The fact that there are so few women entering IT isn’t good for anyone. Tech has become one of the most exciting industries to work in, it’s on the precipice of ground-breaking innovations in health, education and enhancing the ways we work and live.
To have women underrepresented in such a formative sector both at the grass roots and leadership levels means the industry is missing out on valuable human capital. There are countless studies that highlight the economic and company culture benefits to having a gender diverse workforce, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has developed a compelling document on this, including case studies from multinational organisations and research from around the world, all pointing to the fact that having women in leadership, teams and business in general serves business better than without.
Why should we care? Because the problem compounds itself. The fewer women who work in the industry, the less appealing it becomes for other women who want to join. FITT’s annual corporate diversity report captures the sentiment of women working in IT in Australia and for the last three years in a row, members have cited the ‘male dominated environment’ as one barrier to their success.
Additionally, they placed a high level of importance on ‘having senior women visible as role models‘ within their organisations, to give them something to aspire to but also so their needs are represented within the organisation.
There are a couple of reasons why there are so few women entering into the industry. For one thing there are far fewer women than men taking engineering, science or maths at university so the graduate technical roles within IT organisations are largely taken up by men.
The IT industry also has an image problem in its appeal to women because it’s still trying to shake off the geeky male engineer image. Being so heavily male-dominated presents a few obstacles for women who tend to seek out flexible work arrangements in greater number than their male peers.
We need to encourage more young girls to consider a career in IT and prep them for what they need to study for to achieve success on that path. In the 2015 FITT diversity report, 50% of women said they ‘fell into’ a career in ICT, more needs to be done to show young women the possibilities in a career within ICT early on.
FITT’s mission is to attract and retain women to the ICT industry and we do this by providing networking opportunities and access to female role models in the industry through our events and webinars. We also run an annual mentoring program which matches mentees with a senior mentor in the industry for guided 1-1 mentoring and in addition we publish a diversity report taken from our annual member survey and share this with our corporate partners to feed into their own diversity initiatives.
The only way we can ensure there is a new generation of ICT women is to make the industry more accessible through flexible working and ensure when roles come up, there is a fair effort to ensure a female is on the shortlist; the same applies for internal promotions and leadership positions. The new generation needs to be able to see high profile female leaders and feel confident it is a possibility for them.