25/10/2011

Post-Gap year career in IT: women needed!

We’ve reached the stage in society where jokes about women not being able to programme the TV remote are no longer funny, yet women are still very under-represented in the IT sector.

According to the last official statistics from the Technology Counts IT & Telecoms Insights report by e-skills UK, women make up nearly half of the UK’s total workforce. Yet today only 18 per cent of employees working in the IT industry are female.

The British Computer Society (BCS), which champions the global IT profession and those working in it says, despite the statistics, opportunities for women to get jobs in the field have “never been greater”.

According to Prospects, the UK’s graduate careers website, women “are in demand and add diversity to teams”.

This is good news for the 260,000 females in Britain as a report in August revealed that, shockingly, more than one in four unemployed women have been out of work for longer than a year.

So why are ladies put off from searching for jobs in IT in the first place, especially when they’ve conquered the fields of banking, management, politics and many other areas?

One possible reason may be the male-dominated image of the industry.

As Sarah Blow, who works as a software engineer for medical device company Cardinal Health, told the Guardian, “The IT world can be a very lonely and harsh environment for a female who is used to being around a mixed gender environment.”

“It is not something that most women are happy at dealing with,” she said.

There’s also the “myth” that entry into an IT course or degree requires strong maths skills.

But Sarah insists, “Since starting work as a software engineer I have never had to use the maths skills that they taught at university”.

For those women actively looking for computer jobs, even as another recession looms, there’s good news: the industry offers both flexibility and good pay, especially for women with families, unlike other sectors.

There’s a variety of roles that prospective female employees will be able to consider, from business analyst jobs to operations technicians positions to telecoms jobs and engineer roles.

There’s never been more support for women looking for IT jobs, with Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites all playing a big role.

The BSC has a specialist interest group, BCSwomen, that offers a CV clinic service and holds career development workshops and networking meetings. It “lends itself to international networking in a new and challenging way,” and says over 500 women have so far been involved in its “chatroom buzz”.

One of their former presidents, Dame Wendy Hall, received a DBE in 2009 for services to science and technology and for her work promoting opportunity for women in computing. A wonderful example for aspiring female IT graduates, she went on to be elected President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in July 2008. She is the first person from outside North America to hold this coveted position. 

Meanwhile londongeekgirldinners, a networking forum and the brain-child of Blow, has been running for six years now. It holds regular events focusing on “uniting, supporting, learning and having fun as a female in the technology industry”.

As Brian Runciman, managing editor of the BCS says, “Computing’s too important to be left to men”.

The IT industry employs nearly 5 per cent of the UK’s workers.