Do we really need more women in IT?

The lack of women in tech risks alienating IT departments from the wider business, says Natasha Lomas, which is why addressing the issue should be a priority for every CIO.

Should there be more women in IT? The UK tech industry seems oddly coy when it comes to the 'fairer sex'. Sector skills body e-skills UK says only around one in five of the IT workforce is female. But should we care that the IT department is more likely to resemble an all-boys club than unisex salons? In the end, does it matter there's a gender imbalance in IT?

Let's consider an imaginary - and stereotypical - scenario from another famously sex-skewed industry…

A woman is dismayed when her car develops a strange knocking noise. She needs to get it fixed but dreads the trip to the garage where the all-male cast of car mechanics will leer at her before telling her the work will cost at least £450 plus VAT… So what does she do? Ignore the noise, carry on driving and put off getting any work done for as long as possible - depriving the local repair shop of her business and potentially causing serious damage to the car.

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OK so that's fiction - but do a spot of Googling and it won't take long to find plenty of complaints from women about the kind of customer service they receive in garages. The point to be made here is customer service is about serving all comers, not just people like you. (Are all the people your IT department deals with men? I didn't think so…)

One way of getting closer to that goal is ensuring your department contains a mix of people who are representative of the business/population as a whole. In an ideal world that would mean not just more women - but more ethnic minorities and a healthy mixture of age groups too. Diverse people bring diverse skills - and therefore make for a more flexible, creative and dynamic team, and one that is well equipped to engage with anyone/everyone from outside its own four walls.

As it stands, UK IT departments are unable to do that - certainly when it comes to recruiting women. Yet the majority of respondents to this year's silicon.com Skills Survey agree a lack of women is bad for IT.

Being unrepresentative means IT departments are at risk of alienating and isolating themselves from the rest of the business - at a time when it has never been more important for tech workers to eloquently broadcast their ideas beyond the server room. Let's not forget: gender balance outside IT is likely to be much better than a one-to-five ratio and, in many business arenas, it's getting better still.

By contrast IT's gender balance is getting worse - and that only perpetuates the problem. The fewer women there are in the industry, the more women outside will view IT as a male-only bastion. It's a vicious cycle, as a silicon.com reader pointed out in a recent Reader Comment: "There aren't enough women attracted to IT because there aren't enough women in IT!"

Another serious issue affected by the lack of women in IT is the tech skills crisis - e-skills UK has warned more than 140,000 new IT & telecoms recruits will be needed annually to keep up with industry demand. But a recruitment starting point that can't include the lion's share of half the country's population inevitably means that assembling a team of talented people is far harder than it should be.

So the simple answer is yes: IT departments should care about attracting more women.

But if that conclusion is easy, finding a way to do it can seem much more complex - not least because there's also evidence IT has trouble holding onto the women it does have.

Of course the problem of having a male-oriented culture that discourages women is by no means an IT-only issue.

Just take a look at the gender balance in Parliament. In some countries, where the ratio of male to female MPs is especially poor, positive discrimination and all-women shortlists have been used or considered. But forcing the issue in such a way can cause its own problems - and did not appeal to the majority of respondents to this year's Skills Survey as a fix for UK tech.

So what should IT chiefs be doing to get more female bums on seats?

There are less heavy-handed ways of helping IT's culture to evolve. Publically embracing and encouraging flexible working for one.

According to the British Computer Society's Women's Forum manager, Dr Jan Peters, the rise in women leaving IT is largely due to a lack of flexibility on the part of employers around things like career breaks to have children and care for relatives. Yet the technology is there to enable home and mobile working - so what's needed most is management will.

Telco BT, which won Best Company Advancing Women in Technology at this year's BlackBerry Women & Technology Awards, shows it is entirely possible to manage a large workforce of flexible and home workers (63,000 and 12,000 respectively). The company has even managed to save money by reducing office space and cutting travel costs. So the 'it just can't be done' argument doesn't wash.

Management must take the initiative and move forward with progressive policies. CIOs that do this may well find it brings other benefits too - such as more general staff retention and increased productivity. After all, organisations that shout about work/life balance are places where anyone - male or female - would wish to work.

And if this year's silicon.com CIO50 list - of the top 50 heads of IT in the UK - is anything to go by there is some cause for hope: almost a fifth of the top 50 were women, with two women making the top 10.

More females at the top has to be an encouraging sign, able to influence IT's culture from the inside out. So perhaps an agent of change is already knocking on IT's door.

Question is, can you hear her?