back to article All the IT ladies (all the IT ladies), all the IT ladies (all the IT ladies), now put your hands up! Oh, still not many here

Women are still struggling to get a foothold in the IT industry, according to research from PwC. The UK came 16th for gender equality across industries and all OECD countries in the bean counters' "Women in Work" survey – with Iceland and Sweden holding on to the top two spots. Luxembourg has made the most progress since 2000 …

  1. Byz

    I have three children

    All my kids a girls and all have a natural talent with IT.

    I have tried to interest them in using their abilities to work in the IT sector (wages are better than areas they are studying and working) none of them are interested.

    The youngest is a natural programmer and loves gaming. Not interested all have studied arts at further education :(

    1. Trbonja

      Re: I have three children

      Same here but I have two of girls.

      Older one was raised in old fashion way: "suck-it-up-and-move-forward-no-mater-what". I've trained her in martial arts, we built PC's together, PHP coding, a lot of quake 3 death matches. Direct, clear spoken and if someone is on the way, better run; Basically she would be perfect admin from hell! She's in the health industry, child psychology.

      Younger one, has zero interest in technology and preffer things that just work. Sadly, all my attempts to teach her some usefull tech/electronics stuff failed. She is in medical field as well.

      I hire co-op students all the time so I can pass on some knowledge (good and bad) but over the last 15 years I had only 2 female students.

      1. Getmo

        Re: I have three children

        Haven't there been other studies done that try to explain this?

        I believe they surveyed college freshman on their majors/interests, concluded something along the lines of, "men like working with 'things', women like working with people". Obviously not a hard & fast rule, there are many exceptions, and we as a species can be an odd bunch.

        However if it really turns out to be true, studies like this seem a bit odd to me that they almost always suggest or imply that a magical 50/50 ratio is the goal. I wonder if that's just a natural "want" when you're fiddling with statistics all day. But if we don't ask the question first, do people actually want to do this work, before rolling out programs to encourage the youth into "the delights of a career in IT", then it seems more like forcing something on them that they may genuinely just don't enjoy doing.

        As always, we should still be working to make it easier for women who want to work in IT to get in, and IT still has a "boys-only club" image we have to be persistent in shedding.

        But children? They can be easily manipulatived, especially if a gov't/agency is telling them "we want you to work in IT", their parents seem happy & excited when they tell them (they assume the child likes it themselves, not that they're only repeating what they were told in school), as they get a bit older their friends encourage them "wow, you're going to be rich!", and before you know it they're sitting in an office doing something they hate. All it takes is gentle encouragement all along the way.

        When I was a kid, I was taught "people are different. And that's o.k." I find myself asking these questions again when these kinds of articles come up. What if we really are different? What if there's a real reason why it seems there's always more women in healthcare and men in tech? And, as a society, can we all be o.k. with that? Or are we going to be slaves to the 50/50 rule because the numbers look good on paper.

    2. Muscleguy

      Re: I have three children

      My youngest is in Bioinformatics. She built herself a double major in Biochem and CompSci and now has a PhD and a job as a Bioinformatician doing scientific research.

      But then her mother has a BA in pure maths and BSc in CompSci and we have a family friend who got head hunted into BioInfo as a database researcher. So the role of BioInfo was known to her when she chose it as a career.

      It does happen. But you can interest people as much as you like but getting them to commit as a career if they are MORE interested in other things will not work. But having people in other fields who have a tech background is not a bad thing.

      I’m self taught but rose to run Mac support for the lab I was in with IT’s blessing. I emailed them the MAC address of new computers so they could get on the network and I did everything else up to and including surgery. Nothing spectacular and we had an expert if things were outside my ken.

      My G3 Power Mac tower wouldn’t turn on, the guy had no ideas, there it was side down and he said only thing to try was to press the motherboard reset switch. I said go for it and the thing booted just fine. Those towers were so easy to add stuff to. I put an internal ZIP drive in it. Which meant with an external I could duplicate ZIP drives without having to make a disc image.

    3. RandyC

      Re: I have three children

      I mean, my brother has a master's degree in psychology, yet works as a senior change manager in a massive corporation, same with me Im working in a completely different area than my studies. Someday they might be interested in using their skills and talents, it usually happens that way - we get pulled towards things we are naturally able to do.

  2. Andre Carneiro

    Are they struggling, though?

    Just because there aren't as many women in IT doesn't necessarily mean they are struggling to get into it! For heaven's sake!

    Maybe there ARE barriers, I don't know. But this "research" looks at the end state and then infers how we got there. This narrative seems only too common and it really helps nobody.

    Also "If all OECD countries matched Sweden's levels of female employments, GDP would be boosted by $6tn." I'm not sure what this means. Are women better and more productive than men? In that case, would the industry not have cottoned on to it and employed more of them?

    I'm honestly really confused.

    1. dave 81

      Re: Are they struggling, though?

      Any company I have worked for would love to hire women in IT. There are just none applying.

    2. Androgynous Cow Herd

      Re: Are they struggling, though?

      “If all OECD countries matched Sweden's levels of female employments, GDP would be boosted by $6tn,”. I know women less get paid less but I had know idea the gap was that significant.

    3. Gerrardstut

      Re: Are they struggling, though?

      Agreed!

  3. Steve Kerr

    Romania 10-12 years ago

    When I was working out in Romania on a project for an Austrian bank, I would hazard that 80% of IT were women all the way up to management.

    Back then and over there, IT was seen as a woman's job, men's jobs were making and building things.

    Interesting that different places, different opinions on jobs.

    Other interesting things, terrible traffic issues in Bucharest so they made public transport stupidly cheap to get people out of their cars. Was also there when the first Ikea was built and opened, got caught up in gridlock as everyone tried to go there and it was off of the same road as the airport

  4. Evil Auditor Silver badge

    PwC could be advised to take some of its own advice

    Indeed. But, as the proverb goes: do as I say, not as I do.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      PwC record

      From their website "Female representation in the partnership has gradually increased from 13% in 2006 to 21% in 2019." So they've gone from abysmal to bad. One wonders what their profits would be if they walked the walk.

  5. Garry Perez

    Delights.......

    Ooo me ribs are killing me

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    delights? really?

    -- Develop the pipeline of female talent by partnering with schools and colleges to "educate and inspire" young women with the delights of a career in IT

    What delights?

    I've been in IT since 1988 and while I used to get delighted when stuff just worked, I don't think that's what they meant. As far as I can tell, being in IT means dealing with broken hardware, badly written software, uneducatable users, stupid develoopers, ignorant administrators, and worthless managers. Then you have thunderstorms that fry equipment, construction companies who dig up and break cables, and don't forget Microsoft, IBM, RedHat, Dell, Unisys, Honeywell, Groupe Bull, and the rest selling you software that doesn't quite do what they said its supposed to do. Then you have the support staff who are from another country and don't actually speak your language (no matter what language you speak.)

    Sure, women are missing all of this by not being in IT. I find it hard to feel even the least bit sorry for them.

    1. Steven Raith

      Re: delights? really?

      Well, if you find nihlism and cynicism delightful, which has been a streak that runs through all IT support people with some good chops that I've worked with - male or female.

      In my experience - which is of course, a sample of one, so entirely anecdotal - we're a lovely bunch of downtrodden, cynical darlings, we are.

      Much love to all <3

      Steven "feeling a bit nostalgic today" R

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: delights? really?

      > stupid developers

      As a developers myself, I sometime feel sad for those supporting the software I'm working on, considering how bad it is and how varied the modes of failures are. But then I just have to go back to the coal face to pump more half-baked features so that sales can get more deals with more companies...

  7. SundogUK Silver badge

    "Women are still struggling to get a foothold in the IT industry" implies that woman are trying and failing. The 'evidence' you show does not seem to support that - it simply shows that fewer woman than men are entering the industry. What if woman are simply more sensible and want nothing to do with IT?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      That's because they're not showing the right evidence. The actual evidence is that the number of female CS graduates has roughly halved in roughtly a generation. Something has caused that, and it's not innate ability.

  8. baud

    "the delights of a career in IT"

    It seems like the author has never worked in IT or talked to an IT professional (and no, a survey sent to a random panel of IT professionals doesn't count)

  9. karlkarl Silver badge

    Women steer away from two industries.

    1) Refuse collection

    2) IT / Software

    I think the common trend here is women (quite correctly) don't want to deal with shite.

    1. Alister

      Dealing with shite (literally) is much more common in the caring professions, where women are over-represented.

  10. Lee D Silver badge

    When I went to university 20 years ago, there was precisely one woman in the lectures for the CS department, so less than 1%. The maths side, which I was also studying, had something approaching a 40% ratio.

    After 20 years in IT working for schools, I have worked under precisely one woman (in a technical sense, not in a "they were the headmistress of the whole company"), who was an outlier and had been in banking IT for decades before and was nearing retirement. All the applicants for her replacement were male. Every time I've put out job ads (and HR are scrupulous about being equal-opportunity), from apprentices up, every single applicant was male. Every IT department I've visited has entirely male staff. We have employed women briefly, but in the "anyone can carry a computer" tier of jobs... not through want of trying, but we just don't get the applications from female applicants. Schools I've worked in have been majority-female staff in general. It just doesn't feed down to IT.

    I refuse to let my department become toxic masculinity personified, so we are often the haven of staff, male and female alike, when they want some sanity. But I don't get any female applicants responding to widely-published, heavily-advertised, neutral descriptions of a job that involves nothing gender-specific, even in a female-heavy workplace. Yet we have female staff in finance doing high-level Excel and SQL, and I've worked with female teachers more than capable of teaching coding (some of them ex-COBOL programmers), and there's literally nothing in the job that's female-offputting.

    There is obviously some disconnect somewhere - at some level women are discouraged from a career in IT or CS. And short of saying "female applicants welcome" or something (which is going to be construed as sexism or "looking for totty only"), as someone who hires IT staff, I can't do much more.

    Helpdesk roles are perfectly well gender-neutral... anyone can man a helpdesk. Anyone can follow a procedural sheet. You don't even need to be in an office, helpdesks often operate remotely. I do speak to a number of helpdesks throughout the working day, but generally it's male. I hate to say it, but the female staff tend to be in the minority, not stretch past first-level support at all, or are literally "secretarial" staff who were answering the phone and just recording details for the IT people (almost exclusively male) to follow up on later, just so that the phone isn't ringing for too long.

    I've met more female IT trainers than any other sub-profession. The techy staff, and especially the most-techy staff, tend to be male. And I say that not from a position of ignorance - I worked under a female IT Manager who taught me more than anyone else I've ever worked under, and I've worked with female teachers who were ex-COBOL programmers and who could happily geek out with me for ages. But the fact is that they are really in the minority. Whether that's manning the phones at a print service company, or programming up apps, or building servers in datacentres. Technically, I know more transgender women in the profession than I know women (I'm sure someone will complain about my wording there somehow implying that they aren't women, etc., and I'm sure my transgender friends will tell them to shut up because "he's okay" and they know what I meant).

    How we fix it, I don't know. Going into schools and telling them that IT is a career for women just reminds me of Sheldon from Big Bang on his school visit where he tried to encourage the class of girls to get into science. I can't see it having much of an impact.

    1. Andre Carneiro

      “How we fix it”? Could it be that there is nothing to fix?

      I don’t understand why it is that this is seen as a problem. Where are all the women crying out for the opportunity to be given a job in IT?

      If they exist, then by all means then you have a problem to fix.

      It appears that women may well just not be interested in it and that’s anyone’s prerogative. It sounds like you’ve gone out of your way to foster an equality of opportunity and should be commended for it.

      I suppose you could FORCE women into a career in IT somehow but that seems rather counterproductive.

    2. Scott 53

      "Helpdesk roles are perfectly well gender-neutral... anyone can man a helpdesk."

      Er...

    3. Snapper

      I suspect that a lot of it is peer pressure from other girls and possibly careers advice. Highly doubt there are any barriers being artificially thrown up to stop them.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      There is obviously some disconnect somewhere - at some level women are discouraged from a career in IT or CS.

      Yes, they are. And we know that whatever is doing the discouraging is relatively recent, as well: in the mid 1980s somewhere around 36% of CS graduates were female, in around 2015 about 18% were (I think both these figures are US-based, UK ones will be similar I am sure). The proportion of female CS graduates has halved in about a generation. What this tells us is that the difference can't be innate since no change in innate ability can happen over anything like that timescale (it's also easy to check that the content of CS degrees has not changed radically, and in particular 1980s CS degrees were at least as technical as more recent ones). So something has happened in that time to drive women out of CS. I won't speculate on what it is as I don't have recent experience of CS (my experience of living in or near CS depts was over by the mid 1990s really). But it's something.

      1. GerryMC

        I don't know about CS degrees (I don't have one), but when I started working with Computers in the 80s, there seemed to be as many young female programmers as there were young male programmers. I agree something happened to put women off - Possibly the "rise" of the Nerd Culture stereotype?

        Should we be blaming "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Sixteen Candles" et al?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        It’s the same reason women flock to law and medicine. Secure, well-paid, high-status jobs that cannot be offshored

  11. codejunky Silver badge

    Meh

    So should these women really be as free as us blokes to choose what they want to do? Or maybe they need to have special treatment so they can be 'guided' to do what they should be doing according to someone else? Women being as smart as men and should be treated equally. Except they are too stupid to choose the right thing and need to be pushed.

    I cant keep up with this nonsense.

    1. dave 81

      Re: Meh

      Too stupid to get into IT? As someone who is working in IT, I would say way to smart to get into IT.

  12. cornetman Silver badge
    Stop

    > Women are still struggling to get a foothold in the IT industry, according to research from PwC.

    I do hope that was a joke? If El Reg is getting "woke" then I think I will start to get my tech news from the "other" place.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      If 'woke' means 'not driving away something upwards of 30% of the potential pool of people who could work in IT', then let's be woke, because we'll make shitloads of money doing so.

      1. codejunky Silver badge

        @tfb

        "If 'woke' means 'not driving away something upwards of 30% of the potential pool of people who could work in IT', then let's be woke, because we'll make shitloads of money doing so."

        Why would it make money? That 30% of the potential pool of IT workers are most likely doing something else even if it isnt IT. And it could be as well paid, worse or better than if they worked IT. I am not sure what the percentage of workers are in IT of our entire population but rest could potentially work in IT, but instead do something else as is vital to the economy.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Boffin

          Re: @tfb

          You're not doing the right sum. It may indeed be the case that it is more economically useful for people to move from working in IT to somewhere else (it's probably not, but it may be), but if that were true we'd expect the workforce to shrink in proportion: so given, say, 30% of women in the field in 1985 we'd expect about 30% now. That's not what we see: what we see is that the proportion of women has about halved since 1985. That indicates some serious problem which has arrived since 1985, solving which is going to make the workforce more efficient and, like I said, make someone shitloads of money.

          1. codejunky Silver badge

            Re: @tfb

            @tfb

            "You're not doing the right sum"

            I am trying. Sorry if I am not getting it.

            "so given, say, 30% of women in the field in 1985 we'd expect about 30% now"

            Instead of the field shrinking proportionally what about their preferences? That 30% example shrinking to whatever (even drastically) due to a preference for other work.

            "That indicates some serious problem which has arrived since 1985, solving which is going to make the workforce more efficient and, like I said, make someone shitloads of money."

            This is where I am not sure if it is a problem. What happened to those women who moved out of IT and where did they go? Professions do change gender as time goes on, IT used to be almost female dominated. And have those women who moved out of IT making more money?

      2. cornetman Silver badge

        > If 'woke' means 'not driving away something upwards of 30% of the potential pool of people who could work in IT'

        Your use of the word "driving" implies to me that you know something of what is the cause of the change in gender balance in the IT industry. If you believe that there is an active effort to remove women from IT, then perhaps you would like to share it with us, along with the mechanism and the identity of the people orchestrating this atrocity. Consider also the backdrop of that against the massive increase in general female participation in the workplace over the last 30 years: any concerted effort to remove that many women from IT must be extremely obvious and the instigators must be very plain (and no, I don't mean "men": we are really not that well organised, and personally I didn't get the memo).

        Many years ago, the role of secretary was an entirely male occupation. Some time after, men left the profession to be replaced by a very large number of women. No-one drove men out of the secretarial realm. What happened was that the nature and status of the job changed. The market sorted itself out.

        There is no anti-woman cabal. Please, just stop it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Boffin

          Your use of the word "driving" implies to me that you know something of what is the cause of the change in gender balance in the IT industry.

          I obviously have ideas as to what it might be. However my ideas are probably no more informed than anyone else's and I don't think it's appropriate to share such uninformed speculation (and no, I don't think it's a cabal: I'm not some idiot conspiracy theorist).

          Rather my use of 'driving' simply refers to the data: in the mid 1980s somewhere north of 30% of CS graduates were female, in about 2010 it was 18%: something drove women out of the field. I don't know what it was, but it was definitely something. This is the same thing as astronomers observing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating: while they may not know what is driving the acceleration, they do know that something is driving it, and they are justified in using the term 'driving'.

          1. cornetman Silver badge

            > Rather my use of 'driving' simply refers to the data

            The data simply does not support your use of that term.

            Since we do not have a single definitive reason, it is not possible to justify it.

            Women may have been drawn to something more interesting such that they were less inclined towards the IT industry. It is simply not valid to assume that they have been driven anywhere. That suggests a positive force being applied to them to shift them out.

            I know that that is the prevailing orthodoxy, and I know that it is said by many to be a failing.

            But as someone else above commented, those women are working somewhere and they well be doing valuable work in different fields that are benefiting from their labours.

  13. P.B. Lecavalier
    Facepalm

    pipeline of female

    > Develop the pipeline of female talent by partnering

    > with schools and colleges to "educate and inspire"

    > young women with the delights of a career in IT

    Well I'm pretty sure we have something that would turn off many women in this: People talking like a pimp, with terms like "pipeline of females" and "educate and inspire young women with the delights of a career". You just need to change one or two words and you got human-trafficking right there.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Are there fewer and fewer women in IT?

    I've worked in IT training for the last 30 years, working all over the world and in my experience there are a lot fewer women in IT now than there used to be. I used to work in the support team of a major US computer manufacturer, there were quite a few women working there. There were more in the labs than in support. During the 90s I'd find quite a lot of women coming on Unix training classes, I've taught technical classes to all women classes. But I've noticed that over the years I get fewer and fewer women. This week? none, last week? 1, the week before that 2, but those three are the only ones I've had this year. I find it varies from country to country. Spain, I get a reasonable proportion. I used to see that with Greece and Turkey too, but the numbers from there have disappeared too.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      Re: Are there fewer and fewer women in IT?

      Your experience agrees with reality. As I've said in other comments: the proportion of women doing CS degrees has roughly halved in the generation since the mid 1980s. Whatever did that is not a change in innate ability: something is actively driving women away from CS, and thus from the careers which follow from CS degrees.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Are there fewer and fewer women in IT?

        If it's occurring at the level of Uni applications then it's happening well before employers get a chance to discriminate.

  15. clyde666

    even in retail

    Many years ago I ran retail computer shops.

    I always made a point of at least interviewing every female who applied for a job. The percentage of applications was very low.

    Still, even when trying to 'positively discriminate' the proportion of female workers was tiny.

    It's not a lack of ability. I have to assume the industry does not appeal to women. I don't know why.

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