UK.gov eavesdroppers frustrated by red tape
Less women?
The organisation has a purpose and is essentially a pure maths, applied signals and translation organisation, why would there be an equal number of men and women there outside the translation section.
No-one would suggest that there would be an equal number of men working in somewhere, say the house of colour, or even in a government department such as the National Health Service?
While not wanting to offend the small number of women clever enough to work in GCHQ (outside translation - I don't get translation, it's outside my capacity, so I don't know whether you can be clever at linguistics or just knowledgable,) they themselves must be aware that they aren't exactly your typical bird from a mental capacity perspective.
I forget who said it, but someone once described these type of people as "Near geniuses who operate outside all the usual rules." Bearing in mind the relative variance from the norm of male and female intellectual capability, we can hardly expect there to be anything other than a predisposition to masculinity in the staff levels.
"It also promised to improve the diversity of its staff, which the Cabinet Office said was "poor", with the proportion of women lagging behind other departments."
It doesn't do the same work as other departments. GCHQ is not a policy department. It's a do-er, not a spender. Any bod can administer, most can manage, but there are almost no women could constuct some cipher, based on elliptic curves, let alone decrypt such ciphertext.
(Actually, to be fair, I don't actually know if anyone can do it.)
