Jobs for the girls

By Joanne Pontee, Marketing Manager PDMS

Recently we decided to organise a “girls night out” for the female members of PDMS, you know the sort of thing – the opportunity to generally put the world to rights over a meal and a few glasses of wine. When sending out the invite it struck me how much longer the e-mail distribution list of females at PDMS has become. Out of a total workforce of 50, 17 of us are female, around 34% of the company’s workforce. In a lot of industries there may be nothing unusual about this statistic, indeed in some sectors it may appear to be on the low side, but in the IT industry PDMS are bucking the national trend. In 2007 only 18% of IT and Telecoms professionals were female and the gender imbalance in those taking computing science related degrees, and in the technology sector as a whole in the UK, is one of the worst in Western Europe. The number of women embarking on a career in IT has been on a steady decline since the turn of this century. So why are women woefully under-represented in one of the most dynamic and fast-moving industry sectors and does it really matter?

Some of the blame may lie in the way in which technology is taught in schools with the syllabus doing little to enthuse students in enabling them to see the wider possibilities and implications of technology. There is a “leaky pipeline” phenomenon, whereby girls steadily lose interest in working in technology as they progress through education and settle on a career. According to a report by Blackberry maker RIM, 95% of girls aged 11 to 16 think that technology is cool, but are not being inspired to take the interest into their professional lives. It also appears that the vast array of career opportunities in the IT industry aren’t always fully explained to them when they are making career choices. Of course, not everyone wants to be a hardcore coder but there are a whole raft of technology related career paths from project management to business analysis through to design and eMarketing. Many girls simply don’t understand that it’s not all about programming and that technology has a softer side – with many of these softer technology roles the focus is on communicating and understanding how technology can help to solve problems.

Then of course there is the image of IT industry itself – geeks, nerds, anoraks, sandals – need I say more! The problem of getting more women into the world of IT is further compounded by its decidedly unglamorous image. In the same survey by RIM, 38% of women aged 18 to 25 branded IT professionals as “techie geeks with no social skills or social lives”. This somewhat harsh perception simply does not match the reality of people working in today’s IT industry – something I can vouch for having attended some very lively PDMS social outings! A lack of visible female role models for girls to aspire to doesn’t help either. They are out there if you look hard enough – Marissa Mayer, first female engineer to be hired at Google; Meg Whitman, until recently the CE of auction giant ebay; Patricia Russo, head of Alcatel Lucent one of the world’s biggest network firms and not forgetting Ada Lovelace, back in the 19th century, viewed by many to be the world’s first computer programmer.

For the few women that do opt for a career in IT, there may be further challenges along the way. Some face a battle with a culture that can leave them underpaid and sidelined, often unable to break the “silicon ceiling”. For example, in IT women are especially under-represented at senior decision-making level. EU Analysis conducted last year of 150 European companies in the telecoms sector found the average women on boards of directors was just 6%. Another survey by Microsoft in 2007 acknowledged that sexism still exists with some men discriminating against female colleagues by assuming they have less facility for deeply technical matters.

So the numbers of women studying and working in technology are declining at an alarming rate but does it really matter? The UK Government thinks so. It believes the industry needs to recruit more women to improve its competitive position with the rest of the world. After all, the industry at present does not have strong appeal amongst 51% of the population. Added to this is the fact that, according to the EU Commission, the IT industry contributes to a quarter of the EU’s total growth and 4% of its jobs, but that at present there is a shortage of around 300,000 qualified staff. Now you can see why the number of women working in IT does matter. There are other compelling reasons too. According to Intellect (IT trade association), companies with the most women are the best performers. A 2007 report by management consultancy McKinsey and Company found that return on equity was 35.1% higher in companies with the highest proportion of female senior managers. It has long been known that diverse teams make better decisions and mixed gender teams will often outperform their single gender counterparts.

The IT industry needs to act quickly to stop and reverse this trend. Not by advocating positive discrimination, the perception that somebody was hired just because they were female would be a bad scenario, as even if they are highly talented, they’d be on the back foot before they even started. But by making IT in schools interesting and relevant, promoting the huge scope of career opportunities available and doing a good PR job on itself would be a good start. The upshot of this would be that in the process many more much needed men as well as women would be attracted to the IT profession. The arrival of Web 2.0 with its focus on social networking may also help to change the landscape and shift the balance in favour of the girls. The interactivity of the web, think FaceBook, Bebo etc. means that many girls are already using developer tools and IT is becoming part of their daily lives. Hopefully, this will lead to a cultural shift in the female perception of technology and help make it a more appealing career choice.

Why are the tables at PDMS girl’s night outs getting bigger? I think PDMS are bucking the trend because we aren’t your ordinary run of the mill IT company. We attract the best talent (I would say that wouldn’t I!), whether male or female, on account of a culture that recognises and plays to everybody’s strengths and our real passion for technology as a business enabler – oh yes, and girls please take note, we all have very good social skills thank you very much!