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Women in Tech - Time to close the gender gap

Despite decades of progress towards workplace equality, women remain woefully under­represented in the UK’s technology workforce. The figures speak for themselves: according to the Women’s Engineering Society (WES)1, just 15% of the people working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) roles across the UK are female – and only 5% of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women.

Bibliographic Data

Andrews Jon; Hinton Laura; Ash Sheridan
Publisher: PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) UK
English

Content Description

About this publication

  • Publication type: Study
  • Topic: Equal opportunities in the labor market and equal opportunities in non-university and industrial research
  • Publication source: International
  • Year of publication: 2017

What's more, the imbalance doesn't appear likely to be redressed any time soon: the UK's future pipeline of technology talent is also heavily skewed towards men, with women accounting for just 15.8% of the UK's current generation of engineering and technology undergraduates.

This lack of a strong tech talent pipeline is starting to impact organisations. Our Global CEO Survey reveals that two thirds of UK CEOs say recruiting people with digital skills is difficult, compared with only 43% of CEOs in the US and just 24% in China. CEOs say that STEM skills are also harder to recruit in the UK than elsewhere.

And behind the sobering statistics, it seems there are wider societal problems at play. A study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that girls still lack the confidence to pursue high-paid careers in science and technology, despite their school results being as good as – or better than – those achieved by boys.

Slide set created by the BMVIT for FEMtech

 

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