The Gender Research Team (GRIS) at the University of Salford have been fortunate enough to have talked to many women over the past 4 years with 6 gender projects taking place, we have conducted 64 in-depth life history interviews and over 900 women have completed a number of our questionnaires. Our research is fed back into governmental agencies such as the DTI and the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET and our research has been disseminated at an international level.
Sadly while the projects have taken place women are still leaving the ICT industry and there are still major concerns regarding gender diversity given that the percentage of women has gone from around 27% in 1997, 21% in 2004, to about 16% in 2006 (from e-skills 2006). Worst still is, of this 16% of women, 61% are performing database administration roles clustered at the lower end of the salary scale with limited promotion opportunities.
The women we have spoken to throughout the project have had come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, we have interviewed Directors of IT from FTSE 100 companies, Managing Directors from global organisations, to a woman who could not get back into an IT role after being made redundant because she was too old at 51. We have heard happy, sad and bad stories with one women reporting that the new recruit that was employed to cover her maternity leave was paid £10,000 more (apparently he came from outside and so had more experience). The shocking part of that story was that he left when she came back to work because he did not want to be managed by a woman. Another woman reported being asked to go to Singapore for two weeks on the week she returned from maternity leave and another being asked to return to the office on the day of her father-in-law's funeral, as she recently returned back to work after a car accident and was deemed to have taken too much time off work (she recalled that she was called by her workplace constantly throughout her sick-leave).
Barriers to retain women in ICT that have been identified are that many women are still deterred by the long hour culture and the lack of flexibility in working hours, which has implications for women’s work life-balance. Other barriers to entry into the industry for women is the perceived male-dominated culture, the closed ‘old-boys networks’, the low number of women in management role models (currently women account for only one in ten of UK ICT bosses) and the general lack of awareness of opportunities the profession may offer career-focused women. One IT publication reported that ‘Women are not just leaving when they have children – they are leaving even earlier in their twenties. Perhaps even more concerning is highly skilled women are leaving ICT in their late 40s and early 50s, so we are losing highly skilled staff and senior female role models and mentors’ (Williams 2007).
The KAN team hope to collect stories from the ICT workplace, with an emphasis on networking and how women from SME’s/micro organisations, entrepreneurs, self-employed or those working in a rural setting actually embark on networking. How do women in ICT negotiate networking, either face to face at organised events or via the now many social networking sites? Has the lack of networking opportunities impacted upon their progression?
Are you a woman in ICT with a story to tell? Have you a networking story to tell or a story on any other topic?
If so, once you have registered please post the story in your blog and tag it mystory this will mean it will automatically be grouped with other stories from the ICT workplace. (Don’t forget to set which access you prefer, public for all to read or just for the logged on KAN user).
Thanks for contributing to this research.
The KAN Team
