information technology

If like most business leaders, you acknowledge that information technology will be one of the keys to the future growth, profitability and success of your organisation, then you are probably already aware of a creeping problem. By Sue Black of BCSWomen.

It’s the IT brain drain affecting women - and it has almost certainly already hit your organisation. We know that the number of women working in IT has shrunk to just 16% of the total - this shrinks further when you look at CIO numbers. Moreover, according to Diversity in Business, a recent report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), just 7% of private sector companies achieve top scores when it comes to diversity.

By October this year, the new one-stop Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) will be in place. While most businesses in the CIPD survey identified legal reasons as the main driver for diversity moves in their organisations, when it comes to IT-related roles there is a strong business case for making sure that your organisation succeeds in recruiting – and retaining – women.

This skills leak is already having a significant impact on businesses within and beyond the IT sector. As a CEO, how can you make sure that your organisation is meeting this challenge and capitalising on the full range of skills and talent that are available?

With a record of sustained growth, the IT sector is of critical importance to the British economy both as a driver and tool for improved efficiency and productivity. The rapidly increasing demand for IT skills extends beyond the sector itself. But latest statistics show that the number of women in the industry is actually falling, particularly among those working full-time.

It has been argued that this suggests the under-utilisation of high-value skills, which may unnecessarily reduce business and national productivity. In the IT industry, women are more likely to be found in the non-managerial support roles, such as database assistant or IT support assistant, while their male colleagues are more likely to be found in the higher-paid, more managerial roles such as IT manager or project leader.

This has obvious implications in terms of achieving competitive edge and innovation in your organisation. In a wider sense, women have practically no voice in the creation of technological innovations (90% are designed by men) – yet they make 80% of buying decisions. As technology is increasingly consumerised and woven into everyday lives, this under-representation must be to the detriment of industry, to women themselves and thus to society as a whole.

The initial emphasis on programming in computing has shifted as the discipline matures, moving away from the more mathematical and technical aspects, towards softer, more people-focused areas such as software project management and systems analysis and design. These roles will become more and more important in the future in the UK, Europe and the US with the growth of outsourcing of IT to the developing world.

In fact, some areas of IT are changing and growing in ways where employing women may offer your organisation a significant strategic advantage, by making use of the skills that psychologists attribute to women: listening and relationship building, rather than a heavy or sole focus on technical skills and issues.

Demand for this new breed of IT staff is expected to continue, for the contribution of those who can work as hybrid managers, using a full range of technical and business knowledge, along with relationship management skills like collaboration and change management, will become more recognised and valued.

Being bright and working hard are not enough to ensure that most women who do enter the IT sector develop a successful career; they tend to leave in their 30s-50s and in disproportionate numbers. National and international research into the obstacles to employment retention that women in IT face is in line with wider research highlighting the four main reasons why people in general leave their employers.

The good news is that only one of those reasons is about getting more money. In fact, the other three are more about organisational culture and ‘how we do things around here’ – first, not getting on with a direct line manager; second, the need for a better work/life balance; and third, lack of career growth and challenging assignments.

An old management truism about employee relations says ‘if employers paid this little attention to their customers' experience, they would probably be out of business’ and like all clichés, this is rooted in some truth – certainly when it comes to women in IT.

Without suggesting that these issues are easy to address, it can be done with smart, enlightened leadership and turned to an advantage – and at relatively low cost. It’s about changing the way your organisation works.

What can you do? How can you make the employee experience better in your organisation - especially for those women you have successfully recruited and retained in technology roles? The following is not a definitive list, but it can be a starting point for finding out more about how well you recruit and retain women, enabling you to begin to strengthen good practice in your organisation.

• Be a flexible employer – check just how family friendly your organisation really is. Can your HR and employee benefits be tailored to meet individual needs with more flexible work schedules and health care packages; including career and carer breaks?
• Women-focused networks can provide support, encouragement and informal mentoring.
• Reward and recognition for outstanding performance and achievement is as much about management style and feedback as about reward programmes.
• Make it easy for new employees to access coaching and mentoring for one-to-one support and development and ‘just in time learning’.
• Invest in on-going learning and development on issues such as handling conflict, delivering difficult messages and conducting effective performance discussions.
• Make it easy for employees to test and learn by enabling them to try out new roles at work without compromising their current roles. This might include sabbaticals, project work, and pro bono work.
• Encourage employees to become involved with relevant professional societies such as the British Computer Society www.bcs.org.uk
• Make sure that your employees understand what your organisation values.
• Double-check the HR picture – are you propping up a glass ceiling? Dig deeper to find out why retention issues occur and consider employee satisfaction against specific areas of their work. In terms of turnover, is there a pattern when you look at the level, tenure, speed of advancement, performance rating, sex and age of employees?
• Stamp out ‘presenteeism’ – a long-hours culture and competitive over-working are bad for employee health, quality and productivity.
• Find out what makes top performers successful in your organisation and why they stay.
• Find out what works and doesn’t work from your employees – and act on what you find.

Last but not least, walk the talk as a leader. Get your senior management team on board by modelling good practice, showing your commitment to diversity and holding managers accountable for their actions - and for tolerating or ignoring unacceptable behaviour.

There’s no quick fix or easy panacea to stem the female brain drain, but as technologies are increasingly integrated with business practices and perceived less as ends to themselves, this issue will impact more and more on business – and that’s the reason to look into this skills deficit in your organisation right now.

There’s a real opportunity to make a shrewd gain by taking the lead in responding to emerging trends and changes in the market place. By building an accurate picture of what happens in your organisation, changing some of the ways you work and the work environment you offer, you may find women in your IT roles will be happier, perform better and stay - and the men you employ will benefit too. Legal compliance becomes an outcome, not the sole purpose for taking a fresh approach to your recruitment and retention.

After all, when you build and develop a genuinely strong, balanced, motivated, competent workforce, you get bottom line business benefits so it’s a win-win – for you and your customers.

To poach a line from the great Ella Fitzgerald, IT ain’t what you do…it’s the way that you do IT. That’s what gets results.

Dr Sue Black is the founder and Chair of BCSWomen, a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society. She is also Head of the Department of Information and Software Systems at the University of Westminster and co-founder of Triskell Black, which focuses on career issues for women in computing. Its new book on how to build a better career in IT will be published this autumn.

The articles published here in the Thinking CEO are internet updates of the latest management knowledge and practice, which have been commissioned by Sovereign Publications for their bi-annual magazine, CEO Today, and will appear later in the first 2007 issue of this publication. To contact Sovereign and CEO Today, go to:

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