Despite years of IT industry initiatives to boost female representation, a mere 19% of technology professionals are currently women.
A poll conducted among 2,000 respondents by recruitment website, The IT Job Board, to coincide with International Women’s Day, indicated that the figure had risen 3% on last year, but it also pointed out that half of the female candidates in its database had been working in the sector for 10 or more years.
The firm’s managing director, Alexandra Farrell, said: “It is encouraging to see that, in the past year, the number of women working in IT has increased, but we are still far from achieving a ‘level playing field’…International Women’s Day presents the perfect platform to highlight the issue surrounding the lack of women in the UK’s IT sector.”
Players across the industry needed to work harder to attract more women into IT careers as well as champion female workers at all levels in order to develop a healthy future talent pipeline, she added.
Possible initiatives to address the situation included providing more flexible working options as a third of those questioned said that they now worked longer hours than last year. But as Microsoft said today, inflexible working hours limit the attractiveness of too many careers – such as IT – to large chuncks of the workforce.
Farrell put it another way, however. “Longer working hours present an issue when it comes to aspects of childcare, and this could potentially act as a deterrent to working parents,” she said.
