The tech sector used to be stereotyped as a ‘man’s domain’, but not anymore.
For the last five decades, the tech industry has been very male dominated, but recently, we have been witnessing the rise of a female presence in the sector and the good news is it doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.
The tech sector in the UK as a whole was praised by Theresa May in 2017, with the Prime Minister calling it a ‘great British success story’, and this year has seen the introduction of the Tech She Can Charter. The initiative recognises the importance of women in tech and intends to increase the number of females who are interested in a career in tech.
With this in mind, it is said that by 2020, this will indeed be the case thanks to the likes of marketing and financial departments recruiting more people with IT skills and therefore opening up new opportunities.
Gone are the days when women were discouraged from pursuing a technical career. While there is still a lack of equal representation, it’s clear that it is steadily improving. A recent survey of tech professionals by Anderson Frank found that, although only a third of respondents were female, there was actually a six percent rise in the number of female participants compared to last year.
In the survey, only one in 10 of the overall respondents felt that more could be done by their employer to be an equal rights employer. And the good news is women are starting to be better represented at board level too — the data found that 66% of respondents believed there was an equal representation in the boardroom.
Bloomberg’s 2016 Pay Index also indicated that the technology boom has allowed women to be more prevalent than ever in C-level positions, with the likes of Yahoo, Xerox and IBM all being headed by female executives.
When it comes to the issue of equal pay, more than half of the respondents to Anderson Frank’s survey actually stated that they believed men and women were paid equally. With the gender pay gap making many headlines across the country recently, this finding is somewhat surprising, but it does help to show that the industry is making great strides on the gender equality front.
That said, bearing in mind the recent prediction that the UK gender pay gap won’t close until 2069 under current circumstances, while the representation of women in tech may well be increasing, there is still plenty to be done before equality is no longer an issue.