists in the UK, less than one in six were women.

ANY POSITIVES?

Firstly the absolute number of women in the IT workforce has risen. The indicators from the self-employed have improved markedly over the past decade with numbers of women more than doubling.

In the education area, when girls do take part in computing subjects at GCSE and A-level, they outperform their male counterparts. The research shows that 76.3 per cent of females (compared with 69.2 per cent of males) who took an IT-related full course GCSE were awarded A*–C grades.

Of course this provides a potential pool for IT employers, but only if females can be encouraged into IT careers. This also shows that where a motivating curriculum is offered, young women show an appetite for degree level work in tech – this is demonstrated in the high level of female participation in e-skills UK's ITMB degree.

IT DEPENDS HOW YOU LOOK AT IT

Some of the headline figures from the report can be seen either as pros or cons, especially if a more global view is taken. For example, female representation in IT specialist roles is higher in the devolved nations than in the UK as a whole (19 per cent vs 16 per cent). Compared with other EU15 nations the level of female representation in IT positions in the UK is slightly below the norm. It is positive that women are much more likely to hold technician/engineer grade positions than men, with 34 per cent representation among women compared with 20 per cent amongst men, but that goes hand-in-hand with women being less likely to be working in 'professional' (primarily development related) occupations (46 per cent vs 57 per cent).

THE EDUCATION PICTURE

Looking at ICT education compared with other subjects the picture becomes less positive. Across all subjects in higher education in 2013, females accounted for 57 per cent of UK-domiciled applicants and 55 per cent of acceptances, but females made up just 12 per cent of applicants and 13 per cent of acceptances in computer sciences subjects.

STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – see better representation for females, with 34 per cent of applicants and 35 per cent of acceptances (UK domicile), but again for the computer sciences there is a huge drop to 12 per cent applicants and 13 per cent acceptances.

Whilst across all subjects in 2012 females accounted for 59 per cent of UK-domiciled qualifiers, they accounted for just 18 per cent of qualifiers from all computer science/ IT-related HE courses. Females who sat an IT-related GCSE in 2013 decreased three percentage points compared with 2012, and in 2013 females accounted for just 6.5 per cent of those taking computing A-level, a decline of 1.5 percentage points compared with 2012.

WHEN THE WORK IS THERE

When women's education is taken into account, we see a highly-qualified group: over two-thirds (69 per cent) of female IT specialists held some form of HE qualification in 2013 – a proportion that is not only equal to that of their male counterparts, but that is also much higher than that observed for either women or men within the wider workforce. These are capable people. Which makes it all the more problematic that, at £640 per week, the median gross weekly rate of pay for female IT specialists was 16 per cent less than the comparison figure for men working in IT roles (£760). The recorded level of pay for women IT roles has been consistently below that of male IT specialists in each of the past 10 years.

CONCLUSION

It's clear that gender imbalance is still a large problem in IT. Reports such as the Women in IT Scorecard show, however, that the issue is not one of competence. If anything, the performance of girls in education shows that the IT profession is missing out on high-quality potential. It's still a question of keeping this issue in the public eye.

Read the full report: Women in IT Scorecard

CHAPTER 2

THE GENDER CONUNDRUM

Dr Hannah Dee, University of Aberystwyth, examines the current gender gap in the IT industry and asks whether we should be worried for the future of our profession.

The early years of computing were full of women. It's estimated that over 80 per cent of the staff at Bletchley Park during the Second World War were women, operating some of the world's first computational machines and contributing to the foundations of British computing.

Early computing courses attracted equal numbers of men and women students. Sometime around the 1970s, this changed. Computing became a discipline and indeed a profession with a gender problem.

Now, women number about 15 per cent of the technical workforce. Why this is happening is hard to determine: it happens in most Western countries (but less so in other parts of the world).

Maybe women just aren't interested in computers. Or maybe there's something that's putting women off – for example, maybe there's something about school computing that makes women think computing is not for them. Or maybe there's a broader image problem?

SKILLS GAPS, JOB MARKETS AND THE POWER OF DIVERSE TEAMS

One of the turning points of the last decade has been a recognition from business that diversity is something to be valued. McKinsey have released a series of reports under the 'Women Matter' banner, which show, from a business perspective, that diverse teams perform better in the business world.

As an example, when you compare companies in the top quartile for executive gender diversity against companies with no women on their executive board, those with diverse boards have 41 per cent better return on equity, and 56 per cent better EBIT (earnings before interest and tax).

It's important to note that these teams aren't doing better because women are more talented at business; they're performing better because diverse teams behave differently. Monocultures tend to be self-reinforcing: if all your decisions are taken by one sector of the population, then the decision-making and management style is going to be similar.

Diverse boards provide a range of different backgrounds and management styles, all engaging in the business process, and when this happens, McKinsey show that the resultant business process is more effective.

There are other arguments for diversity in the workplace. In professions with heavy gender imbalances, the minority generally has a more difficult time. Male nurses take more sick days and female accountants are more likely to register on the anxiety and depression scales.

There's a term – sex role spill over – for the way in which unrelated aspects of gender roles seep into a profession when that profession has a major gender imbalance. There's no need for system administrators to be interested in beer and trains: having unrelated but common interests doesn't make you a better system admin (although it may make it easier to chat with colleagues).

There's also a skills shortage in IT roles. Neelie Kroes, the EU commissioner for the digital agenda (and EU vice president), recently proposed grand coalitions to address technical skills gaps.

Skills gaps aren't uniform across the entire ICT/computing field, but exist in most subdomains; for example, the UK's National Audit Office has recently said that unless recruitment to computing courses increases dramatically, we face a 20-year wait for enough skilled professionals in the cyber security domain.

So diverse teams perform better, and there are lots of jobs in some parts of the profession at least. Where are the future employees going to come from?

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN SCHOOLS?

There's been a crisis in school computing, which came to a head last year with the Royal Society calling for a major reform of the technical curriculum in their publication 'Shut down or restart?' The problem is that the nation's school children simply don't know what computer science is. Pupils are taught ICT in schools, which involves spreadsheets, word processing and maybe some database or web design. Computer science – systems, programming, networks and algorithms – hardly gets a mention. In universities we see this at interview every year, and in computing departments across the UK there are freshers wondering what they've let themselves in for. This isn't a problem that's unique to computing (most law students, for example, haven't studied law before they get to university), but coupled with our image problem it has major implications, particularly in terms of gender.

School computing in the broadest sense has seen falling numbers, and not just with women. ICT A-level numbers dropped 34 per cent in 2003–12, and computing A-level dropped 60 per cent in the same period. In 2012 the number of women choosing to do computing at A-level fell to just 297 across the whole of the UK. In most UK university computer science departments, the student gender ratio is just as bad as that in schools – hovering between 10 and 15 per cent.

COMPUTING CAN BE FUN

Computing can be an incredibly rewarding subject. When you're programming, you're quite literally building things out of ideas, and the sense of achievement you can get from getting a tricky piece of code to work is great. When I'm programming, those 'Aha!' moments are actually quite common. Sure, some of the work is boring, but name a job that doesn't have boring bits. The problem is that our profession is seen by children as a job made up from mostly boring bits.

Another thing we have to get across is that computing isn't just programming. There's system design, algorithms, user experience design, software testing, user testing, technical training, technical writing, networking, user support and helpdesk roles, and lots of other careers. That's before you consider management and analyst roles further up the business tree. Only a handful of these potential careers involve sitting in a cubicle on your own writing code. The vast majority of careers require teamwork, creativity and (dare I say it) social skills.

GIRL GEEKS AND CODER CHICKS

Computing now pervades our lives. Most of us have devices in our pockets that are far more powerful than those used by the computing pioneers of the 1960s. This is a hugely exciting time to get into tech.

Social networking emphasises the computer-as-communication device, and now the gender ratio of computer users, gamer and purchasers is pretty much equal. Indeed the largest growing demographic in computer games is my own (35–55-year-old women). Women are active consumers of technology; we're just not getting involved as creators.

Organisations and events targeted at women exist to try and break this pattern. These can be linked to professional societies, like BCSWomen (the BCS group for women in technology) or they can be grassroots organisations like Girl Geek Dinners who put on talks and dinners around the world.

There are also organisations aimed at particular areas within computing, like MzTek for women interested in computing and art, or CAS #include who work to make computing in schools more inclusive. Dr Reena Pau, a member of CAS #include, says, 'we want to offer opportunities for as many students as possible to be able to experience computing, whilst of course realising it will not be for everyone!'

These organisations provide a space for women to meet and network, but they also provide support and mentoring opportunities. School computing is being rejuvenated by organisations like Computing At School, and a lot of the big companies are coming on board to help out (Microsoft, Google and IBM have all been sponsors of some of the initiatives mentioned so far).

So there's a problem: to perform at their best, businesses need diverse teams, but there just aren't women coming through the educational pipeline. This is because computing in schools, until recently, hasn't actually represented computing. On top of this, there is a general image problem of the subject as a solo pursuit dominated by men, which means that students looking for other careers – creative, social careers – don't think of applying.

What can you do to help out?

• If you're a manager, encourage your employees to get involved in schools, or, if you're technical, think about helping out in schools yourself. Code club and Computing++ link programmers with schools across the UK.

• Encourage your women employees to get involved with BCSWomen.

• If you have a daughter or a niece (or a son or a nephew), think about encouraging them in creative computing. The programming language Scratch introduces programming concepts to children from the age of about seven upwards.

• If you're interested in finding out more, the book Little Miss Geek by Belinda Parmar is a great introduction to this general area.

In the words of the late Karen Spärck Jones 'Computing's too important to be left to men'.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Women In It"
by .
Copyright © 2014 BCS Learning & Development Ltd.
Excerpted by permission of BCS The Chartered Institute for IT.
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Table of Contents

ForewordPreface 1. Some background 2. IT professionals 2.1 Entrepreneurs 3. Academics 4. An interview with Karen Spaerck-Jones 5. Useful links