Women in tech – or the lack thereof

Post date: Feb 02, 2017 10:49:13 AM

The London IT sector may be booming, but there’s one aspect that could do with considerable improvement: gender diversity in the workforce.

Private-sector group Tech London Advocates recently conducted a survey of its members in conjunction with London Tech Week, and its findings included some alarming statistics:

• Nearly one-quarter (23 per cent) of poll participants from tech enterprises based in the capital said their companies don’t have any female board members at all.

• Three in 20 respondents (the equivalent of 15 per cent of the survey pool) reported their firms had no women at the senior management level.

• Almost four in 10 survey-takers (39 per cent) noted that although their senior management teams did include some female members, these individuals composed less than one-fifth of the total senior manager population.

“For a sector identified with disruption and change, these figures are very disappointing,” said Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates. “We live in a city with a global reputation for diversity, yet our most exciting industry fails to reflect this in its most senior positions.”

‘Radical change’ required

Despite the sobering statistics outlined above, nearly half (46 per cent) of respondents felt the London tech arena stacks up favourably against other global cities in terms of accessibility to women. Although that particular figure shows London could be worse off, there’s still a great deal of room for improvement – to the point at which Baroness Martha Lane Fox believes “radical change” is in order, as quoted by the Evening Standard. After all, as Tech City News acknowledged, figures from the Greater London Authority indicate that the city is 50 per cent women.

The baroness, who hosted a Tech London Advocates Women in Tech working group meeting at the House of Lords earlier this month, pointed out that proportionally speaking, there are more women in the House of Lords than there are at tech companies in the United Kingdom.

“We must accept the scale of this problem and work together to put women at the heart of the technology sector,” Lane Fox asserted. “Mobilising a currently unused resource will have huge benefits for the digital industry, the economy and UK PLC.”

Diversity as a component of tech-sector success

In an article he penned for Tech City News, Shaw asserted that getting more women into digital jobs in London – especially at the senior and C-level tiers – will have numerous benefits for both individual companies and the industry as a whole.

Calling diversity “a crucial tool for success,” Shaw noted that diverse companies tend to be more innovative. Their leaders are able to bring a greater range of ideas and perspectives to the table, facilitating a spirit of constructive debate and discussion rather than a culture of groupthink in which everyone tends to agree with one another.