Women in IT jobs: it is about education, but it is also about more than just education Deloitte Global predicts that by end-2016 fewer than The education pipeline 1 25 percent of information technology (IT) jobs in Not every current IT worker has an educational developed countries will be held by women, i.e. women background in computer science or other similar field. 2 working in IT roles (see Figure 1) . That figure is about But in those fields of study, and especially in computer the same as 2015, and may even be down. Lack of science, there are clear problems with gender diversity in gender diversity in IT is both a social and economic the educational pipeline. issue. Global costs may be in the tens of billions of dollars; according to one study, the gender gap in IT Only 18 percent of US university computer science 3 8 costs the UK alone about $4 billion annually . Given that (CS) graduates in 2013 were women . And that was cost, gender parity (roughly 50 percent women in IT down from 1985, when 37 percent of graduates were jobs) seems a reasonable goal over the long term. Why women. UK figures are very similar: in the 2013/14 are the 2016 numbers less than half that goal, and why educational year, only 17.1 percent of computer 9 aren’t they improving faster? science students were women . That is much lower than overall female participation in higher education in Gender imbalance in IT has been recognized as an the UK of 56 percent, and actually down very slightly 4 10 issue since at least 2005 . One might have expected from 17.4 percent in the 2012/13 educational year . some improvement since then, and perhaps even faster The percentage of women enrolled in mathematics, change since 2010, when there was a surge in articles computer and information sciences at universities 5 about women in technology jobs . That has not been and colleges in Canada is higher, at 25 percent in 11 the case. 2014 , but that is down two percent since 2009, 12 when it was over 27 percent . But at the best known For example, in the eight years between 2005 and 2013 computer science school in the country, the University the percentage of women in IT jobs in Sweden fell from of Waterloo, women made up only 13 percent of 2010 23 percent to 22 percent (although the percentage of enrollment in computer science, down from 33 percent women in senior IT roles did rise from 16 to 21 percent). in the late 1980salthough they now have a number of In the US, which has five million IT jobs, the ratio of programs to get more women to enroll, and to retain female IT workers also fell from 25 to 24 percent from 13 them once they are in the program . In Sweden as of 6 2010 to 2014 , with the proportion of women in more 2010, women were 24 percent of computer science senior roles declining three percentage points to 27 14 15 graduates , down from 30 percent in 2000 . percent in 2014. In the UK, with 1.2 million IT posts, the percentage of women in IT jobs increased from 17 7 percent to 18 percent 2010-2015 . In each market, the total number of IT jobs increased by over 20 percent in the last five years. Figure 1: Women as percentage of total IT workforce by country for US, Sweden, Canada and UK 30% 25% 24% 22% 22% 20% 18% 15% 10% 5% 0% US Sweden Canada UK Source: The statistics for the chart above were obtained from government websites or documents. The US data is for 2014, Sweden data is for 2013, Canada data is 2011 and UK data is for April-June 2015. See endnotes for information on sources. 4