IT industry needs more female role models says software boss

The CEO of an AIM-listed West Midlands technology company has said women need more role models to bridge the gender gap in IT.

Elizabeth Gooch, founder of Staffordshire-based eg solutions, said gender stereotyping was holding back women from fulfilling their true potential.

Currently, only 17% of employees in the UK technology sector are women; only one in six school leavers starting a degree in computer science in 2016 was female and the total number of girls taking either ICT or computer science at GCSE fell by 12% in the same year.

Mrs Gooch, who pioneered the back office workforce optimisation market; a market that is now worth an estimated $3bn, said it was clear that steps needed to be taken to boost the number of women opting for careers in technology.

She said: “We recently asked our ‘Women in IT’ group what barriers there are for women entering the sector and the response was that gender stereotyping remains the primary issue. There is still a perception in schools that boys are better at science and maths and, as a result, young girls are put off STEM subjects. This can also be reinforced at home, where it’s often seen as the man’s job to do the technical stuff.

“We need to remove these stereotypes and encourage young girls to get involved in technical activities; not just hard sell them on the idea of careers in IT.”

Wilma Gombedza, a coder at eg, has grasped the nettle and made it her goal to encourage more young women to follow her career path.

Her Tech Partnership is visiting schools and colleges to spread the word amongst young girls and women about what a career in IT really involves.

Tina Kelly, eg’s Testing Manager, also believes there is a lack of awareness of the variety of careers available to women within the IT industry.

“It’s not just about coding,” she said. “There are so many other exciting jobs in the tech sector such as Project Management, Business Analysis, Solutions Architecture, as well as a myriad of roles in supporting business functions. We are all in tech and big advocates for our industry so we need to educate girls and women as to the variety of careers open to them.”

Mrs Gooch said government initiatives to develop 80,000 coders in the UK may help to address some of the persistent skills crisis in the sector, but it did not properly reflect the demands of the sector.

“Coders cannot operate in isolation of all the other specialisms required to build a successful industry and, by promoting this discipline alone, without addressing the perception of it as ‘geeky’, it won’t do much to encourage women into the sector either,” she said.

She said getting women into IT did not have to be via the coding route and many could be encouraged to move into that discipline after experiencing other roles in the tech industry.

Jane Gombedza followed her sister, Wilma, into eg; initially joining in the Client Implementation team. Now she is planning to go back to university to study cyber security with financial support from the company.

“Wilma and Tina are just two female role models within eg,” said Mrs Gooch. “Our Product Manager, the Quality and Compliance team, a number of Client Implementation Consultants and our Support team either are, or contain, women. All set great examples of what women can achieve in IT roles.

“Our first goal was to encourage more young people into the sector as a whole. Therefore, we have implemented successful graduate, apprentice and work experience schemes.

“We don’t believe in single sex promotion or quotas, but we can still lead the charge to help young girls and women to see what they are missing in IT.”