Over the next few years, the progressive retirement of
the baby-boom generation means that IT departments will be forced
to recruit more imaginatively in order to work around staffing
shortfalls.
If IT has traditionally been a stronghold of the white,
middle-class male, technology heads will have to look to a far
broader range of recruits to fill their departments, not least
because of a dramatic decline in young
Generation
Y adults moving into IT.
Maggie Berry, director of
womenintechnology.co.uk, a UK-based online job board and
networking organisation for female IT professionals, explains: "The
industry is missing out on talent. With the perceived lack of
candidates by 2010, which isn't far away, it's going to be
increasingly difficult to hire males under 40. This means that
people will have to look at hiring more women because they won't
have any choice. So they might as well start now."
But, while important, this is not the only reason that IT
directors should contemplate ways in which to broaden their
potential resource pool. Another is that women are starting to
become the primary purchasers of home, personal and leisure
products and services in the wider market.
As
Diane
Morello, a vice-president and Gartner fellow, points out: "If
women become the largest influencers in services procurement and
there are only men designing those services and the applications
that underpin them, it's a downward slope."
Mixed environment
But there are other benefits to be had from creating a more
mixed environment. Not only does employing a diverse range of staff
of both genders, different races and religions reflect the reality
of customer, supplier and partner bases more closely, but it also
brings new perspectives to any debate.
Claire Hamon, CIO of UK building firm the
Rok Group, explains:
"Evidence proves that a blend works better. If you run an
all-female company, it might excel if it has an all-female customer
base, but it's less likely to if it's targeting men as well so it's
important to match the wider demographics."
A mixed environment also brings about a different dynamic. "If
you're in a party with a mix of people, there tends to be more of a
buzz and atmosphere than if you walk into a room with just boys or
just girls, although that can be fun in certain circumstances too,"
Hamon adds.
But a key challenge in promoting diversity is simply the
historical lack of women opting for IT as a career in the first
place, combined with a recent surge in women choosing to leave the
profession and apply their talents elsewhere.
According to a 2006 report by
Intellect, a trade
association for the UK IT and telecoms industry, women are employed
in only 16 per cent of all high-tech job roles, including
electronics, although they account for 46 per cent of the wider
labour market.
The Office for National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and
Earnings for 2006 indicates, on the other hand, that, while 18
per cent of IT-only jobs are held by women, this figure is down
from 23 per cent in 2003.
Ongoing decline
But this decline appears to be an ongoing trend as a report from
Cambridge University, published in 2005, points out - almost 50,000
women chose to drop out of the profession between 1999 and 2003,
with the situation being most marked after the Year 2000 and in the
wake of the dot.com bust.
Elizabeth Pollitzer, director at
Equalitec,
a not-for-profit organisation that promotes best practice in the
recruitment and retention of women in IT, explains: "Companies cut
down in general, but more women seemed to lose their jobs than men
and, while headcount has grown overall since, women haven't caught
up again."
Influences here include a general move towards offshore
outsourcing and an increase in the number of migrant workers in the
UK, with the Home Office having granted between 20,000 to 30,000
permits to IT workers to fill the skills gap.
But this still doesn't explain why IT remains so unappealing to
women in both an initial and long-term sense. In Pollitzer's view,
one of the problems is that girls simply do not see technology as
"cool" - a situation that is not helped by predominantly negative
media portrayals of technical staff or negative gender stereotyping
both at home and at school.
"There are many examples of good practice and people doing
innovative things with technology, but they're not going to the
right places, so girls don't know about them. They think of IT as
it was in the 1990s, being all about desktops and back-end
databases, rather than technical transformation, which is leading
us to a digital future," she says.
Moreover, much careers advice in not meaningful to a new
generation of "digital natives" and fails to explain the wide range
of potential job roles and occupational pathways effectively. "A
job title and a traditional career as a 'database administrator'
will not appeal to a 14-year-old girl," says Pollitzer, whereas
working as a business analyst, web designer or project manager
might.
Bucking the trend
But even women who buck the trend and opt for IT as a
profession, are increasingly unlikely to stay the course. Not only
do women tend to work in lower skilled and lower paid areas of the
industry as they are usually less assertive in this respect than
men, but, over time, they also have a habit of self-selecting
out.
The predominant reason for this is having children. Berry
explains: "If you have a career break even for a couple of months,
things move on, but the biggest issue comes if you take a couple of
years out. In professions such as accountancy and law, things don't
change as much, but IT is very fast-paced, which is why it's a
bigger problem here."
This implies that simply providing women with longer maternity
leave is unlikely to help the situation as it simply means that
their skills become even more rusty. "If all they get is a buddy
system where they can talk to other people in the organisation and
get the gossip, it's not enough, They're out of the culture, they
miss training and face-to-face networking opportunities and this
has an impact," says Pollitzer.
But the situation becomes even more tricky if women are away
from the labour market for more than two years as such a prolonged
absence generally hits confidence and self-esteem. This, in turn,
leads many to "just try and pick up any job and so they
under-perform". Moreover, as it can be expensive to pay for
training courses to try and re-skill themselves, many women simply
go elsewhere.
Even if they do decide to stay, however, a culture of sometimes
long and anti-social hours can take its toll. Lynn Broadbent, group
technology director at the
EDM Group,
which provides document scanning and records management services,
explains: "A big issue is work-life balance. Women are often still
the main carers in the family environment and so they have to be
very focused and organised to juggle all aspects of their lives. In
this day and age, you might think we should be able to have
everything, but compromises have to be made so it's difficult."
Female friendly
So in light of all this, what can IT directors do to make their
departments more female friendly? The first thing to think about is
the recruitment process and the different ways that men and women
may react to situations.
"Women are less likely to apply for a job that they don't feel
likely to get and so they're often over-qualified. Therefore, it's
important to recognise that women and men are often different in
their approaches here. It's also important to learn to prize
different things such as maybe valuing interpersonal skills as
highly as confidence," Hamon says.
While she does not believe in positive discrimination, she does
believe in equal opportunities, which means putting staff at the
centre. "It's about looking carefully at how to give people the
right support, training and encouragement and it's about valuing
and rewarding them and giving them positive feedback. But it's also
about balance and focusing on family-friendly policies."
This includes planning in order to create a predictable path
through each project delivery cycle to preclude the necessity of
cramming five weeks' work into seven days - a way of life that is
not sustainable into the long-term, for either men or women.
Broadbent agrees. She co-chaired the Opportunity 2000 Action
Group when she was at
Barclays Bank, which dealt with barriers to women, ethnic
minorities and disabled people in the workplace, and likewise found
that positive discrimination was not the answer. This tactic only
led to resentment among the male population, which ended up feeling
alienated. Training, on the other hand, was helpful "to open up
women's sphere of thinking as to what was possible".
"It's all about awareness and understanding of the individual.
For some women, expectations of being able to succeed are low, but
for others, it's down to the family environment and the fact that
they can't commit as much time to work. Each person's situation is
different," Broadbent says.
Less committed
But she indicates that it is dangerous to simply assume that a
woman with children will be less committed to the organisation or
to her career. "Many women have the same levels of commitment as
their male colleagues - they just need to be given the right
opportunities. And flexible working across the piece, for both men
and women, helps," she adds.
Any strategy that seeks to promote gender diversity and
inclusion has to be driven from the top, however, and be backed up
with coherent HR policies covering all levels of employment
activity if it is to succeed.
"A lot of companies have good diversity policies, but this
doesn't translate down to line managers because they have their own
agendas. So if, for example, they're not assessed on how much
effort they've made to encourage women, they're not going to do it
because it's not part of their job spec. It does make a difference
if they're rewarded for it though," Pollitzer says.
Part of this incentivisation process could be to encourage women
to enter the IT profession through non-traditional routes, for
example, by providing training or re-training to female workers
returning to the labour market or those wishing to change career
direction.
As for the thorny issue of career breaks themselves, Hamon
indicates that it is crucial to keep female staff members in touch
with what is happening in the organisation - and not simply by
sending them the company newsletter once a month.
"It's about partnership. An employer has a duty of care towards
each individual, but employees have an equal responsibility to
engage meaningfully with the company. So line managers need to
recognise that someone on maternity leave is as much a member of
the team as if they were in the office each day. What it's really
about is putting people at the heart of your strategy and learning
to prize their differences," she concludes.