Nine-in-ten women leave the tech sector after ten years, taking vital skills and expertise to other sectors like finance and professional services.

That's according to new research from Akamai, which found that women are leaving tech roles at a pivotal point in their careers, prompting calls to offer better pay, career progression, and flexibility to buck the trend.

The survey of 1,500 women in the UK showed that 55% of women leave tech roles or tech companies after five years of being in the industry, with 87% departing within ten years.

They largely head to finance, education, professional services and healthcare, the report said.

"We lose women from cybersecurity at the exact moment their expertise becomes most valuable," said Zoe Mackenzie, President of Women in CyberSecurity UK. "This isn’t a pipeline problem; it’s a leadership one."

Why women leave tech

According to Akamai, more than a third left by choice and did not want to return to tech, while 31% said they left mostly by choice and now preferred their current situation.

The women polled said they departed the tech sector largely because they didn't feel a sense of belonging, cited by 52% of respondents.

Notably, a lack of gender diversity in company leadership was highlighted by 40% of women polled, suggesting drastic changes to corporate culture are needed to prevent continued attrition.

The poll was split into two sections: women who had left tech, and those who had left but then returned.

Four-in-ten women who had departed the sector said they would come back under the right conditions, notably flexible working arrangements, hybrid working, and improved work-life balance.

That echoes previous research that suggests half of women who left the tech sector did so due to conflicts with caring commitments, though it's worth noting hybrid working and other flexible arrangements are widely popular regardless of roles or gender.

Of those who had come back already, more than half said they were motivated by a higher salary, while four-in-ten said they needed better work-life balance and clear career progression.

"The findings provide a valuable picture of what mid‑career women are looking for in order to return to tech, and it’s encouraging to see that the majority could be persuaded to come back under the right conditions," said Hazel Little, the CEO of Career Returners.

"Progression pathways are crucial for retaining talent, but equally important is ensuring that women who want to return have clear, supported ways to re-enter the sector in the first place. When employers build both return pathways and progression pathways, they create an environment where women can come back, grow and stay."

Tech sector attrition

The Akamai report marks the latest in a string of studies pointing to a concerning trend of female attrition in the tech sector.

According to last year's Lovelace Report, between 40,000 and 60,000 women leave the sector each year. This level of attrition has a direct impact on economic growth, the study noted.

At current rates, the departure of women costs the UK tech sector an estimated £2 billion ($2.7bn) to £3.5 billion ($4.7bn) each year.

Other reports, meanwhile, suggest that women leave the tech sector at twice the rate of their male colleagues.

The gender diversity gap in tech leadership has become a recurring talking point for the sector. Akamai’s study specifically highlighted this issue as a key factor in why women leave the sector, and that tracks with figures on diversity rates in higher-level roles.

Between 20% to a quarter of the UK tech sector is made up of women, yet that isn’t reflected in leadership positions. Official government figures suggest women account for just 5% of leadership positions across the industry.

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With the UK facing significant AI skills shortages, new research suggests a sharper focus on boosting workforce diversity will be required to meet government AI training plans.

A new study from BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT found the proportion of women working in tech has risen to 22%. While the marks a welcomed - albeit small - increase of 1%, the institute noted there’s still a lot of work to be done.

At present, 441,000 women work in specialist IT roles across the country, but BCS said this means roughly half a million women are still “missing” from the workforce if an equal gender split were present.

BCS said the report comes at a critical time for the UK tech sector, with enterprises ramping up AI adoption and the government pushing for a rapid roll-out of tools across the public sector.

Skills shortages have been a long-running challenge for the tech sector, and AI is now exacerbating the issue. In a report earlier this year, IT leaders said finding talent with AI-related skills was one of their leading challenges.

BCS is urging leaders from the tech industry and government to sharpen their focus on closing the gender diversity gap and accelerate upskilling plans laid out in the AI Action Plan.

Part of the government’s AI strategy centers around boosting skills to compensate for growing demand for AI talent. All told, the government aims to retrain or upskill around 7.5 million workers in AI with support from big tech companies.

With women still underrepresented in the sector, BCS said there is a “significant opportunity to ‘supercharge’ the AI capacity of the UK” by boosting diversity and recruiting from other minority groups in tech. This includes workers with disabilities and those over the age of 50.

Recommendations outlined in the BCS report include ensuring that digital literacy and computing skills are “embedded across the curriculum and support girls to stay engaged beyond the age of 14”.

Higher investment in programs aimed at supporting and promoting women to pursue tech careers, or return to the industry, is another key recommendation.

"Accelerating the numbers of women in tech roles is both a challenge, and an opportunity for every organization building Britain’s digital future,” said BCS chief executive Sharron Gunn.

“We cannot create high-trust, high-integrity AI systems if the profession behind them is missing out on the talents and perspective of half the population. Diversity is not a cosy add on but a prerequisite for safe, fair and innovative technology, especially in AI.”

Diverse teams build responsible AI

Aside from boosting broader tech sector diversity, research shows diverse teams will be crucial in AI development moving forward.

Analysis from IBM earlier this year, for example, found a lack of senior female leadership figures in business could hamper responsible development strategies.

69% of respondents told IBM they believe it’s important that female leaders are involved in AI decision-making, while 73% said improving female representation will help tackle AI-related gender bias issues.

Crucially, gender diversity in senior leadership has a tangible impact on economic performance, the study found.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents said increasing female leadership roles will be vital to ensure all corners of society will experience benefits from the technology.

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Over the past decade, initiatives to boost female representation have delivered visible improvements. We’ve seen targeted recruitment drives, more conversation about equity, and more female leaders in the industry. However, taking a closer look at the numbers and lived experiences reveals that the channel industry still has some way to go.

The UK’s technology workforce remains less than a quarter female, and over 60% of women in tech report having faced discrimination. Talent shortages remain a challenge - but that is just one side of the coin.

Entrenched structural and cultural barriers remain and often shape who thrives in this sector. As such, it's time to have an honest conversation about how technology leaders can level the playing field.

Looking at the roots of the issue

In reality, the gender imbalance begins long before women step into their first role. In schools, girls remain underrepresented in computer science and engineering programs. By university, there’s usually only a handful of female computing students.

Conscious and unconscious biases continue to compound the problem. Traits celebrated in male peers, like assertiveness and decisiveness, may sometimes get judged differently in women.

At the same time, many women continue to shoulder most caregiving responsibilities, and combining this with navigating a culture built around long hours and constant availability, it can feel like a game with no winners.

For workplace leaders, the challenge is reshaping an industry model built on assumptions that someone else is handling life outside work. Even progressive companies can replicate these norms unknowingly, creating environments that drain rather than develop female talent.

Empowering inclusion at every level

Attracting and retaining women in our industry requires us to challenge traditional workplace norms and to create environments where everyone can succeed. Inclusion should be embedded at every level, from hiring to everyday management. Similarly, workplaces must actively cultivate environments where people can bring their whole selves to work, without penalty or tokenism.

Indeed, in my experience, one of the best ways to empower female leaders in the channel is to make our organizations more inclusive to fathers. The conversation about inclusion too often stops at supporting mothers, yet genuine equality depends on enabling fathers to take on caregiving responsibilities without stigma.

When men feel empowered to take paternity leave, request flexibility, or step back temporarily from the career race, it normalises parenting responsibilities for everyone. It creates more equitable households and eases the pressure of feeling as though parents can only focus on their careers or the family.

Recruitment must also break from tradition. Too often, tech hires are sourced from the same narrow pools. Yet throughout my career, I have successfully recruited women from industries like hospitality, where customer service and agency translate incredibly well into sales and tech environments.

Most skills can be taught, and luckily, the most crucial traits – like communication, adaptability, and understanding business value – are just as plentiful outside of the industry when you know how to look.

Finally, a culture that values different perspectives produces better solutions and stronger customer relationships. In our fast-changing market, cognitive and experiential diversity is an advantage that we should not overlook.

With female consumers and decision-makers representing a growing share of purchasing power, companies that exclude women from shaping products and strategies are limiting both innovation and market insight. In other words, the moral argument for inclusion is just as powerful as the business one.

Building pathways for the next generation

For women starting in tech, the path can still be challenging - but it is no longer solitary. The visibility of female leaders, stronger networks, and flexible workplaces is reshaping what a tech career can look like. Companies that match words with actions, like publishing pay gap data, celebrating flexible working for parents, and demonstrating female leadership, create environments where women can thrive.

Equally, mentorship and community are more accessible than ever: there is now space for many women to elevate each other, not just compete for a single seat at the table.

The rules of the workplace were written for a different era, and the time has come to rewrite them. If the channel can build technologies that change how the world works, it can certainly build workplaces where women thrive every day.

True progress will come when equality is not a headline or a program, but the way this industry works, from the first rung to the boardroom.

More than two-thirds of women in tech experience imposter syndrome, according to new figures, prompting calls for greater support from employers.

In a survey of tech professionals for recruitment firm Hays, 68% of women said they'd faced imposter syndrome at some stage in their career, compared with just 61% of men.

"We cannot overlook the fact that more women doubt what they are capable of than men," said Amanda Whicher, technology director at Hays UK & Ireland.

"This imposter syndrome imbalance both stems from and exacerbates the lack of female representation across the tech sector, so it’s crucial that we take the necessary steps to overcome this phenomenon."

Meanwhile, those working in the private sector were slightly more likely to experience imposter syndrome, at 65%, with it affecting only six-in-ten in the public sector.

Overall, it's a problem that affects 64% of tech professionals, making the workers in the tech industry the most likely to experience this issue.

Hays found that the second most affected industry, accountancy, has a 61% rate, with engineering, construction and property, and marketing all at or below the 50% mark.

Similarly, around a third of those working across the tech industry said that they had been experiencing imposter syndrome more frequently as their career progressed.

How to tackle imposter syndrome

Whicher said there are practices workers can employ to address imposter syndrome.

"Recognize that imposter syndrome is not a reflection of reality but a negative feeling from your inner critic,” she said. “Secondly, focus on your strengths and achievements to improve your confidence.”

Another approach recommended by Whicher included embracing imperfection and the ability to be “willing to make mistakes”. These are an opportunity to grow, she added, and are vital in driving career progress.

"Employers have a vital part to play in celebrating the successes of their workforce and rewarding them accordingly, so they feel less like imposters and more like worthy and valued members of the team."

Research earlier this year from HR firm iCIMS found that four-in-ten women were experiencing impostor syndrome there and then, particularly when it came to AI.

Nearly a quarter of women reported feeling unprepared for AI-driven changes in the workplace and said they weren't sure how to adapt to the technology, compared with just 17% of men.

A similar study from Vodafone found that six-in-ten women were more likely to apply for a job if there were other women in leadership positions.

"Businesses can’t afford to lose out on top talent because women don’t see themselves reflected in leadership positions or have the time to invest in themselves," said Nicki Lyons, chief corporate affairs and sustainability officer at Vodafone UK.

"The data is clear – seeing women in leadership roles isn’t just about representation; it drives real change and opportunity. Women need senior role models to help feel inspired and supported in their own career progression."

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European workers are looking warily across the Atlantic, worried that US corporate culture could start creeping in across the region.

More than eight-in-ten employees across the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain told careers site Zety that high-pressure US work environments, highlighted by figures such as Elon Musk, could start influencing their own workplace.

A third said they'd start looking for a new job immediately if their company adopted US-style policies such as return to office (RTO) mandates or weekly accountability reports.

More than four-in-ten said they were worried about an overemphasis on 'hustle culture' and long hours, and a third about increased workplace surveillance and productivity tracking.

The study found European workers are determined not to let these trends creep in, with virtually all saying it's important to keep European labor laws independent from US corporate influence.

Nearly three-quarters called for worker protections to be strengthened in response to the increasing adoption of US-style workplace policies.

There are some aspects of US workplace culture that appeal to Europeans, according to Zety. Four-in-ten said they liked the idea of higher salaries and performance-based pay.

Similarly, around a quarter said they were interested in job opportunities within innovative industries or that they valued the American entrepreneurial mindset and career mobility. Yet despite this, only 22% found the US focus on individual achievement appealing.

"As US corporate influence creeps into European workplaces, employees aren’t having it,” said Jasmine Escalera, Zety career expert.

"They’re pushing back against policies that put work-life balance, job security, and mental health at risk. With more workers demanding stronger protections, European leaders could soon be under real pressure to keep the harsher side of US corporate culture at bay."

Cultures differ on both sides of the Atlantic

A survey late last year from Adobe found comparatively small differences in workplace practices between the US and UK.

Gen Z employees in the UK were more likely than Gen Z US employees (55 percent) to take social media breaks during their day - 62% compared with 55%.

Notably, US staff were working longer, averaging 41 hours compared with the UK's 38, and more than four-in-ten always ate lunch at their desk compared with 31% in the UK.

US workers started substantially earlier in the morning too and were much more likely to check emails while on vacation.

Fears of US influence may not be overblown. President Trump has attempted to interfere with overseas workplace culture, most notably in the case of diversity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, for example.

The president called for Stockholm's city and embassy contractors to reject DEI policies, with similar demands sent to organizations in Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Luxembourg, and Spain.

However, according to a poll by the UK's Institute of Directors (IoD), more than seven-in-ten bosses said they're not planning any changes to their current approach to diversity, with 4% planning to scale up DEI activities.

“This research suggests that, whilst developments in ED&I in the US may have some spillover effect in the UK, the vast majority of UK workplaces will see no change," said IOD principal policy advisor for employment Alex Hall-Chen.

"Particularly for employers with no US presence, the prevailing view among British businesses is that decisions made by the US government and US companies will have little to no bearing on investment in their own ED&I programmes."

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Women are much more likely than men to see cybersecurity as a shared responsibility across an organization, but aren't getting the training they should.

Managed threat detection and response provider e2e-assure surveyed 1,000 employees across a range of industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, professional services and financial services.

Researchers found that while half of women said they viewed cybersecurity as the responsibility of everyone in the organization, the same was true of only three-in-ten men.

Nearly nine-in-ten workers said they had been the victim of a cyber attack at work.

Notably, 28% of women said they were unclear of the consequences of falling prey to cyber criminals, compared with 16% of men. And there's also less awareness of AI policies amongst women, at 21%, compared with 27% for men.

Meanwhile, when a breach does occur, only three-in-ten women receive the necessary training - and risk a disciplinary if they cause another breach - compared with 35% of men.

"Cybersecurity in 2025 and beyond is not just an IT issue, it’s a business-wide responsibility. Our research reveals that while men and women recognise the importance of security, businesses are missing a crucial opportunity to drive forward cyber resilience, as they feel disconnected to training provided," said Rob Demain, CEO of e2e-assure.

"This means men are less likely to recognize the importance of their cybersecurity practices for the rest of the organization. And while women view it as a collective responsibility, they’re uncertain about the consequences, due to lack of training effectiveness."

A quarter of men said they saw themselves as responsible for the security of their company, compared with just 18% of women. And it's important, the researchers concluded, that employees do have this sense of collective responsibility.

"To relieve frustration and fatigue for cyber risk owners, and build resilience from the ground up, an organization needs to have a 'one team, one dream' mentality," they wrote.

"There needs to be a strong narrative in place, positioning cybersecurity as a collective responsibility, driving an internal cybersecurity culture to ensure employees are engaged with training and policies."

Employees should be kept at the center of the security strategy and involved in the creation of policies, the report recommended. Security measures should be explained clearly and feedback collected regularly, with training and security measures adapted accordingly.

However, things could be worse, according to research from non-profit cybersecurity training organization ISC2, which recently found that more than a third of women are now involved in creating organizational Gen AI use policy - 5% higher than the figure for men.

They're also working harder to get certifications, with more than a quarter working towards AI-specific security certifications, compared with just 18% of men.

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Four-in-ten (40%) women in tech experience imposter syndrome and it’s forcing them out of the field, according to research from HR firm iCIMS.

Female job seekers say they are deterred from pursuing a career in tech due to a perceived lack of skills and experiences. This imposter syndrome threatens to cause issues for equality in the tech space, the study noted, particularly in the burgeoning field of AI where biases could be tackled early.

23% of women reported feeling unprepared for AI-driven changes in the workplace and are not sure how to adapt to the technology. This is compared with 17% of men who reported the same fears.

By contrast, 27% of men feel prepared and confident to adapt to AI compared with just 14% of women.

Women are less likely to report upskilling in AI over the past six months and 40% have no plan to upskill compared to 29% of men. Similarly, only 10% of women think AI literacy is a requirement to land a job in the current market compared with 18% of men.

There were some promising statistics, though. The report found that many women are still pursuing careers in the field, with applications from female candidates increasing by over a quarter (27%) year on year.

An uphill battle for female tech workers

Women are faced with increasingly difficult access to the tech industry. In late 2023, BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, suggested the gender gap in tech could take almost 300 years to close without intervention.

The issues apply at sector-specific levels, with women making up just 26% of positions in cybersecurity teams, according to 2023 figures.

Reports also show that the gender gap in tech is already spilling over problematically into AI, with female enrollment in AI courses taking place at half the rate of men and making up just 32% of enrollments despite a 227% surge in uptake generally.

Progress is taking place, but it's happening very slowly. For example, while the number of women studying computer science degrees is steadily on the rise, 75% of computer science students are still men.

"There’s still a long way to go until we have the truly diverse tech profession we need to ensure emerging technology like AI benefits everyone. That also includes creating a more inclusive culture across the tech profession itself," BCS commented as part of an earlier piece of research.

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Finding talent with AI skills has already become a major challenge for enterprises, but with some enterprises shelving DEI hiring practices, research suggests the situation could get worse.

In General Assembly’s State of Tech Talent report, two-thirds of recruitment leaders said hiring candidates with AI skills is more challenging than recruiting for other tech roles.

This means many enterprises have to pay more to secure talent, with 68% saying they usually have to offer higher salaries to candidates with AI skills, up from 64% last year.

Meanwhile, virtually all said that it's harder today than three years ago to find qualified candidates with both the soft and technical skills needed.

The study found three-quarters of tech hiring leaders are also worried they're hiring skilled AI workers too quickly and without taking time to build a sustainable, diverse pipeline of talent.

"To move forward, we need to build an AI economy that uplifts everyone — employees and companies alike," researchers advised.

"That requires upskilling and reskilling employees for an AI-powered future of work and building more sustainable entry-level pathways into technical careers."

DEI in the spotlight in the AI era

Notably, six-in-ten organizations said the increased focus on AI skills has heightened the need for diversity initiatives.

Building teams with a broad array of backgrounds has proven beneficial when it comes to successfully implementing AI strategies. Yet despite this, around 4% of HR professionals surveyed said their company had scaled back or eliminated their focus on DEI in tech hiring over the past year.

Hiring leaders aren't happy about this, however, and are concerned this could lead to greater problems down the line. Around half believe this could raise costs per-hire or lead to higher employee turnover.

These concerns are warranted. Analysis from Deloitte, for example, found a significant portion of Millennial and Gen Z employees are more likely to stay at a firm longer if it boasts a diverse workforce.

Nearly half (45%) of respondents warned candidates will see their company as a less desirable place to work. This aligns with research from Glassdoor, which found prospective employees are more likely to accept a job with employers that align with their values on DEI.

The topic of DEI in tech has come to the fore in recent months, with a host of major tech firms including Google, Meta, and Amazon scaling back or scrapping diversity policies.

Naturally, these moves have sparked intense criticism from industry stakeholders and raised concerns among minority groups across the sector.

Execs aren’t clued up on AI

Elsewhere, the study found there are skills-related issues at the top of many enterprises. Most VPs and directors, for example, said they’d never had any training on the topic of AI.

Only four-in-ten executives said they were very or extremely confident they know how to use AI tools without compromising company data, and more than a quarter said they were not very or not at all confident.

Around two-in-five admitted they lacked the knowledge to make decisions when it comes to hiring vendors that use AI.

Daniele Grassi, CEO of General Assembly, said this underlines the need to upskill executives to prepare for the ‘AI era’.

“Technical and non-technical leaders alike must understand the legal, privacy and ethical implications of AI use," Grassi said.

"They need to know how to evaluate AI vendors, how to protect company data, and how to guide their teams on using AI in their work. Companies who don’t establish AI usage policies and upskill executives on AI face consequences ranging from data and privacy breaches to competitive disadvantage."

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Things are looking up for women in the tech industry, according to new research from AND Digital, with 84% believing the industry has changed for the better.

In a poll of female tech leaders in the US, 83% said they feel they've succeeded as a leader while nine-in-ten said they enjoy being a leader in tech.

However, it's not all good news. While 47% of the US workforce is made up of women, in technology that falls to 25%, with leadership roles diving further to 11%.

According to the survey, three-quarters of respondents said their organization could do more to make the workplace better for women in leadership roles and 76% said they had encountered challenges because of their gender during their route to leadership.

These challenges included extra scrutiny, a lack of respect from men, a struggle to have their work recognized, and seeing male coworkers promoted ahead of them despite a lack of experience. Only six-in-ten said they believe leadership positions are equally accessible to men and women.

"It’s clear that the technology industry is finally making huge strides in the way it supports and empowers the next generation of female leaders," said Linda Benjamin, VP of product development at AND Digital.

"It’s one thing to increase the diversity of your headcount, it’s quite another to ensure those new hires remain supported, motivated and happy to continue in their careers."

More work needed

Despite women reporting those concerns, just four-in-ten said they've experienced gender discrimination, with a similar figure reporting witnessing it impacting others in the workplace.

"These findings should send a clear signal to CEOs and company founders that their hard work building more diverse teams has been worth the effort and that these positive changes will enable them to build more profitable and productive businesses.

Despite some progress, it's clear more work needs to be done — even if it's simply ensuring discrimination is recognized as such. A survey last year from recruitment firm Nigel Frank found that male respondents didn't believe there was real sexism prevalent in the technology sector.

That report found that only 6% of men believed that women suffered discrimination in the workplace, with four-in-five believing women were treated equally to men.

Work-life balance still needs addressed

The AND Digital report found that most companies, more than eight-in- ten, are seen as supporting work-life balance across genders, for senior positions, at least.

However, the survey also showed 57% of women still believe they aren’t managing to balance both sides of their lives, with family or caring commitments impacting their work.

That's echoed by previous research from Tech Talent Charter that revealed half of the women in the UK tech sector departed that industry over conflicts with caring commitments.

"With AI shaking up traditional working models, it’s crucial that forward-thinking businesses invest in the latest female tech talent, to ensure they can stay ahead of the competition and deliver better products and services," said Benjamin.

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Only four-in-ten businesses have programs in place to hire more women, new research shows, despite a majority of IT professionals agreeing that there's not enough diversity in the sector.

According to a new study from ISACA, three-quarters of businesses say that attracting and retaining talent is a challenge. But female IT professionals believe they are still being shut out.

Nearly half (43%) of female respondents said a main reason that women are still underrepresented in tech roles is because most IT role models and leaders are male.

Other key issues highlighted in the study included pay inequality, according to 42% of women, though this was recognized by only 15% of men.

Overall, men tended to rate their sense of authority in specific areas of their current role more highly than women. This showed up particularly when it came to making purchasing decisions, where there was a gap of 13 percentage points, and in contributing to company strategy and direction, with a 10-point gap.

"More needs to be done to increase the representation of women in the IT and technology sector — and more needs to be done to welcome their leadership and influence," said Julia Kanouse, chief membership officer at ISACA, who oversees the association’s SheLeadsTech program.

"This will not only help to address the global skills gap and boost productivity in the sector—it will also create a more inclusive and diverse working environment."

The survey found that more than half of women would like to see more mentors or role models, with others calling for tech clubs or women's networking groups and for more female tech professors to be hired.

However, 68% of women - along with 72% of men - said they were extremely or very satisfied with their career progression. Meanwhile, 73% of women and 71% percent of men said they had received a salary increase or promotion in the last two years.

"Encouragingly, women have near-equal career progression satisfaction to their male counterparts and are slightly more likely to have received a raise or a promotion in the last two years," said Sarah Orton, UK and Europe lead for ISACA's SheLeadsTech initiative.

A report this time last year from career advice site Women in Tech uncovered five common obstacles facing women entering the tech sector.

These included lack of awareness and industry contact, a lack of role models, confidence issues, exclusionary hiring processes, and discrimination - all similar to the barriers identified by ISACA.

"Having a workforce of people with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to bring to the table is not only the right thing to do – it’s also a business imperative that makes an organization more innovative and its work that much more efficient and effective,” Orton said.

“Progress has been made – but the sector has more work to do.”

Tech forms a crucial element of any organisation’s future growth ambitions. Yet, as is the case for many industries, the sector has suffered from macro-economic uncertainty and is plagued by a skills gap that threatens to put a pause on plans for growth and innovation.

Nearly four-in-five employers globally report difficulty finding the skilled talent they need. The issue is even more apparent as estimates suggest that 375 million workers will need new skills in the next two years alone. 

With the rise of generative AI dominating business agendas in the first half of 2023, studies show that the technology has the potential to impact 300 million full time jobs, as 18% of work globally can be automated. 

While the demand for digitally skilled talent continues to rise, women hold only 17% of major technology jobs today and make up only 20% of information and technology graduates. We cannot expect digital services to be accessible, and therefore beneficial, for all if there is not equal representation in developing and maintaining them. 

As women continue to be underrepresented in STEM, from education into the workplace, they miss the vital opportunity to learn, develop, and upskill in increasingly critical fields.

Each and every new innovation provides us the opportunity to reflect on the role women have, and should have, in shaping our future and driving the push towards digital. As a woman working in the tech industry, I understand how much value women have to offer the industry, particularly against a backdrop of increasing demand for digital skills. 

Now more than ever, we should be supporting women and promoting technology careers, helping both them and the sector to reach their full potential.

Nurturing a diverse STEM workforce

With rising demand for digital skills, it is imperative that there are equal opportunities for women to develop these skills and be involved in the sector. 

Currently, with the UK Government pushing its AI and emerging technologies agenda, there is significant potential for innovation – and we must promote this further to ensure our industry remains balanced.

There are simply too many biases. Typically, when we think of the technology industry, we usually associate it with young white men in developer roles. These stereotypes often originate in the experiences and ideologies we encountered in our childhood and school years and are more often than not, very wrong. 

The fact that the IT industry is much more diverse, both in terms of the workforce and the roles that exist within it, is often overlooked, which is why it is so critical we promote a diverse group of role models to young people. 

By encouraging children and teenagers to undertake STEM courses, giving them the confidence to find their place within the industry, we can begin to move the needle. 

Making the case for equal representation

An often overlooked area of the industry is the channel, as it is not the stereotypical technology role we’re used to hearing about. There are huge opportunities for women wanting to work in the sector though. 

I myself have had the pleasure to collaborate with so many talented fantastic women, and the space allows women with the opportunity to build real, long-lasting relationships and work on mid-term initiatives from start to finish.

In my experience, the channel industry is doing better than most. It is balanced, attracting people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, and a brilliant opportunity for women to build a strong network with partners, sales leadership teams and customers. 

It also provides women with the opportunity to inhabit roles of influence. We have so much to gain from, and also offer, the industry – and it’s our role to help others realise the opportunities for them.

Flexibility as a pathway to inclusivity

 In the past, women have faced barriers to progressing in their careers because of childcare and family commitments, but since the pandemic this concept has been truly flipped on its head. 

Home and hybrid working offer greater flexibility, empowering women to make their role work for them. Additionally, businesses have realized that the once-prevalent 9-5 structure is not always fit for purpose.

Trust in employees is critical to this. Open communication between managers and employees right from the very beginning can guarantee a combined feeling of support and security in their role irrespective of their personal situations.

People managers also have a powerful influence on an employee’s sense of belonging, which can have a huge impact on the retention of any employee working in any industry. 

However, particularly for an industry that’s male dominated, ensuring women feel like they have a role within the business can be the difference between them choosing to leave, stay or return to the industry.

Overhauling the status quo

The channel, and technology industry as a whole, is a fantastic place to attract and retain women, where individuals can build trusted partnerships, a great network and as a result can inspire other women into future careers.

The coming year will be an exciting and transformative time for tech. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are being rapidly integrated into business operations across all sectors, spurring discussion about the future of work. 

Governments worldwide are ramping up efforts to understand how this technology can be used and how best to regulate it, but undoubtedly the opportunities it offers are huge.  

We must make sure that women have the chance to cash in on this opportunity, and be a part of innovation that will shape the future. This has benefits for all involved – both women and the industry.  

The number of women working in the UK cyber security industry has decreased, sparking concerns that efforts to improve diversity in the space are falling flat. 

A report from the UK government on cyber security skills across the labor market found that only 17% of the cyber sector workforce is female, marking a decrease from 22% last year and on par with 2021 and 2020 statistics. 

The study found that just 14% of senior roles are filled by women across the industry, a figure that’s risen steeply since 2021’s result of just 3%, but one that still underlines a clear imbalance of power.

The report noted that the proportion of women in the cyber workforce has remained “broadly consistent” in recent years. The results from 2021, for example, showed that 16% of the cyber workforce was female, indicating only a very small improvement in the space of two years.

“Although there were signs of an upward trend last year, this has not been sustained,” it said. 

The dip in female representation comes at a critical time in the cyber security space, with demand for skills rising steeply in recent years. 

The report said there is an estimated shortfall of 11,200 people in the industry, and while this does mark a dip from 14,100 in 2021, this is largely due to slower growth in the sector. 

Around 50% of all UK businesses were found to have a “basic cyber security skills gap” while one-third (33%) have an “advanced” security skills gap. 

This aligns with previous estimates from 2022 and 2021, and highlights that firms across the country are still contending with an acute skills shortfall amid a period of rising threats. 

An analysis of cyber security job postings in the last year shows that firms are seeking to bolster security-related skills within their workforce.

160,035 job postings were recorded last year, but 37% of these vacancies were reported as “hard to fill” by businesses, the report said. 

What’s being done to improve diversity?

The report noted that businesses are accelerating efforts to improve workforce diversity. 

Nearly half (40%) of cyber firms said they had taken action to “adapt their recruitment processes or carried out specific activities” to attract and encourage applications from diverse groups. 

38% also said they have accelerated efforts to recruit more women and bolster gender diversity within the workforce.

Across all “diverse groups” - which spans women, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, neurodiverse, and physically disabled people - women were “slightly more likely” to have been targeted in recruitment drives.

Amanda Finch, CEO at The Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec) said that her organization’s own research shows firms can still do more to attract female talent and encourage women to enter the industry. 

“Often the security industry is stereotyped as something of a ‘boys only club’. CIISec’s latest state of the industry report highlighted the progress the industry still needs to make on this,” she said. 

“38% of organizations have not implemented development programs to attract women to join the profession or promote those already in it, and a further 5% have tried but failed.”

Alternative routes into cyber

Employers also revealed they are exploring alternative routes into the cyber workforce for diverse groups. However, the report noted that this is typically focused on entry-level roles. 

“Hiring through non-degree routes” was identified as a key approach among many, with ‘capture the flag’ tests used to “identify raw talent”. 

Similarly, firms revealed they are also working with third-sector organizations to improve support for diverse groups within the workforce talent pool. 

Racial and gender-based inequality in tech recruitment is still a pervasive issue, according to new research.

The State of Wage Inequality report from Hired shows that bias in recruitment and hiring processes is actively harming people of color and women, with only minor progress being made on this front in the last five years. 

While the report highlighted that 99% of hiring leaders say they “make efforts to ensure hiring decisions are free from bias”, additional work is still required to root out long-standing cultural issues. 

Just over half (56%) of hiring managers reported that bias is still present in their workplaces, according to Hired. Gender-based biases are among the most common they see in their organizations, with 17% reporting this as a key issue.

Similarly, 12% reported that racial biases are also a lingering problem, followed by age-based discrimination. 

In particular, Hired said that representation “remains an issue for non-male, non-white individuals".

In 2022, 38% of positions advertised only offered interview opportunities to men. This marks a slight increase from 37% recorded in 2021, the report found.

Affinity and confirmation bias

A key factor in the continued issues reported by HR leaders was that many hiring managers experience “affinity and confirmation bias”, the report said. 

“Affinity bias occurs when interviewers favor candidates who are similar to themselves,” the report explained. “Confirmation bias leads hiring managers to focus on information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs about a candidate.”

Hired warned that both these issues directly harm individuals applying for jobs that don’t meet preconceived notions or beliefs held by the hiring managers. 

Long-term, this has an adverse effect on workplaces, leading to teams that are “largely homogenous” and lack diversity. 

Diverse teams deliver results

Eliminating bias in recruitment and hiring processes delivers broader results than merely improving diversity statistics. Companies which prioritize racial and ethnic diversity were 36% more likely to achieve “above average financial returns”, according to a report from McKinsey.

Meri Williams, CTO at Pleo, told ITPro “diverse teams win” and that organizations should place a stronger emphasis on fostering workforce diversity.

“This isn't purely about being fair to those of different genders or races – the more diverse teams are, the more varied an organization’s thinking becomes and the broader the range of solutions they develop,” Meri said. 

“Attracting a diverse workforce begins with an unbiased hiring process. And while it’s essential to ensure talent acquisition is set up right, do not overlook the fact that commitment to inclusion should run beyond the HR team and through the entire company.

“The work doesn’t stop there either and leaders must enable a diverse culture to thrive through an inclusive workplace design.”

Cloudflare is working to set an industry example through its LGBTQIA+ group and efforts to protect marginalized communities, with a senior figure at the company urging tech leaders to go further with their diversity.

Jen Taylor, chief product officer at Cloudflare, told ITPro that employers should aim to exceed basic diversity and inclusion efforts with active allyship, in order to properly support their employees and spark innovation within the workplace.

Shortly after joining Cloudflare in 2017, Taylor was approached by employees at the company about the possibility of starting an internal community for LGBTQIA+ employees.

The result was Proudflare, the company’s LGBTQIA+ employee resource group (ERG), for which Taylor was asked to become the founding executive sponsor.

The ERG operates around the globe, running events and providing a safe space for LGBTQIA+ employees and allies at Cloudflare.

“One of the things people often talk to me about is how important Proudflares and these ERGs are in general for helping people find their community within the organization,” Taylor said.

“Finding allyship, finding and feeling like they have a safe environment where they can ask questions, where they can ask for help, where they can raise important topics and really be an important part of the overall Cloudflare community.”

For some employees living and working in regions where marriage equality has not been brought in, or LGBTQIA+ lifestyles are even criminalized, the ERG can provide a chance to open up around other members of the community and receive support.

Taylor stressed that pride month is as much about visibility as it is a celebration.

“Pride started as a form of protest, of creating visibility,” she said.

“It’s been partnerships across a variety of diverse communities that have helped us transform that focus of visibility from one that is of anger to one of celebration and inclusiveness.”

‘Walking the walk’

Taylor told ITPro that the degree to which an organization is inclusive and diverse derives in large part from the perspectives of its leadership.

"It's not just making it an imperative, but also walking the walk,” she said.

"It's demonstrating that in your business practices, in how you run your meetings, in terms of how you hire. It's about demonstrating that in terms of cultural norms you create, in terms of how you treat your employees, and how you recognize and reward your employees. 

“It needs to be infused within the context and the fiber of an organization.”

Taylor has seen attitudes improve across the industry since she first entered the workforce, both for LGBTQIA+ people and for those from different perspectives, or race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

“When I came out of undergrad, I didn’t feel like I was really welcome to be my full self, I didn’t feel comfortable being out or talking about my personal life,” she told ITPro.

“Now I feel really encouraged to be myself, and feel supported in the work that I do.”

As a queer woman who worked her way up in tech, Taylor noted the powerful effect of embracing active allyship and community-building throughout a company and urged others who consider themselves allies to join ERGs and support their LGBTQIA+ colleagues.

Taylor also urged leaders looking to drive transformation and positive change should work hard to become active allies.

Employees from marginalized groups could be nervous about seeking mentorship, so those serious about making a difference should work to “advertise themselves as ‘I’m open for mentorship, for advocacy”, Taylor said.

All sectors still have work to do when it comes to making LGBTQIA+ employees feel supported and able to be their full selves.

In February, Proud Ventures’ LGBTQ+ Founder report revealed that almost a quarter of LGBTQIA+ startup founders fear revealing their identities, in case it affects their funding negatively.

Almost 80% of founders in the report said they had hidden their identity from colleagues, and more than a quarter stated they would never come out within the sector.

Protecting the community through Project Galileo

Since 2014 Cloudflare has run Project Galileo, a program through which it provides free security to businesses at risk of cyber attacks including those maintained by minority groups, activists, or journalists.

This includes the likes of The Trevor Project, which provides crisis support for LGBTQIA+ youths, and the gender equality and diversity movement Women’s March.

Politically-motivated cyber criminals often use distributed denial of service (DDoS) to force websites offline.

Websites run by anti-racism groups were subject to DDoS attacks in 2020, with Cloudflare having blocked more than 135 billion malicious HTTP requests in one weekend coinciding with protests against police.

“It is safe to assume that at any moment, any of the organizations in Project Galileo and probably multiple of them, are on the receiving end of an attack,” Taylor said.

Cloudflare uses all of its globally-available technologies for Project Galileo and works with third-party groups that vet requests to join the project so that it isn’t making the sole decisions on which organizations are included.

To protect participants, the full list of groups that receive help through Project Galileo is not publicly available.

Above all, Taylor stressed that improved diversity is a net benefit for all within a company.

“The way that you actually facilitate innovation is, you bring diverse perspectives to the table, you put interesting problems in front of them, and you encourage people to to dig in and bring their perspectives,” she said.

“And so, for us, building in diverse and inclusive workspaces is a business imperative because we need those diverse perspectives in order to facilitate and drive the innovation that we're delivering, we need our environment to be inclusive.”

This article originally appeared in issue 33 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here

It’s widely understood that workplaces benefit hugely from having a diverse workforce. A range of different approaches to everyday work is healthy and positive, and being open to the widest workforce possible can help employers face up to the skills shortage, which the technology sector is only too familiar with.

But formulating and implementing a diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy is not a simple matter that takes just a few weeks. This should be an ongoing lived experience – embedded deep in the core of an organisation – to be truly effective. While there are plenty of shortcuts available, any organisation that doesn’t invest the energy, time and resources needed will encounter pitfalls that will backfire.

Building a workforce of all the talents

Understanding the complexity of diversity can be an important first step, and firms may find it most beneficial to seek external expertise to help them process this. Doing so means any policy, the strategies through which it will be implemented, and the ongoing embedding of D&I in everyday working practices is both broad and deep.

“Organisations need to construct policies with an intersectional lens,” says the head of growth at leadership training programme provider Circl, Meenal Patel, tells IT Pro.

“People from underrepresented backgrounds often fall into multiple categories of diversity. A policy which focuses on gender one year, race another, and neurodivergence another will fail before it even begins. We cannot segment diversity in this way. The best diversity policies put intersectionality at the heart of their approach.”

Getting started on D&I

Becoming a more inclusive workplace can manifest as a decision to transform an entire workplace culture. Taking standardised D&I policies “off the shelf” – rather than working from the ground up to develop policies which fit with specific needs – is far from ideal.

“Before starting a D&I strategy, companies must assess where the gaps are in their business,” says Chelsea Slater, CEO and co-founder of InnovateHer. Armed with this information, organisations can start to work to increase diversity in a meaningful way.

For Holly Foxcroft, head of neurodiversity research in cyber consulting at Stott and May, the biggest mistake firms make is to implement change policy without training employees or giving guidance on the change. “This means employees may not understand why the change is needed, and may not understand the policy and its practices, which can lead to resistance,” she adds.

Sitting alongside this is the question of where responsibility for D&I is located. Slater sees a lot of companies give this work to people who are not in a D&I role, but are passionate and vocal about it. “This is the first “no” when looking at D&I in the workplace,” she adds. “When this happens, colleagues get stressed out as they are doubling their workload almost immediately. D&I is a full-time role.”

The better approach, says Slater, is to either employ someone into this role internally or get a consultant or company to help create a strategy and then implement it.

Strategies must be embedded, not siloed

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that, having recruited diverse candidates, the job is done. In fact, supporting every team member should be embedded in the culture.

“Organisations need to take a fresh look at how they deploy career development,” Patel says. “Equality is giving diverse candidates an opportunity in the organisation. Equity is giving them the resources to succeed once you have hired them.”

Another trap is placing too much emphasis on metrics. Setting a target of changing the makeup of the workforce, by having a statistical goal can be helpful, but it shouldn’t be seen as the only, or even the main, prize.

“The one thing organisations should avoid is to overly focus on the numbers and metrics,” says Bev White, CEO of Nash Squared. She is very clear on this point, adding: “Numbers are very important about telling you where you are, but the engine of diversity is in culture change. You can’t change the temperature by tapping a thermometer, and you can’t change diversity simply by measuring it.”

Bringing everyone on the D&I journey

Vitally, implementing a D&I strategy is a matter for the whole organisation. It’s about cultural change, and this isn’t achieved overnight.

Slater offers sage words, telling IT Pro that implementing a diversity strategy means undergoing a huge organisational culture shift “because you’ve recognised that you are not diverse, or people aren’t being treated fairly within the workplace”.

“Culture can take a long time to change, and you must be willing to have tough conversations with colleagues, and face pushback from colleagues, to create a culture that supports inclusive behaviours,” she concludes.

Finally, it’s centrally important to avoid a culture of blame – making those who have not understood D&I in the past feel somehow that they have done wrong. That way lies the road to building resentment and losing support for the changes that need to happen. When D&I is seen as a lived experience across the whole organisation, everyone is involved and the positives are accentuated.

Google has opened the doors to its newest office space in Atlanta and announced a $1 million commitment to support work in training underserved communities throughout Georgia.

The company recently opened the doors to the new space in Midtown Atlanta at the 1105 West Peachtree building, it said yesterday. This new Google office encompasses 19 floors spanning 500,000 square feet and is part of its broader investment in local communities across the US.

Google has been in Atlanta for over 20 years. It has over 1,000 employees in Georgia, located in two offices as well as in a data centre in Douglas County.

The tech giant underlined that Atlanta has a rich civil rights history and is home to top Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and tech talent. It hopes continuing its long-term investment in Georgia’s capital will help support its Black Googler community there, in line with the company’s racial equity commitments.

"Inspired by the city’s legacy for social change, our office was designed as an homage to the people of Atlanta, with each floor an ode to Atlanta’s cultural, musical and artistic history," said Matthew Pritchard

Google Atlanta co-site lead and global business organisation lead. "We worked with more than 50 local and diverse companies to design and build the new space, including artwork from more than 20 local artists."

In the lobby, visitors are greeted with a giant heart outlining the Google Atlanta sign. One of the staircases features a rainbow design, in support and celebration of the LGBTQ+ community, inspired by the city’s nearby rainbow crosswalks. The WERD Cafe, the Google cafeteria, is named for the first Black-owned and programmed U.S. radio station.

Google also announced yesterday a $1 million commitment to the Urban League of Atlanta to support their work in training underserved communities throughout Georgia. The company hopes the grant will help jobseekers get digital skills training and place them in high-growth jobs.

The tech giant is also partnering with local community organisations and universities. It’s working with HBCUs like Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College to attract talent, and partnering with the Technical College System of Georgia to offer Google Career Certificates to 22 colleges across the state at no cost.

Lastly, the company is partnering with Mayor Andre Dickens and the Atlanta BeltLine to launch the Atlanta BeltLine Marketplace, an effort to help local Black, Latino and women-owned small businesses reach new customers by retrofitting rail cars into office spaces. It’s providing Wi-Fi for the rail containers, a complete suite of Google Nest products, Chromebooks, and free digital skills training.

Salesforce investors have rejected a shareholder proposal that called for an independent racial equity audit analysing what effect the company's internal policies have on civil rights, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Retail activist investment platform Tulipshare put forward the proposal after two Black women in prominent positions resigned from the company in 2021, citing a toxic work environment and disingenuous marketing around equality.

The workers also described “rampant microaggressions and gaslighting” and a “big gap from how Salesforce portrays itself and the lived experience” of working for the company.

The company has committed to having 50% of its workforce from underrepresented groups by 2023. However, on its current trajectory, it would take Salesforce 12 years to reach its goal, according to shareholders, and that two in five current employees are White.

Since 2015, the company has only increased its percentage of Hispanic employees by 1.1%, and of Black employees by 2.3%.

In the proposal, Tulipshare claimed that by categorising Women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Multiracial, LGBTQ+ employees, People with Disabilities, and Veterans together to form the company’s definition of underrepresented groups, Salesforce can continue to mask its legacy on race.

“Whilst we are disappointed that our proposal did not pass today, this vote was just the beginning in the fight for racial equity in tech,” said Antoine Argouges, Tulipshare CEO and founder. “Polling we conducted for this campaign found that someone is more than twice as likely to experience racism if they work in tech.

"Tech companies need to urgently address racism and microaggressions in the workplace – and shareholders must realise their potential to influence racial equity in society.”

Salesforce hasn’t disclosed the full outcome of the vote yet, but Argouges said that once the results are published, Tulipshare will consider its options for continuing the fight for racial equity at the company.

IT Pro has contacted Salesforce for comment.

The cloud-based software company isn’t the only tech organisation that has faced scrutiny over its diversity policies. LinkedIn decided to settle with the US Department of Labor (DoL) in May over allegations it had carried out systemic, gender-based pay discrimination.

The DoL announced the settlement on behalf of 686 female workers in California. Under the terms of the agreement, LinkedIn was set to pay $1.8 million in back wages and interest to the affected workers.

Virgin Media O2 has announced plans for a “comprehensive package of support” for transgender and non-binary employees that will include the company funding gender transition treatment, estimated to cost around £20,000.

The company already provides Bupa private healthcare for its staff, as well as access to Healthy Minds, a 24/7 psychological helpline.

The latest commitment is part of the telecom’s first joint diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) strategy since the two companies officially merged in 2021.

Known as All In, the DE&I strategy sets ​​four goals that are to be achieved by 2027. This includes equal gender representation in Virgin Media O2’s senior leadership team, out of which 15% need to constitute ethnic minority employees. According to recent findings from the Tech London Advocates network, three-quarters of London’s tech companies have almost no BIPOC representation on their senior leadership teams, with the lack of diversity potentially costing the UK tech sector its world-leading position.

Virgin Media O2’s DE&I strategy also aims to ensure that minority ethnic groups will make up a quarter of the company’s wider organisation, which in turn will also reflect “all gender identities and expressions” as part of “progress for gender parity”.

Commenting on the announcement, Virgin Media O2 chief people officer Philipp Wohland said that the All In strategy will see the creation of a “more inclusive and equitable company” for employees and customers alike.

“Virgin Media O2’s purpose is to upgrade the UK; that’s not just through our leading products and services, it’s also by the type of company we want to be and the role we play in society,” he added.

To facilitate a more inclusive work environment, the telecom is also rolling out a two-hour employee training session led by Equity Sequence.

This is despite warnings from experts that anti-bias training, especially in such a brief session, is ineffective in increasing diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

“The idea that somebody can come into a company, spend two hours with an organisation, and change everybody's actions is just bizarre. It does not happen,” London School of Economics professor Dr Grace Lordan told attendees of the Tech for D&Iversity event on 31 March 2022.

Businesses should avoid investing in training sessions aiming to overcome unconscious bias among employees, a London professor has warned.

London School of Economics (LSE) professor Dr Grace Lordan described unconscious bias training, which cost organisations around £6 billion a year, as entirely ineffective.

“Unconscious bias training doesn't work,” she said, speaking at the Tech for D&Iversity event, held on Thursday evening. “Your unconscious bias is based on your background, it's based on the way that you've been brought up. The idea that somebody can come into a company, spend two hours with an organisation, and change everybody's actions is just bizarre. It does not happen.”

The ineffectiveness of anti-bias training has been known since the 1930s, with numerous academic papers from top universities backing the claim. Despite this, public and private sector organisations alike have poured resources into the practice, which has become a lucrative market – especially since 2020, when companies including tech giants were urged to address systemic racism following the murder of George Floyd on 25 May.

However, anti-bias training has since been criticised as simply a bureaucratic practice that doesn’t implement real change, nor does it lead to increased diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

In October 2020, the UK government was criticised for spending more than £400,000 on unconscious bias training sessions, according to a Freedom of Information request by the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

Lordan, who founded LSE’s The Inclusion Initiative (TII) in November 2020, told attendees that, instead of spending money on ineffective training, team leaders should “put structures in place” to prevent employees from falling into the traps of unconscious bias.

This includes providing equal opportunities across team members and auditing pay gaps, she added.

“We encourage people to write down whether or not somebody disagrees with their idea and encourage dissent. And then to look back and see: Are you ignoring the women? Are you ignoring people from a particular country or even people who follow a particular football team?”

Lordan’s advice comes as the latest TLA research found that three quarters of London’s tech companies have almost no BIPOC representation on their senior leadership teams, with the lack of diversity potentially costing the UK tech sector its world-leading position.

At this point, arguing for more diversity in tech is (or at least should be) like preaching to the converted. Multiple studies have shown the benefits of diverse technical teams, it remains an ever-present topic of conversation within the industry, and awareness of the need to increase diversity has never been higher.

Yet, even with all this attention, diversity across a variety of categories still remains a perennial problem, indicating greater awareness may not be having enough of an impact. So if we know there’s a problem, what’s stopping organisations from remedying it? We spoke to some of our expert panellists about why diversity in tech continues to be such a challenging issue to address, and what can be done to try and fix it.

It’s important to note the last few years have not been entirely without progress. Pressure from both campaign groups and industry bodies has led more companies to implement programmes aimed at boosting diversity and creating more inclusive working environments. As Studio Graphene founder and CEO Ritam Gandhi notes, however, these efforts aren’t yet universally adopted.

“I think the ones that are taking it seriously are either large organisations with top-down direction requiring managers to take it seriously, or smaller businesses and startups that have witnessed the benefits of a diverse team,” he says. “There are a number of smaller businesses in particular who don't prioritise diversity because it simply isn't a high enough priority – as they are battling for survival or growth, and that needs to come at any cost for them.

“I definitely think one of the big changes is the extent to which addressing the lack of diversity is being taken seriously by organisations and policymakers. For instance, I was impressed to see Web Summit giving a 90% discount on tickets for women in tech. One of the big realisations that everyone is coming to is that a ‘heterogeneous’ team can create better technology delivery outcomes to the table because everyone brings a different perspective to the table.”

The pace of change is slow, though, and the problem extends beyond entry-level development and helpdesk roles. According to our panellists, more effort is still needed to decrease gender and racial disparities at the higher levels of organisations.

Pipeline problems

“We are starting to see reports that show growth when it comes to things like the gender split in technology roles in the UK, but we're not seeing that same level of growth for more senior technology roles,” says Moonpig head of security Tash Norris. “This is even more true when you look at BAME representation at director-level and above in the technology sector.

“However, whilst the growth when it comes to greater diversity in tech isn't where it should be, I do think we're starting to see companies make more concrete commitments on their diversity and inclusion agendas. Diversity is so much more than gender and it's refreshing to start to see companies be more upfront about how they're creating more inclusive environments and contributing towards creating good 'pipelines' of talent, as well as nurturing existing talent.”

The question of how to shore up tech’s talent pipelines – the supply of candidates coming into roles for the first time – has been the subject of debate for some time. It’s widely regarded, though, as a critical step for long-term diversity improvements, particularly as it relates to women in technical roles.

“I agree with Tash about the need for diversity in senior roles, but that won't happen unless we are feeding the pipeline,” explains Natural History Museum CIO Alison Davis. “In my experience, when I’ve hired at senior roles, the candidates just aren't there, and this isn't just about how you write the job description.”

Davis’ experience is not unique; even when organisations actively want to bring a greater balance to their senior technical roles, they’re often stymied by a lack of available candidates. This is one of the principal reasons why improving the supply of diverse technical candidates has become such a priority.

“I think the biggest pipeline challenges lie in the deeper tech roles such as security and infrastructure,” adds Manila McLean, CIO of Newcastle Building Society. “I've witnessed over the past few years a move towards a better balance in software development, testing and IT services. In other digital and tech roles such as product design and UX, I'd say we have a really good balance across industry; certainly in the financial services sector organisations I’ve worked with.”

Looking at gender diversity in particular, one of the industry’s biggest goals has been to get more female students into STEM fields at an earlier age, and turning an interest in technical subjects into a fully-fledged career after university. The IT community, according to Davis, could help this effort by doing a better job of communicating that the industry includes a range of roles, from highly technical careers to ones that are much more people-focused, adding “it’s not all about coding!”.

“Alison referenced the importance of encouraging young women to choose STEM subjects,” Norris says, “and I agree this is absolutely part of the resolution to increasing our talent pipeline. At Moonpig we've recently partnered with two organisations, Stemettes and Cajigo to do exactly this. Investing time demystifying our sector and showing that it's a fulfilling (and interesting) career path can go a long way.”

“I agree,” McLean adds; “it starts with grass roots!”

Culture club

One of the key tasks for any company looking to create a diverse environment is to ensure that it’s a welcoming place for different kinds of people. This, however, can be fundamentally undermined by the culture of an organisation, Davis points out, and it’s about more than stamping out overt discrimination or bullying.

“Company culture has to affect diversity,” she explains. “It doesn't matter what you say, if there is an ethos that a company works in a certain way and that is counter to supporting inclusion, then you can have all the policies you like; it won't change. It doesn't have to be overt, but if for example, you’re expecting folks to travel all the time, that excludes people.”

“I do think institutional biases still play a role in promotion challenges,” Gandhi adds, “but perhaps less so ‘institutionally and more down to individual personalities. As individuals, we have personal experience in relation to who we've worked with and how things have worked out – this is controversial, but I do see individuals letting past experiences impact their present world decisions.”

A problematic company culture can manifest in other ways too, such as favouring more aggressive, confrontational management styles that are typically seen as masculine. Placing more emphasis on these kinds of styles can create an environment in which more empathetic personalities are viewed as less effective.

“I think that assertiveness is sometimes a mischaracterisation of being decisive,” says Norris. “Having the ability to be clear on, and committed to, a decision (whilst still being open to fair challenge and even maybe being wrong) is a great skill for a leader. Sometimes, being decisive is also demonstrated alongside assertiveness or even aggression and I believe it's misunderstandings around the skill that's actually being appreciated that can cause challenges around diverse hiring, progression and maintaining diverse talent.”

“Not that long ago, I was told by a fellow CIO with whom I was working on a project that he didn't really trust me to be capable,” Davis reveals, “because he hadn't seen me throwing my weight around, and he thought you had to do that to be a CIO – never mind that I'd been a successful one for a significant number of years.”

McLean suggests one of the reasons why technical roles in areas like UX and product design have a better gender balance than deeper tech areas, like infrastructure or security, may be because these areas tend to use less ‘masculine’ terminology. She also argues in order to improve overall diversity, companies might need to adopt a more interventionist approach.

“I‘ve been reflecting on things like gender quotas and a programmatic approach to achieving proof points in diversity and inclusion, and while I would prefer the culture to drive behaviours and outcomes, I do think in order to see a shift we need that ‘programme and quota’ element until it almost becomes a moot point. I’ve seen initiatives like the Women in Finance Charter, which requires organisations to commit to achieving a better gender balance across financial services, having successes in those organisations that have committed to it.”

Movers and shakers

This approach has gained favour in some circles, but it can be controversial. Some argue this kind of affirmative action can actually be damaging for equality, as it potentially implies someone may have got a job on the basis of box-ticking diversity initiatives, rather than their skills. Others, however, maintain this outcome can be avoided by employing quotas in a thoughtful and considered manner, which is what Norris’ boss – Moonpig CTO and fellow IT Pro Panellist Peter Donlon – has done.

“I initially struggled with quotas,” she admits. “I'd personally hate to think the main reason I got a role (or for anyone at the company to think that) is because I'm female. However, it can drive good behaviours; our CTO has previously said he won't 'click go' on hiring a role until he's seen a diverse candidate pool. This approach has really resounded with me. It's really ensured a lot of us to think about whether we're doing enough to attract (and seek out) diverse talent.”

A good HR team can really make a difference in this aspect. By emphasising the importance of building a diverse talent pool, IT leaders can work together with talent acquisition teams to ensure that a wide enough net is being cast in order to seek out a broad and diverse selection of candidates, while still hiring somebody suited to the job.

“I feel lucky to work with a really talented recruitment team who know how important it is to our team, and our CTO, to see a diverse candidate pool,” Norris says, “which means more than just gender diversity.”

“When I open a new role, our recruitment team will do things like challenge my job description, which I really dig – such as what skills are truly must-have, whether a degree is really needed, et cetera. We do need to ensure that whilst our recruitment teams have tough KPIs around hiring, that we're also making space (and creating a culture) where they feel okay to challenge what we're asking for and how we're asking for it.”

This is also a key part of the conversation McLean’s team has with HR departments and recruitment agencies when filling technical roles, noting that looking for candidates outside of traditional pipelines is one short-term measure she’s considering to boost diversity. McLean’s considering ways to attract candidates who are hoping to reskill and transition into a technical role, “almost like apprenticeships for mid-career candidates”.

“Yes, we have had a lot of success with internal hires,” agrees Davis. “One of our recent developers has moved over from our fundraising team, where she was doing some local data analysis to support operations. Project managers are easy to move around and can then move into technical areas if they want, and we have also had folks move into the service desk.”

“We have real challenges with recruitment because of the comparatively low salaries, which is why internal development is a good route for us. We're also looking at being more creative with apprenticeships, which we hope will open up roles to wider communities.”

Norris has firmly embraced internal recruitment and cross-skilling, but beyond its capacity for improving diversity, she pointed out that bringing in staff from different areas of the business (or different industries altogether) can introduce significant advantages from a problem-solving perspective.

“I'm a big fan of career-switchers! I have an ex-lawyer in my team and an ex-marketing executive joining soon. They have entirely different skill sets and perspectives to the rest of the team and continue to increase our effectiveness as a unit. Their strength areas are ones not often found in traditional cyber security applicants and so they've been able to join and upskill some team members whilst also learning the tech side themselves. I think there's still some way to go for companies to recognise and embrace the value added by mid-level career switchers (and not offer them entry-level salaries).”

Fostering true diversity is a challenge, and despite the industry’s stated willingness to improve matters, factors such as a lack of diverse applicants for technical positions and a need for cultural change have proved to be barriers to companies’ diversity and inclusion efforts.

There are ways to remedy this, however. Improving the pipeline by making technical roles more attractive to people from diverse groups is one strategy, as is mandating diverse candidate pools at the hiring stages and removing unnecessary qualification requirements. Whatever the approach, one thing is certain: the road to a genuinely diverse tech workforce is still very long indeed.

AbilityNet's TechShare Pro event, which aims to create better awareness of and great discussion and solutions related to accessibility and inclusive design, is back again this year.

"TechShare Pro brings together digital accessibility and inclusion specialists from Europe and beyond to connect and learn from each other. Their common goal is to break down the barriers which prevent disabled people from accessing the digital world, whether that is caused by badly written code, outdated social attitudes or changing the way we run our organisations," Mark Walker, head of marketing at AbilityNet, told IT Pro.

"AbilityNet’s vision is of a digital world accessible to all – a world where people with any disability can use tech to achieve their goals at home, at work, and in education. Our team of staff and volunteers work with a huge range of people and organisations every day to fulfil that vision, whether through personalised advice for individuals or expert services and training for organisations."

IT Pro is proud to be media partner for 2021, supporting a fantastic and incredibly important forum for conversations to help ensure businesses embed inclusive thinking into their core.

"We are absolutely thrilled to be joining forces with AbilityNet as the media partner for TechShare Pro," said Maggie Holland, global editorial director and head of content at IT Pro.

“Our mission is to provide real-world insight and advice to guide business and technology decision-makers - who are often information-rich, but time-poor - and that includes raising awareness and discussing key accessibility topics. As such, supporting this event in our capacity as media partner completely aligns with our expertise and values.”

Key areas on the agenda for this year's show include (but are not limited to):

• How to change leadership culture and thinking
• Key legislation and regulations - for both the UK and Europe
• Why accessibility and inclusion are important in business

Importantly, this isn't another pure tech event, according to Walker. Indeed, speakers will include those from IT as well as other areas of the business such as diversity and inclusion, HR, marketing and more.

"We can’t achieve our vision without their involvement," Walker added. "In the fast-moving world of digital technology our annual TechShare Pro conference is a chance to keep track of the big changes in the world of accessibility and inclusion, to hear from the experts in various fields and to encourage and nurture the connections and relationships which we all need to achieve that goal."

Microsoft is this year's gold sponsor for the event, which is online-only and running from the 16th to the 18th of November.

“We’re delighted to be involved in this years’ TechShare Pro as lead sponsor. This event is a great way to highlight the need for further digital inclusion and accessibility awareness across all industries," added Hector Minto, Microsoft's global lead for accessibility evangelism.

"Microsoft prides itself on digital accessibility and we’re excited to share insights and support delegates on their digital accessibility journey.”

Tickets are already on sale for the event here with an early bird discounted rate until the end of August.

It took me five years of working in London’s tech scene to realise it wasn’t representative of the wider society it served. On a spring day in 2015, I was sitting at my desk in Amazon’s London office. My colleague Sarah and I were key account managers in the payments department, and together we were huddled by my screen looking at the company’s organisation chart.

We wanted to see how many women were in Amazon’s leadership team. We started at the top of the chart, where CEO Jeff Bezos held a solitary top spot. Beneath him, the next layer of executives were all white men. The layer beneath them showcased a homogeneous group of white men, too. We were disheartened to discover how few women occupied leading roles within the company. What hope did we have of breaking into this gentleman’s club?

A Tech Nation report in 2018 found that women represent just 18% of the UK’s tech workforce, despite representing 49% of the total UK workforce and 51% of the overall UK population. And representation doesn’t improve at senior levels: women hold fewer than a quarter of all the director-level roles in the UK’s tech industry. According to an Inclusive Tech Alliance report published in 2019, Black, Asian and other minority ethnic people represent a mere 8.5% of the tech industry’s senior leaders.

No change

Worse, in the five years since Tech Nation first launched its annual report, there’s been no acceleration in the rate of diversity. No acceleration despite notable campaigns to drive change such as PwC’s Tech She Can Charter urging employers to work together to increase the representation of women workers in tech. No acceleration despite the mayor of London unveiling a toolkit to help organisations become anti-racist workplaces, adding to an existing campaign in place since 2018 to help Black men secure employment in tech.

Several compelling reasons have been cited for tech’s dire state of diversity. Many journalists are quick to point to the STEM gender gap, placing the blame on low numbers of girls taking up relevant subjects at school. Others focus on the lack of role models for women. However, a common thread is the culture of this male-dominated industry. It can feel toxic to many who aren’t represented in the dominant groups, and one way this toxicity shows itself is in the language tech companies use.

As professor Michael Kimmel said: “Privilege is invisible to those who have it.”

From job adverts to programming languages, tech teams are now finally recognising how words can have the power to exclude individuals, and are taking steps to remedy this to promote greater diversity and inclusion within their organisations.

“This isn’t a place for you”

Ellen Jones is an LGBTQ+ and disability writer, speaker and consultant within the tech industry. She spoke to me about the language used in job adverts and how seemingly innocuous descriptions of team culture can have devastating effects on diversity. “One thing as a disabled, queer woman I find incredibly alienating is when job applications give a really prescriptive company culture, which ultimate boils down to ‘this isn’t a place for you’.”

Tech firm Textio offers a solution to this problem. Its software includes a feature called “tone” that helps you recognise hidden gender bias in the language you use in ads. Recognising such implicit bias can be hard on one’s own, so the tool highlights phrases that research has shown impacts the gender balance of applicants.

Applied is another software company helping companies adopt more inclusive language. Its product scans your job description for any language that research has shown to be exclusionary and removes any identifying information from job applications, eliminating implicit bias. Case studies show that this approach works. Diversity VC used its platform to hire a diverse group of interns and shared a rave review of the diversity of applications. “Against the backdrop of an overwhelmingly white, male, privately educated status quo, having 47% female, 70% BAME, 35% socio-economically disadvantaged and 11% LGBT is all the more impressive.”

I used #BlackTechTwitter to ask black technologists what information they paid the most attention to when seeking potential employers. Dozens of people mentioned language as something they looked out for. Yet a quick scan of open tech roles on social media sites showed that many firms aren’t taking action on the inclusion issues that were highlighted in my thread. Tech talent pays attention to the words used across a company’s website and careers page: they look for indicators that it’s diverse, inclusive and has equal opportunities for staff of all backgrounds.

The responses in the Twitter thread revealed that it wasn’t enough for companies to simply state the obvious “equal opportunity employer” line when it comes to inclusion: they need to explicitly show their commitment to inclusion and showcase the actions they have taken, and continue to take, to increase representation. Jobseeking technologists from underrepresented backgrounds are doing their own employer due diligence by looking for the nuances; subtle linguistic indicators that reveal the employer’s inability to check their privilege and optimise for inclusion.

At UK challenger bank Monzo, the team has adopted measures to hold themselves accountable for using inclusive language. Brenda Wong, a member of Monzo’s culture and communications teams, shared examples of the bank’s internal Slackbot (a bot facility in the Slack messaging software), which flags exclusionary language and suggests more inclusive replacements. “If you use the word ‘guys’, a Slackbot message will pop up directing you to an internal explainer about why we don’t use that word at Monzo,” Wong told me.

However, Wong recognises that a Slackbot alone is insufficient to hold the team accountable for always communicating in the most inclusive way. “We explicitly train folks on inclusive language during their induction too, so it’s the standard that’s set from the very beginning. Slackbots are just reminders to help guide behaviour.”

At Brandwatch, where I work as vice president of global community and belonging, members of the Pride committee led a project to update our Slack settings to allow all staff to show their preferred pronouns alongside their display name. As a person with cisgender privilege, I often take for granted the fact that people correctly guess my preferred pronoun when viewing my profile picture. By choosing to display my preferred pronouns she/her, I choose to help normalise the practice. This makes it easier for the next person who joins our team whose preferred pronoun could be they/them or not obvious to discern by sight.

Coding out prejudice

Motivated by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, Brandwatch’s Engineering Diversity and Inclusion Committee decided to change the terminology it used on a regular basis. It realised terms such as “master/slave” could be replaced with language that was more inclusive to colleagues and the wider tech community. The solution? Alternatives to terminology categorised by compulsory and suggested, examples of which you can view in the box to the left. Since updating terminology can create a lot of tech debt, their aim was to make these language changes going forward in new and existing code repositories.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter movement was a catalyst for sparking conversations within the tech industry about how to be anti-racist. Dr Ronda Zelezny-Green, a digital development and tech policy expert, noticed more colleagues and more tech professionals in her network discussing racism and allyship in the industry following Black Lives Matter. As a Black woman, and the only Black woman at her level of seniority in her organisation, she tells me she found this change a hopeful one, until she tried to channel this energy into a problem she discovered at work.

While the Black Lives Matter movement was still dominating headlines, she learned that her company’s IT department used the terms “whitelist/blacklist” in the context of emails that were whitelisted and trusted, or blacklisted and blocked. As a master’s-level linguistics expert she recognised the damaging consequences of this connotation. “The implication is that white is right, and that’s not okay.”

She suggested that her IT team find alternatives. She sparked the conversation to show how anti-Blackness can manifest in seemingly harmless ways. But what she intended to be a conversation about racism quickly became a conversation about processes and industry standards. She tells me she felt the more important issue had been derailed. “Language can be inclusive or exclusive, but the tech industry can delay or push back on language changes, getting mired in the process and clinging to outmoded standards. When this happens, the tech industry is showing us that inclusive language is not a priority.”

I asked tech professionals on Twitter to share examples of their teams taking action to use more inclusive language. I received hundreds of responses, indicating that not all employers are turning a blind eye to the problem. Tech CEO Avery Francis told me “we care deeply about this at Bloom”, the workplace design consultancy she founded after her own negative experiences navigating the tech world as a woman of colour. “Some examples: we don’t address groups of folks as ‘guys’ and practice calling people in when they do. We are learning more about ableist language and replacing words such as ‘crazy’ with ‘wild’ and using ‘position’ instead of ‘stance’.”

Camille Fabreguettes, a full stack engineer at Sqreen, told me they no longer use whitelist/blacklist on her team. Ashraf Abed, the founder of Debug Academy explained that “we updated our curriculum to teach ‘main’ instead of ‘master’.” Arno Fleming, tech lead at The Next Closet, told me “we’ve replaced ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ because they focus most on age and potentially gender.

“We’re hoping that ‘starting’ and ‘experienced’ can communicate the level better. And we’re hoping to introduce a ‘guys jar’ after lockdown – anyone using that word can contribute €2 to a team outing.”

Recognising privilege

It’s important to remember the real impact here goes beyond semantics. By choosing to recognise the privilege embedded in language, we are choosing to challenge injustice and create a more equitable and inclusive industry. I spoke to Claudia Alick, an intersectional inclusion expert, about why the language we choose is crucial to make tech more inclusive. “Changing vocabulary is not the point,” Alick said. “The act of explicitly choosing justice-based language remaps implicit meanings and allows us to acknowledge and remove colonising racist, sexist frameworks. This is recoding the performance of our communication.”

In 2018, Buffer’s director of people, Courtney Seiter, published the article An Incomplete Guide to Inclusive Language For Startups And Tech. She wrote: “Language is one of the most powerful tools we have as humans. Historically, language has left many out. Inclusive language seeks to treat all people with respect, dignity, and impartiality. It is constructed to bring everyone into the group and exclude no one.”

The language we choose to use at work as tech professionals says a lot about what matters to us. It says a lot about what is important. And if we aren’t making the effort to make our language inclusive, we’re saying that inclusion doesn’t really matter.

An inclusive workplace isn’t just about supporting people of different genders, sexual orientations or races. Almost 20% of the UK has some form of disability, and it’s important to make sure that our offices, applications and services are set up in a way that is accessible to these people.

There are many reasons why this is a good idea; aside from being a legal requirement and a moral imperative, it can bring usability and productivity improvements for all your staff and customers, not just those with impairments. Joining us this week to discuss accessibility tech, digital inclusion and the benefits that it can bring to your organisation is Robin Christopherson, head of digital inclusion at UK charity AbilityNet.

You can get in touch with AbilityNet by calling 0800 04 876 42, or emailing inquiries@abilitynet.org.uk.

Highlights

“The RNIB, the Royal National Institute for the Blind here in the UK, did some brilliant research, where they got a bunch of visually impaired people to look at a range of websites. And obviously, the sites that were accessible were easier to use for them. But the most interesting part of that research was the control group of able-bodied testers that had no disability or impairment, didn't do anything differently about accessing websites, the sites that were accessible were also easier for them to use; they were able to complete the tasks on average 35% more quickly. So you get this 35% usability bonus. Every developer and designer, they stress about how to optimise the UI and the UX and make it a really good experience. WCAG is a shortcut to a really massive leap in usability for every single user.”

“AI is massively important. But it also has this darker side, where bots driven by machine learning are, for example, trying to submit forms. And that's why you have the evil that is CAPTCHA having to exist, so something like Google's ‘I'm not a robot’ tick box only works if you're not a keyboard user, which I am. Because that region on a web page just around that tick box and message is monitored for mouse movement towards the checkbox. It doesn't monitor mouse movement across the rest of the site, because that would be far too creepy. But around that area, Google is allowed to monitor your mouse movement towards that tick box. And if it's sufficiently wobbly, then it’s fine.

If you tab to it and hit the spacebar, which is what I would do, then most of the time, you will get the other CAPTCHA challenge coming up, which is increasingly obscured pictures of traffic signals or whatever it might be. And the reason why that's becoming increasingly difficult to see is because the AI is getting increasingly better at recognising those images, and successfully completing the CAPTCHA. So it's an arms race.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Make the web accessible
• How tech can promote diversity in the workplace
• Uber launches fleet of wheelchair-accessible cars in London
• Lack of diversity in tech sees skills go to waste, argue MPs
• Why tech can’t close the diversity gap
• How to give your business a voice
• Making the case for screenless content
• The IT Pro Podcast: When bots go bad
• Researcher breaks Google CAPTCHA using speech-to-text AI
• Computer vision – have you seen the light?
• TechShare Pro 2021 | AbilityNet
• TechShare Pro 365 | AbilityNet

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This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘Why digital accessibility is good for business’. To listen to the full episode, click here.

Adam Shepherd

Hi, I'm Adam shepherd.

Jane McCallion

And I'm Jane McCallion.

Adam

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast. This week we're talking about digital accessibility, and how organisations can use technology to make themselves more inclusive for people with disabilities.

Jane

Much attention has been paid over the past few years to making the workplace more welcoming for people from different racial backgrounds. But in the push for greater diversity, one group that should not be overlooked is people with disabilities. There's a lot more that can be done to make our workplace better suited to supporting disabled people. And assistive technology can play a major part in that effort.

Adam

Here to tell us more about the issue of digital accessibility and inclusive tech is Robin - Christopherson, head of digital inclusion at AbilityNet. Robin, thanks so much for joining us.

Robin Christopherson

Adam, Jane, thanks for having me on.

Jane

So, Robin, can you tell us a bit more about what digital accessibility is?

Robin

So digital, we all know what that bit is. Accessibility is making sure that all of your digital products and services are inclusive to people regardless of their particular impairment, I for one am blind for example. So I use a software called a screen reader, which is built into Mac and iOS, for example, I use a third party one on Windows called Jaws - job access with speech, if you're wondering why a screen reader has such a funny name. And it basically speaks everything out to me, who can't, you know, see anything at all. And it's driven from the keyboard because I can't see the arrow, the mouse pointer, either. So that's an example of where accessibility is so crucial, you know, your websites, your applications, for me, anyway, need to be speech friendly, and need to be able to be driven fully from the keyboard. But obviously, there are other disabilities other impairments, the full range of people with a motor vision, hearing, cognitive impairment, there are 13 million people in the UK with a registered disability. So that's one in five. But there are so many more that have an impairment. In fact, I would argue that we're all you know, different shapes and sizes, and maybe get eyestrain on a Friday afternoon, maybe have some wrist pain, maybe just choose to turn on that Immersive Reader in your browser and have the article spoken to you. For example, 60% of people who watch YouTube videos, have the captions turned on Google tell us. And that's not all because they've got a hearing impairment. So there are so many reasons why we would encourage people to play with the accessibility settings of their devices, and not just settle with the kind of vanilla out of the box experience. Because we're all different. So accessibility, yes, it's for disabled people. It's absolutely key for us to be able to engage in the digital world. And how important is that, you know, for all of us. So it can actually lock out people that have a significant need. But it will also help everybody who needs to have usability, needs to be able to do things in an extremely easy way. And because we have more extreme needs than people that don't have a disability, it actually makes those products extremely usable for everybody else. And I can go into that in a bit more detail later on.

Adam

So with that in mind, can you tell us a little bit about what abilitynet does?

Robin

AbilityNet, we're a technology and disability charity here in the UK. We have centres across the country. We deliver consultancy services to organisations who want to become compliant, it is a legal requirement, but also want to do the right thing and make sure that their services and products are as inclusive as possible. We also deliver free services to disabled individuals. We've got a network of 300 volunteers around the country who would normally be going into people's homes, hopefully that will resume at some point in the not too distant future. But we also have a free phone number. We've got an email inquiries team. So you know, we're about helping individuals get the access they need. There are loads of solutions out there, built into your devices, as I mentioned before, but also lots of specialist third party assist assistive technology, as it's called. And we do assessments for students in university, for employees in the workplace. So we're kind of both sides of the solution, making sure that the digital services that people access are inclusive, but also helping make sure that people with particular requirements have the right technology suite for you know, helping them get over any hurdles they may have, in using the technology to its best effect.

Jane

What can companies do to make their IT more accessible? I mean, I'm sure that some of us are familiar with things like the more upright mice for people who might have mobility issues in their hands, or, indeed, screen readers. But does it go a bit beyond that?

Robin

Absolutely. So the end user technologies, the more ergonomic mouse that you mentioned there, more ergonomic keyboards, making changes to your desktop, for example, to increase the text size, make the mouse pointer bigger, there are so many different adjustments that the end user can make, to make their access better. organisations on their part, need to follow certain rules when they are creating digital products. And the de facto world standard is called WCAG, many of your listeners I'm sure are, or at least have heard of WCAG - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, that's the current version. And the legal requirement is that they meet double-A level of compliance. So there's single-A, double-A and triple-A; triple-A is like the Rolls Royce. Double-A is where you need to be to stop hindering access for people with disabilities. So priority levels one, two, and three, if you comply just with the P1, the 'high-pri', the highest priority checkpoints, then it's like making sure that you provide a ramp up into a building for someone in a wheelchair. If you're not single-A compliant, then it's almost going to be a non starter for people who are using, you know, voice recognition or like myself needing to rely on speech output. Double-A is where they can get around all parts of the site, they can do things, everything's inclusive. Triple-A is like layering on additional features, like a style switcher, for example, so that with a single click someone with dyslexia can get a more dyslexia friendly colour scheme, you know, maybe a beige background, 120% font size, one and a half line spacing, that sort of thing, high contrast theme, etc. So but double-A, that middle point, that's the sweet spot, whereby you are no longer discriminating against people who have particular requirements. But as I mentioned before, that's actually going to make it easier for everybody, because you're making your products extremely usable. And the RNIB, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, here in the UK did some brilliant research, where they got a bunch of visually impaired people to look at a range of websites. And obviously, the sites that were accessible, were easier to use for them. But the actual, the most interesting part of that research was the control group of able bodied testers that had no disability or impairment, didn't do anything, you know, differently about accessing websites, the sites that were accessible, were also easier for them to use, on average 35% more quickly, they were able to complete the tasks. So you get this 35% usability bonus. And you know, every developer and designer, you know, they stress about how to optimise the UI and the UX and make it a really good experience. WCAG is a way of shortcuts to really massive leap in usability for every single user. So there are similar guidelines for iOS and Android. Both Apple and Google have published the accessibility guidelines for developing on those platforms. So the guidelines are out there. If you follow them, and make your products as inclusive as possible, then you're going to be legally compliant, you're going to be you know, doing the right thing to give access to as many people as possible. But you're also going to get, you know, a very significant uplift in performance for everybody. And I could go on and on; SEO is improved because you're exposing all of the right information. You know, if it's visible to me as a screen reader, then Google's going to be able to access it, proper labels on images, that sort of thing. So it's going to improve your search engine rankings. It's going to make the pages slimmer, it's going to make them more platform compatible. So if it speaks to me, then it's going to be more easily ported over to a voice first technology like smart speakers, etc. So I could go on and on.

Jane

I was gonna say you've actually, you have touched on a couple of times there, something I want to delve a little bit deeper into, which is, a lot of these technologies are stuff that I think everybody is starting to use in their everyday life. And I'm sure, I'm not the only person who yells at my phone to put on a timer or tells my smart speaker to do a thing. All of this is voice recognition which I don't even have to speak strangely to these things anymore. It can deal with a British accent, how are things just generally coming along better as these types of technology are used more broadly, anyway?

Robin

Absolutely so, the ways that disabled people have been using a PC and getting access to Windows, to the internet, etc, for decades now have now very much become mainstream. So yeah, voice first paradigm like yelling at Siri or the 'A lady', I'm not going to say a name because there's one right here. And having things spoken back to you in an intelligible way that doesn't leak out some HTML code or something, all of those things are absolutely central to this proliferation of platforms. Talking about what we use every day, the smartphone is obviously at the heart of a lot of what we do, and never leaves our side. And when it comes to accessing the services and the information that we used to on a PC, obviously, from an editorial point of view, you know, you need to cut in half the amount of verbiage, the length of text from a PC screen down to a mobile, and you need to be able to make your make sure that your sites are responsive, etc, you need to have a much more clean and distilled down interface, you know, you need to impose a lot more discipline on yourself when you're creating a UI for a much smaller screen. But actually, everyone that's using a mobile phone is in very real terms disabled on a daily basis, or at least impaired for reasons that it's not this controlled environment, when you had a PC, you know, you can get as big a monitor as you like, if the text is difficult to see, just bump it up a little bit, if the mouse is difficult to see, make it bigger. If the sun's on your monitor, draw the blinds etc. Get a nice ergonomic keyboard, nice ergonomic mouse, as we talked about before, it was a really controlled environment. Now, all of that's out of the window. With a mobile phone, the size of the screen is what it is, yes, they're getting bigger, but they're also getting smaller these days.

Small sheet of shiny glass, on a sunny day, when you're out and about, you have exactly the same requirements as someone with a vision impairment does 24-7, regardless of you know how big they make their screen, those accessibility guidelines that I talked about to make sure that you've got sufficiently contrasting colours, a decent default font size and style choice, etc. All of those will help people across platform who have got a vision impairment, but they're absolutely going to help that person with their mobile phone out and about who doesn't have any impairment whatsoever. Similarly, using your phone one handed, you know you're holding in one hand, you're using your thumb on the screen to tap on things that gives you a motor or dexterity impairment just like somebody does using a mouse with a tremor, for example, on a desktop browser. So you have the same requirements and you will benefit from the same accessibility guideline. So for people that are interested 44 by 44px is the minimum tappable element size, good separation, so you don't accidentally get the wrong one. My wife is forever going back to the start of an episode or programme in iPlayer, because the start button is right, you know that kind of go back to start button is right next to the pause button. So you know there's some basics in UI, that if they follow the guidelines, then that wouldn't be that close. And then everyone would benefit from that. I mentioned before about YouTube, most people have captions turned on. And yeah, whilst that's going to help people that have a hearing impairment, it's also going to help people in a noisy cafe or in a noisy train or whatever it might be. And so to make sure that captions are available, as per the accessibility guidelines, we'll help everybody who wants to turn those on. For preference reasons. I could go on and on, you know, Uber, that app needs to be supremely usable, to help people who need to order an Uber after a good night out. And they've had a few. And that's exactly the same, that extreme usability for someone with a cognitive impairment, who wants to try and book an Uber without support, we don't always have, you know, someone on hand to help us, particularly with home working, you know, as a blind person, I would often turn around and ask a colleague, oh can I borrow your eyes? You know, this thing isn't accessible, it's not talking to me. So, yeah, there are so many overlaps, I could go on and on. But the main message is that accessibility is actually no longer for disabled people. If you think about the numbers, I mentioned that, you know, one in five definitely need it. But four in five will benefit from it. So you know, if you just look at the numbers, accessibility is actually no longer for us. Because we're only a fifth of that audience, it's actually for everybody. So, if you're on the fence, if you've, you know, always known about accessibility, but you haven't quite got round to it, or you haven't got the level of support within your organisation that will free up the necessary resources and time etc, to be able to get people to get up to speed on it, retool, if needs be, get the right documentation in place, it's really important to make sure that, you know, you really champion it within your organisation because this is worthwhile. This is really, really important. And I would argue, in this mobile first world, and we know it is because 56% of traffic to any given website, you know, on average is from mobile on a daily basis. So it is a mobile first world we're living in, it's really important to make sure that it's sufficiently championed and prioritised within an organisation.

Adam

And I think it's really interesting, the point you raised about the difference between mobile and desktop usage. I think that's a really interesting kind of comparison. If you'll forgive the slightly trite example, anyone that's tried to use a desktop formatted website or application on a mobile device probably has kind of some small idea of how difficult it is for people kind of with various impairments to use kind of normal websites and applications even even on desktop, which kind of hopefully should help kind of bring across how you know how necessary and how impactful these technologies can be?

Robin

Absolutely, certainly, I know that colleagues that don't have an impairment do struggle with websites and applications, I'm pretty sure that's because of the things that you talked about, you know, unresponsive on a desktop, on a mobile phone, and you have to do horizontal scrolling, etc, etc. So, but for me, as a blind person, and people with, you know, other disabilities, it can be an absolute showstopper. So you know, it's a difference between being able to engage in the digital world, which we know is so important, and being locked out, not being able to book that airline ticket, not being able to bank online, etc. And so many organisations are closing their phone channels, the alternative channel to be able to do things via human. So it's really, really important that we make sure that everybody kind of jumps on there, you know, joins the party and does things in an inclusive way. It is a journey, no organisation is going to be fully compliant, going forward, because there is a lot to do and sites are very agile and you know, fast moving, etc. We have a brilliant yearly conference called TechSharePro, it's the biggest conference concerning accessibility and digital inclusion in Europe - I think the world, actually. Over 500 organisations come together. It's obviously been online recently, but we discuss in great depth all of the areas that we've touched upon here, and in particular, how to embed accessibility within your organisation and what best practice looks like across different sectors, different organisations of different sizes, Microsoft, Google, all of the organisations are there, they are key sponsors etc. So, there are so many organisations prioritising this and in fact, getting real brand value out of being vocal about being inclusive and prioritising accessibility, that yeah, we would strongly recommend people having a look at that - TechSharePro.com - and seeing if they're able to join, obviously, it's online again this year. But the timing's right, you know, you can start having a look at how accessibility can be a bigger part of what you do each day. And, you know, jump on TechSharePro, and really immerse yourselves in some brilliant sessions, different work streams about an inclusive workplace, about accessibility leadership within an organisation, about the business advantage, there are so many different themes and streams. And we also have a new initiative called TechSharePro 365, which is a year round stream of information via email newsletter, a series of webinars and podcasts, and various other fact sheets, etc, that will be pushed to people who want to get up to speed on what inclusive design looks like. So if you again, subscribe going to TechSharePro.com, to 365, then we will help you by providing information to you about how you can, you know, get on that journey and make sure that your products are fit for purpose, I would say, in this mobile first world.

Jane

And we will of course include links to all of that in the show notes as well as our very own episode, 'when bots go bad', in which Adam and I share our own thoughts on the disappearance of phone lines in favour of bots when it comes to customer service.

Adam

But that aspect of kind of accessibility to the whole kind of chatbot versus, you know, human telephone operator question isn't something that I'd particularly taken into account, kind of as, as part of that conversation. And I suspect there's a lot of organisations that similarly haven't kind of, haven't incorporated that into their thinking,

Robin

We should talk about AI. Because AI plays such a massive part in accessibility. You know, machine learning, let's say, is at the heart of voice recognition. It's at the heart of object recognition, which I use all the time, I use an app on my phone to snap something, to get information about what's around me, obviously, to scan in printed documentation, etc. iOS has a built in screen recognition feature where I can get a description of people's I don't know social media profile pictures or other things that they post on there, which otherwise weren't given alternative text. So AI is massively important. But it also has this darker side, where bots driven by machine learning are, for example, trying to submit forms. And that's why you have the evil that is CAPTCHA having to exist, so something like Google's I'm not a robot tick box only works if you're not a keyboard user, which I am. Because that region on a web page just around that tick box and message is monitored for mouse movement towards the checkbox. It doesn't monitor mouse movement across the rest of the site, because that would be far too creepy. But around that area, Google is allowed to monitor your mouse movement towards that tick box. And if it's sufficiently wobbly...

Adam

Is that how that works?

Robin

Yeah.

Jane

I did wonder.

Robin

If you tab to it and hit the spacebar, which is what I would do, then invariably, not always, but actually most of the time, you will get the other CAPTCHA challenge coming up, which is increasingly obscured pictures of, you know, traffic signals or whatever it might be. And the reason why that's becoming increasingly difficult to see is because the AI is getting increasingly better at recognising those images, and successfully completing the CAPTCHA. So it's an arms race. And the people that are losing out are, well everyone really, because it's often very difficult for someone with no vision impairment to successfully complete that CAPTCHA, because the AI is getting better and better. But for someone like myself, those images can't have alternative text, by definition, otherwise, it would be machine readable. So there's a catch 22 there. So I have to go for the audio CAPTCHA - alternative which I don't know if you've ever listened to. Sometimes it's not too bad; reCAPTCHA from Google isn't too bad, the audio challenge, but often they are supremely garbled. And the reason why these are getting worse and worse as well is the same one, because AI is getting increasingly better at recognising speech, you know, in the context of background noise. So this is an arms race to the bottom. And it's one example where AI is kind of working against inclusion. So if we can try and avoid that, and I would definitely recommend a service like textcaptcha.com, which on relatively low trafficked sites, I think the first 2,000 API calls a day are free. And textCAPTCHA just gives you logic challenges that are text based, so they're machine readable, I can, you know, answer them. Which of these is not a fruit or something, which, surprisingly, isn't easily cracked or readily cracked by AI just yet. And you might be thinking, well, what about people with a learning difficulty? that challeng, you know, that text based logic question might be too challenging for them, I would argue that if they find that too challenging, then they're probably not going to be surfing solo. And they're almost certainly not going to be completing the sort of form that you would find this sort of CAPTCHA challenge on. So yeah, there's lots of nuances to what accessible design looks like in practice. Don't worry about navigating your way through and trying to work things out for yourself. Look at the guidelines, they're very well described. There's lots of technical compliance techniques that are listed in them. So it's just a question of feeling passionate enough, after having listened to today's podcast, to go away and start having a, having a play. And, you know, if you're finding it challenging to build into your day to day job, you know, time constraints, etc, escalate it. It's important enough, it's a legal requirement. And with legislation, like the public sector bodies accessibility regulations, if you are a local authority, central government organisation, university, etc. Or if you sell your services to the public sector, or to Europe, because this is something that came from European legislation, then you absolutely need to be very, very aware, and prioritise it to, you know, the extent that you, you have the time to get to grips with it. Because for the first time ever here in the UK, the government is proactively monitoring websites reporting and fining on them because of these public sector regulations that came into effect a couple of years ago. So yeah, there's loads of reasons to start embracing inclusive design, and I can't think of any reasons not to.

Adam

So Robin, where can organisations go to find out more about how to enact some of these changes and how to improve their digital accessibility?

Robin

Great. Well, yes, whether you are wanting to become more familiar with accessibility and how to do it within your organisation. Or if you're someone who wants to know about how you can use technology to help you, whether it's about wrist pain, or eyestrain on a Friday afternoon, we can help with both sides of the story. So if you go to abilitynet.org.uk, or you can give us a call, 0800 04 876 42 or email inquiries@abilitynet.org.uk.

Adam

And we'll put both of those in the show notes for this episode. Unfortunately, however, that's all we've got time for this week. Our thanks once again to Robin from AbilityNet for joining us.

Robin

Thank you.

Jane

You can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website www.itpro.com.

Adam

You can also follow us on Twitter @ITPro, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

Jane

Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts to never miss an episode. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review. We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of it. But until then, goodbye.

Adam

Bye.

Ask any tech company, and they’ll tell you that diversity is a major priority for them. Nevertheless, when it comes to technical teams, there are still many women who find themselves becoming the first female employee to join a division full of men.

This week, we’re speaking to Cloudera senior solutions engineer Ana Gillan about her experience as the first woman in Europe to join one of the company’s technical teams. We discuss what it’s like to be a trailblazer, the importance of self-confidence, and why ping-pong tables and free beer may actually be hurting your company’s diversity efforts.

Footnotes

• Seven ways to retain your female tech talent
• 10 best free coding boot camps
• How to confidently change careers to IT
• Taking the road less travelled to a career in IT
• What are your tech skills worth?
• How to get into the tech industry
• IT Pro Panel: The truth about talent
• Is remote working killing company culture?
• How do we fix security's toxic culture?
• Why you should prioritise employee experience
• The IT Pro Podcast: Why the tech skills gap doesn’t exist
• Mind over matter: Why work is more than work
• What is Hadoop?
• How to leverage Hadoop in the analytic data pipeline
• Five steps to big data project success
• The 8 best data science boot camps
• How to become a data scientist
• Culture Club: Creating a firm employees love
• Data scientist jobs: Where does the big data talent gap lie?
• Why do you need a good data team?
• IT hiring shows resilience in face of rising unemployment
• What should I be looking for when hiring a developer?
• The softer skills CIOs will need to adopt for the future
• How to become a T-shaped employee
• UK gov backs female entrepreneurs with £50k cash injection

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Aberystwyth University boasts the most gender diverse computer sciences teaching staff in the country with women representing a third of academics, although this may not be enough to encourage younger women into the field.

The Welsh university is followed by the University of St Andrews, where 33.1% of its computer sciences staff are women, and King’s College London (KCL), where women represent 31.9% of its academics.

This is according to an analysis of the 25 top computer science departments in the UK, with researchers from CrowdStrike also finding a correlation between gender diversity and quality of the computer sciences department. Of the departments with the highest gender diversity, 40% were in the top ten.

“It’s encouraging to see universities in the UK increasing female role models in the Computer Sciences to inspire the next generation and help to address the growing skills gap in technology disciplines,” said CrowdStrike’s chief human resources officer, JC Herrera.

“Alongside the initiatives being delivered in higher education to improve female representation in STEM, the private sector must play a pivotal role too by partnering with trailblazing organisations and charities, as well as offering scholarships and innovative apprenticeship schemes. If we want to continue driving our industry forward, we must address these inequities.”

The analysis was inspired by recent research that showed women are 52% more likely to consider a career in a STEM subject if inspired by a female role model. This lack of gender diversity in the teaching staff at institutions, therefore, is fuelling a vicious cycle that discourages women.

Female students are less likely to study computer sciences at a higher level or pursue a career in the field unless they can identify with a role model. This means fewer academics in the field corresponds with a reduced likelihood that female students will pursue computer science-related careers and, in turn, inspire others to follow suit.

Despite the slight encouragement these figures represent, a paltry 13% of students studying computer science-related courses in the UK are women, according to UCAS figures. Research from late 2019 also found the proportion of women in tech roles was flatlining.

By contrast, there are encouraging signs in secondary education where figures last year showed more female students in the UK had chosen to take the Computing A-level than ever before. Overall entries for the course rose by 12% this year, with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT finding roughly 21,000 had enrolled through UCAS.

While women still only comprised a fractional 15% of overall entries, more than a third of women, 34%, achieved an A or A* versus 26% of men.

This article originally appeared in Issue 11 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

Why does the tech sector have such a bad reputation when diversity is considered? The lack of women in tech has been in constant debate for decades, but diversity means much more than only gender. From disability to age and ethnic groups, diversity is multifaceted and by not acting to include all groups in their business, organisations in the tech sector are losing out on massive untapped potential that they should actively be embracing.

Businesses in the tech sector that want to innovate and thrive must pay close attention to the make-up of their workforces. In 2015, McKinsey stated that companies that have high levels of gender diversity outperform their competitors by 15% and companies with high levels of ethnic diversity, delivering 35% higher performance. Five years on, has the tech industry improved its record?

According to the latest survey from BIMA (British Interactive Media Association), which asked 3,000 people to explore their experience of diversity as members of the UK technology community, 35% of women feel their gender has negatively affected their career progression. Overall, 14% of all respondents believe their ethnicity has negatively affected their career progression, with nearly a third (32%) of people of Asian and South East Asian descent and 40% of people from an Afro-Caribbean and mixed heritage background saying they have experienced negative discrimination as a result of their ethnicity. 24% of neurodivergent people, meanwhile, feel their condition has negatively affected their career.

Speaking to IT Pro, Claire McCartney, senior resourcing and inclusion adviser at the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) says: “Most employers need to do more to improve the diversity of their new hires. CIPD and Omni research conducted earlier on this year found that less than a quarter (23%) of employers are going beyond basic legislation relating to protected characteristics when it comes to recruitment and selection processes.”

McCartney concludes: “We also found that a quarter (24%) of employers do nothing to improve diversity at board level, where the problem is the most acute. Overall, organisations need to be adding more rigour, consistency and challenge into every aspect of their recruitment and selection processes; they need to be taking a more strategic approach.”

Nevertheless, some companies are making positive changes. Nimmi Patel, policy manager for skills, talent and diversity at techUK explains: “Companies in the industry that are doing great things include Accenture, Intel, Atos, BAE Systems, BT, Microsoft, FDM and Fujitsu. I think there is some really good work being done across the sector, both by the large multinationals but also by the smaller companies who are really looking inwardly at themselves and working out what they can do to improve their own diversity.

“The Tech Talent Charter released its second annual benchmarking report this January and found that gender representation was better in micro-organisations than in larger companies, with 42% female staff in technical roles in micro organisations compared to 24% in large companies within its signatories. There are lessons to be learned from the SMBs.”

Often smaller businesses and organisations are more enlightened and able to move at speed to make the changes necessary to become more inclusive and diverse. Larger businesses are making positive moves, but clearly need to accelerate this process to deliver real tangible change.

Levelling the playing field

Businesses that realise a diverse workforce is the key to commercial success will be the leaders in their sectors. In tech, however, it seems that message is still struggling to get through; according to the September 2020 CIO report from KPMG/Harvey Nash, only 10% of tech leaders in the UK are female. “The scarcity of female technology leaders is a symptom of wider problems with how leaders are selected, promoted and mentored,” the report states.

Bev White, CEO of Harvey Nash Group, tells IT Pro: “Crucially we need to make the sector more attractive to women, as there are few industries that offer a more creative, better paid, and interesting career path, yet the message isn’t getting out there. Part of the problem is that there are so few women studying technology-related degrees. For instance, UCAS (the admissions body for higher education) reports that women make up just 13% of students studying computer science and gaming related courses in the UK. In stark contrast, around half of people studying for accountancy qualifications are women.”

Pay has often been a key metric when illustrating the disparity between men and women, which the latest research from Hired concludes is 4% in the tech industry, averaging out at a disparity of £3,000. Looking at LGBTQIA+ women specifically, they are twice as likely to feel discriminated against as LGBTQIA+ men.

Tech businesses often state they want to do more to improve the level of diversity across their organisations. What are the practical changes that need to take place for those ambitions to become a reality?

“Make diversity a part of your corporate culture,” says Perrine Farque, a multi-award-winning diversity and inclusion expert and judge at the Diversity in Tech Awards. “Hiring diverse talents starts before searching for candidates and collecting CVs. If you don’t have the fundamentals in place in your organisation, your efforts will fail. Take a moment to revisit your company culture before starting a new candidate search.”

How the tech sector is perceived as a career choice is also a significant factor when diversity is considered. Simeon Quarrie, founder and CEO at VIVIDA, which creates immersive training experience for cybersecurity, explains: “At the moment, the tech industry doesn’t reflect the society it was built to serve. Most people are drawn to industries where they can see people like them excelling in them. You see someone like you doing well in an industry and are inspired to follow in their footsteps. My hope is that initiatives like Women in Tech are showing young girls that a career in tech is viable.”

Quarrie adds: “At the moment, the tech industry is struggling to find its voice and show off how broad a career in ‘tech’ can be, which is a big problem as talented people from a range of disciplines aren’t even considering tech to be a viable option. However, there is space for all in the industry – whether you are a female black graphic designer or a white male computer engineer – but at the moment that message isn’t getting through.”

The future of change

Is the tech sector about to make revolutionary changes to improve its diversity record? Perhaps not, but certainly it’s adopting a higher level of awareness, hopefully backed by practical actions and initiatives, to tap into what is clearly a hugely underused resource.

Amy Brachio, EY global business consulting leader, says: "There are certainly opportunities for women, ethnic groups and [neurodiverse people] to join the tech sector, but I think the main thing that might make people think twice about joining is the lack of visible role models. Not seeing someone from your own diversity group could be a barrier, but it's certainly one that can be overcome. Technology companies need to get better at shining a spotlight on the professionals who are diverse and successful.

“Businesses should be purposeful in bringing in diverse candidates. Don’t shy away from having those conversations and be honest. If there is a lack of diversity in the workforce, challenge yourself and those around you to address the problem. Ultimately the goal for any successful company is to create an environment where people from any background can feel a sense of belonging. That is only achieved in being purposeful with diversity.”

Making the required changes within your business is also the advice the Harvey Nash Group’s Bev White gives: “At the core of inclusion lies creating the right culture throughout tech businesses. I like to ask people ‘Do you have a daughter, a niece, a granddaughter? How do you want the workplace to be for them?’ This usually gets people thinking and looking at it through a different lens.

“For leaders and managers in tech, our role is to do everything we can to facilitate the creation of inclusive and open workplaces. It’s about supporting, mentoring and sometimes nudging people in our teams to advance, develop and progress. People usually have far more potential than they think they do – it’s about helping them unlock that, whoever they are.”

This article originally appeared in Issue 11 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

We’ve seen no shortage of scandals when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). In just the past few months, we’ve seen Microsoft’s robo-journalists illustrate an article about racism with an image of the wrong band member of Little Mix, the UK government’s A-Level algorithm penalising students based on the performance of past students, and, most recently, Twitter’s AI-powered image-cropping tool appearing to favour white faces over black faces.

However, AI bias isn’t an issue limited to big-name companies and high-profile scandals. A recent report from Capgemini that surveyed 800 organisations and 2,900 consumers has revealed 90% of organisations are aware of at least one instance where an AI system had resulted in ethical issues for their business.

What’s more, the findings show that while two-thirds (68%) of consumers expect AI models to be fair and free of bias, only 53% of businesses have a leader who is responsible for ethics of AI systems, such as a chief ethics officer. Even fewer – just 46% – have the ethical implications of their AI systems independently audited.

It’s clear that, with AI becoming embedded in all aspects of our life, companies need to do more to ensure their systems are free of bias and even find ways to use the technology to help mitigate harmful biases in order to make fairer business decisions.

Team building

So how do we do that? It starts by building a diverse team, something the industry is still failing to do; according to research published by the AI Now Institute, 80% of AI professors are men, and only 15% of AI researchers at Facebook and 10% of AI researchers at Google are women.

Jen Rodvold, head of digital ethics and tech for good at Sopra Steria, comments: “Diversity is key not only to driving a successful AI strategy, but essential to a business’ bottom line. A diverse workforce will offer a range of different perspectives, flag any bias involved in the development process and help to interrogate wider organisational processes that could be perpetuating bias and impacting the way your technology is developed in unforeseen ways.”

This is a viewpoint shared by Andrew Grant, senior product director for AI at Imagination Technologies, who says that ensuring a diverse set of data scientists is critical to developing ethical AI.

“To ensure best practice when establishing data sets for the training of an AI, there firstly needs to be a diverse set of data scientists collecting and analysing the data. No one section of training an AI should be overseen by an individual, by cross-checking work, individual bias can be much more effectively removed,” he says.

Diversify your data

Diverse datasets are also required; by training machine learning models on historic data – such as data that shows men are more commonly promoted to senior roles, or that most technology industry workers are white – encoding biases into AI is nearly inescapable.

Caryn Tan, responsible AI manager at Accenture, tells IT Pro: “Organisations building and designing AI must remember that it’s limited by the information it is fed. An algorithm can't tell when something is unfair, it just picks up historical patterns. When we don’t take steps to mitigate this it can result in bad feedback loops that can trap people based on their origins, history or even a stereotype. So organisations must take proactive steps to address potential bias before it has the chance to manifest.”

Anna Brailsford, CEO at Code First Girls, adds that in order to ensure models are being trained using a diverse data set, it’s critical that “diversity and inclusion are a part of the foundation of business decision-making”.

“In the tech industry, it’s been well documented that machine learning and AI systems are inherently biased – a result of the data set used to train their intelligence,” she tells IT Pro. “Researchers at Harvard have found that companies are using flawed historical data sets to train their AI for recruitment purposes; meaning women and people of colour are being discriminated against before they’ve even made it to the interview.

“A top-down approach isn't the answer and could potentially further entrench existing AI bias. Instead, businesses need to treat diversity and inclusion as an ongoing learning process.”

Transparency is key

Of course, businesses must also consider AI guidelines and transparency, particularly in the face of increased regulatory scrutiny. The European Commission, for example, has issued guidelines on the key ethical principles that should be used for designing AI applications, while the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in early 2020 called for “transparent AI”.

The latter stated that when an AI-enabled system makes an adverse decision, such as declining an application for a credit card, then the organisation should show the affected consumer the key data points used in arriving at the decision and give them the right to change any incorrect information.

Tom Winstanley, VP of new ventures and innovation at NTT DATA UK, comments: “As AI scales up across the economy, it is essential that businesses have robust, ethical standards in place, enshrining AI guidelines at the heart of their operations.

“Transparency is critical: companies cannot rely on a ‘black-box’ dataset and should be open about how their AI is trained and what standards they have in place to ensure it is used responsibly. It is for this reason that NTT DATA publicly announced its own AI ethics guidelines last year.”

Rodvold adds: “Ensuring transparency of your technology, alongside strong diversity practices, will work towards eliminating bias and ensure you build public trust. A holistic Digital Ethics approach, which considers the intersection of diversity, transparency, privacy, and safety in the development of AI, will ensure you take customers on your AI journey and deliver effective, sustainable technology.”

With AI becoming increasingly ubiquitous in all walks of life and the problem of built-in bias in these systems becoming well-documented, it’s key that businesses act now to ensure their software and processes are free of bias. Thankfully, while it’s adoption has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s still early enough to do something about it.

That means the future of AI can still be shaped, for the better, through strategic diversity efforts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unexpectedly sped up digital transformation processes already underway across all kinds of companies in multiple industries, but it’s also delivering unforeseen changes in the way senior executives such as CIOs must act in their day-to-day roles.

Outdated boardroom and leadership styles are being stripped away amid the rise in remote working from home, and traditional and incumbent ways of doing things are fast being ripped up so businesses and their employees can survive, and hopefully still thrive, despite this uncertainty.

For the CIO of right now, and of tomorrow, this has signalled a major rethink on how to adapt their job description from a core focus on information technology and computer systems to also including a broader range of softer skills that can bring more humanity to their digitally-led enterprise responsibilities.

So what are these softer skills and how are things already changing?

According to research for the Executive MBA Council (EMBAC) report A New Way of Learning and Working, employers are in agreement that new leadership models are emerging with stronger roots in emotional intelligence and agility as well as conscious, continuous learning.

Tim Sadler, CEO at security company Tessian, suggests empathy should be a top priority. Citing his company's own research on 2020's new hybrid working models, which showed a third of IT leaders are worried about their teams being stretched too far in terms of time and resource, he says: "CIOs need to be empathetic to the rising pressures that remote working arrangements have on IT teams in order to keep them motivated and retain talent.

"The good news is that a high percentage already demonstrate these soft skills; half ranked employee wellbeing as their top concern should workforces continue working remotely."

CIOs must examine their own leadership style

Roy Aston, of Paysafe, is one CIO already reconsidering what the role means and he believes it’s now much more important to consider your "leadership shadow".

He explains: "I have come to learn that your ability to influence and have impact as a leader is dependent on the relationships you have built with the people you work closely alongside. In our current remote working environment, this has meant I'm trying to be even more aware of my mood or how I come across in virtual meetings and the tone of my emails.

"In this increasingly digital environment, it has become even more important not to hide behind a screen dealing with the transactional elements of the role, but to take time to interact (digitally), with a genuine authentic interest in people."

For Kais Bouchiba, global artificial intelligence and machine learning strategist at MSC Software, one key change for CIOs will be to enhance their listening skills. He says this will enable them to hear and recognise valuable input from the "new guard" of employees and use bottom-up knowledge in their strategy.

Bouchiba says: "This year has seen so much of the workforce working from home or furloughed, and many have taken this opportunity to educate themselves on tools like AI and digital twins, ensuring it is now more important than ever for CIOs to learn how to listen to their employees and take their new, diversified skills onboard.

"These younger professionals are coming into the industry with fresh perspectives and often superior experience in new approaches such as machine learning (ML) and data analytics, so to fully exploit the potential of these powerful tools it is imperative the C-suite gets everyone on board and contributing. This means focusing on interdisciplinary collaboration and bringing together a diversity of perspectives."

Eva Murray, tech evangelist at database company Exasol, believes storytelling could also become a key soft skill, due to the amount of data companies are set to produce – and analyse – through AI and machine learning.

She says: "Data and analytics are now the centrepiece of every organisation. CIOs and CDOs must identify how data can help and demonstrate value quickly by becoming a storyteller to sell their insights internally. A story makes the benefits of data clear for those who may be turned off by hard statistics."

CIOs recognise the need for change

According to Lily Haake, head of CIO Practice at global technology recruiter Harvey Nash, CIOs are switching their focus. For the first time in the history of its CIO Survey with KMPG, "strong culture and leadership" was cited as the most important factor in attracting and retaining key technology talent by the 4,000+ people it spoke to.

She says: "This is now even more important than 'good remuneration', which is remarkable, but perhaps unsurprising. CIOs now understand that having a strong employee value proposition is vital if they want an engaged, productive and creative workforce."

Haake suggests technology leaders must not neglect the sense of "belonging and purpose" needed in today's successful working environment, adding: "The credentials of a great CIO now go far beyond just a strong technical grounding and a few decades of leadership experience. The ownership of technology is becoming increasingly distributed throughout an organisation, so the CIO will need to work in partnership with their peers in marketing, finance and operations in order to get the best value from technology. Adaptability is also key in this new, fast-moving world – a strong CIO can fail fast and learn from their mistakes.

"Empathy and openness are critical, as well as an appreciation for diversity of thought. Data from this year's CIO Survey confirms more diverse tech teams outperform on a whole range of success measures, such as 'trust and collaboration' and 'ability to innovate'. CIOs who cultivate a truly diverse and inclusive organisation will find themselves ahead of the pack."

Such diversity of thought will rightly be crucial for those CIOs focused on rolling out AI and machine learning initiatives, in order to prevent inherent biases being programmed in.

But change only comes when there is a recognised desire for it and Cliff Green, director of consultancy firm Harmonic, believes being fully cognizant of the shift is everything.

He says: "The skills needed today are, in many ways, less rooted in the technical side of things. As the role of the CIO has expanded, from integration only to business enabler, so too have the skills required. Above all else, the CIO of today needs a total awareness of their business and the direction of that business, and not just a focus on their technological niche.

"If you combine project management skills with a great nose for business direction, you'll be a CIO that can effectively react to change and make sure your organisation is prepared for the future."

Design thinking is a long established principle in business and beyond. Organisations that take a design thinking approach are focused on end users – existing or potential – and develop their products or services with an end user perspective right from the outset. Organisations with a diverse workforce have a much better chance of taking a design thinking approach to its full potential.

Why does design thinking matter to tech firms?

Tech firms, by their very nature, are innovators. No tech firm can thrive by standing still. Existing products and services must be updated at regular intervals, new products and services must be brought onto the market.

According to Ileana Stigliani, an associate professor of design and innovation at Imperial College Business School who teaches part of the Digital Transformation Strategy Executive Education programme, design thinking is the key to outperforming competition. “Nowadays, the success of tech companies depends on their ability to use technology to address unmet users’ needs,” she explains.

In the Executive Education Programme on Digital Transformation at Imperial, this approach is called “using design thinking to lead from the front end” she says.

“The design of successful digital solutions starts with a deep understanding of users’ needs and behaviours – the front end – rather than being pushed to the market from the back end of the organisation.”

Why a diverse workforce is crucial

To get the best from taking a design thinking approach firms should have a diverse workforce. If a firm is looking at product or service development from the point of view of its end-users, it needs to be able to think like them, analyse, plan and be a critical friend to itself like them. As Perrine Farque, a diversity and inclusion speaker and consultant tells IT Pro: “Diverse teams create more innovative solutions, and innovations are what tech companies need to survive”. She points to a 2018 study by BCG that found that companies with above-average diversity have greater “innovation revenue”, meaning they produce a greater proportion of revenue from new products and services than organisations that are less diverse.

Stigliani adds that “a design thinking team should be a multi-disciplinary team consisting of a mix of specialisations, personalities, cultural backgrounds, and so on, where team members can cover each other’s blind spots, minimise biases, challenge assumptions and avoid groupthink”.

Innovation and design thinking go hand in hand

Tech firms that innovate and find new opportunities in the market that have not been spotted before can reap great rewards. Think of the first tablet computer, something that many of us now take for granted but was a complete novelty when it first appeared.

Firms that don’t take a design thinking approach can find themselves just working to please the mainstream. Stigliani points out that this results in missed opportunities, whereas design thinking really helps with innovation. Working just to meet the needs of mainstream users, she says, results in “overlooking areas where the real opportunities for innovation and business growth lie – at the margins of markets. Engaging with extreme users, whose behaviours and needs deviate from the norm, is not only good for business, as they represent under-served market segments, but for creativity too – rarely do average users inspire ground-breaking innovations.”

The flip side of failing to take a design thinking approach is potentially dark for tech firms. According to Stigliani, the most serious consequence of not taking a design thinking approach to product innovation is extinction. “Being able to innovate is a matter of survival,” she explains. “If tech companies don’t disrupt themselves by transforming the way they approach and solve problems, they will be disrupted.”

Take steps in the right direction

Even if the market leaders understand and use the principles, a design thinking approach taken without a diverse workforce might not come easily to all tech firms. Stigliani suggests firms should ask themselves three fundamental questions: “Are we willing to take risks and tackle problems the solutions of which cannot be found in past experiences and cannot be proven by data? Are we open to experimenting and using possible failures as learning opportunities? Do we value different perspectives and inclusive design?” Answering yes to these questions is, she said, “the first step towards becoming design-driven”.

Farque puts even more emphasis on increasing diversity, which is necessary for design thinking to realise its potential, saying that firms should set diversity goals and tie these to monetary compensations. “Goals drive behaviour [and] monetary goals drive behaviour faster,” she says. “If you are committed to diversity and inclusion, you must set goals for your leadership team that are tied to monetary bonuses. Having worked with numerous tech organisations and had countless conversations on diversity and inclusion, I have witnessed that setting diversity goals that are financially rewarded is the only route to success.”

It was only a few months ago that tech giants stood side by side to condemn in-built racial bias in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly facial recognition. Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon were lauded for their decision to halt or refuse sales of controversial facial recognition software to US police departments, a move considered timely and indicative of a wider movement to clamp down on racial discrimination following the death of George Floyd.

So it’s shocking to hear that Google, a company that once championed the idea of reining in facial recognition technology, has reportedly decided to fire the very person who helped shape the company’s AI ethics.

Timnit Gebru, a Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory alumna, is among the most acclaimed AI researchers in the world and, as the technical co-lead of its Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team, has contributed enormously to Google’s stance on the ethical use of the technology. After all, she is the co-author, along with Joy Buolamwini, of a revolutionary paper that highlighted the discriminatory nature of machine learning algorithms. It was this very research that contributed to Google’s 2018 decision to stop selling general-purpose AI-driven facial recognition technology.

Almost two years to the day later, Google has now decided to unceremoniously cut ties with Gebru.

According to Gebru, the company made the decision to dismiss her after she sent an email to her colleagues about the company’s decision to retract one of her research papers. This came just days after the tech giant was accused of illegally blocking staff from sharing work grievances across a number of its internal communication services.

What’s most shocking is that, ultimately, the disagreement between Gebru and her superiors seems to stem from her actions of “advocating for underrepresented people” – the very thing she was hired to do. Instead of taking the opportunity to listen and negotiate with one of their leading employees, Google reportedly decided to cut Gebru off her corporate account – a crystal clear message that she had been terminated with immediate effect.

This treatment would be seen as appalling in any situation, regardless of the employee’s position or standing. However, it’s hideous that a black female employee who has contributed so much to Google’s social and racial awareness efforts is the target. On top of that, the company has had no qualms in the past about capitalising on Gebru’s expertise, as well as her race. As one fellow Google AI employee put it, the company was “quick to get rid of @timnitGebru after constantly parading her around as an example of how much they care about ethical AI”.

In an email to Google’s employees, AI lead Jeff Dean said the recent paper Gebru submitted “was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted”.

What might have started as a communication error has now turned into a massive error of judgement and, although the company might not see it this way just yet, it’s obvious that Google needs Gebru more than Gebru needs Google. It needs to feed on her research, ideas, and excellence.

The firing of Gebru comes at the end of a long year during which plenty of corporations made a lot of promises to address racism, restructure their internal policies – anything that would make them as blameless as possible in a climate where there’s growing social awareness of systemic racism.

Google needs to realise its employees are not pawns to be exchanged for “wokeness” points. If one tweet can sum up this situation best, it’s this:

The main image in this article is licensed from TechCrunch under Creative Commons license 2.0.

IT Pro contacted Google for comment for this story, but the company declined to provide a statement.

Our working lives were turned upside down in 2020 – in some cases, irrevocably. However, research shows that women are under additional stress during the pandemic, particularly within the confines of lockdown. A study this summer by King’s College London and Ipsos MORI suggests that women still bear the brunt of childcare duties during lockdown.

Women also reportedly feel more stress and anxiety than men during the lockdown, with US research indicating that the gender gap in mental health has widened significantly during the pandemic.

“Longer term, I think the mental health impact on women should not be ignored, particularly in those homes where women bear the brunt of the burden of home and school care,” Margaret Adam, AVP European tech ecosystems services, SMB/start-up and partnering ecosystems at IDC, tells IT Pro.

Women in the IT industry are no exception to this. “The IT industry is fast-moving and fast-changing, and this brings its own levels of stress, that combined with emotional and household care and duties can be overwhelming and, I believe, will take a toll,” she says.

How the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated underlying issues for women in business was one of the topics discussed at a recent women in technology event that coincided with the launch of Samsung Pioneers. This initiative, the company says, is a platform to champion women in tech and aims to bring together brands, industry and non-profits to share advice, guidance and advocate for change.

“In recent times, it’s been really challenging for us all. We know first-hand how we’re all struggling to meet this new normal,” professor Sally Eaves, senior policy advisor at Forbes Technology Council, said at the event.

Tess Smillie, VP of people at Samsung UK, Ireland & Europe HQ, said it was important for women to seek out others for support and offer their support in return. “There is so much value and power in shared experiences and learning through others. It can be as basic as having someone to talk with or to listen,” she said.

Existing and potential challenges facing women

The impact of COVID-19 on women in tech is unavoidably linked to discussion of progress made in gender equality, how to tackle unconscious bias, and the existing and potential challenges facing women in the industry.

When asked to share advice to help empower women within the tech industry, Jacqueline De Rojas, president of TechUK, noted that the greatest threat to diversity is “the belief that someone else will fix it”.

“It is therefore incumbent upon us to play our part – the smallest of actions, kindness and encouragement or piece of advice from those who’ve ‘gone before’ can make the biggest of differences,” she said.

“Collaborate with other women in tech, aim to become a job creator rather than a job seeker, mentor the next generation when you can and get involved in your local community to give insight on how accessible the world of tech can be,” added Hadeel Ayoub, founder and CTO of assistive technology company, BrightSign.

IDC’s Adam tells IT Pro it's important to be transparent about the challenges women are facing during the pandemic. “Try not to do it all, but to experiment with ways of working that enable you to stay on top of both home, family and work commitments,” she says.

“This is a chance for the industry to reset expectations on what is feasible. It’s likely that many companies will have headcount freezes and, in some cases, redundancies so the workload is likely to increase. It’s vital to try to find a way of working that doesn’t lead to burnout.”

Technology is part of the solution

On the flip side, one of the biggest takeaways from the event was that technology is also part of the solution, in that it allows both a remote and flexible approach to working.

“Women have been shouting about about flexible working for decades,” said Tanya Weller, director of Samsung Showcase, KX, at Samsung Electronics. “The pandemic has forced those small and medium businesses that perhaps have struggled – whether it’s been a trust issue or a technology setup issue – [to say] ‘we have to do this, there’s no other option’.”

Ultimately, said De Rojas, women need to champion and support one another in the current crisis, and into the future – and technology will continue to play a part in that.

“We’ve done a great job of embracing technology, and it has been fabulous for social connection. And I certainly have really leant on the sisterhood in tech when I just needed to reach out and have a chat. Or just things that you would normally have done with a human have been certainly enabled by technology. I would say that I’m a tech optimist, but frankly, I don’t know how we would have got through the pandemic without it.”

Tips for everyone to avoid burnout

• Prioritise your mental health and try to carve out time for self-care
• With video conferencing, calls can now be recorded. Instead of trying to attend every call, ask if you can listen back if required
• Try to keep some distance between work and home life, even if it’s as simple as short walk or run before or after work
• Keep calls to shorter durations, blocking time in calendar for work or personal time
• Be disciplined about the hours of work to ensure resiliency in the ‘next normal’ of work

Events in 2020 have highlighted and exacerbated inequalities in society – the increasing gender divide, systemic racism and the impact of a global pandemic on jobs and mental health; all under the spectre of a potential economic crisis. Knowing this, it would be all too easy for firms to deprioritise diversity and inclusion (D&I) as a matter to be revisited post crisis. But instead this year has served as a societal wakeup call.

“It’s time to enact long lasting change,” says Dawn Jones, director of policy and external partnerships at Intel. “D&I is as crucial now – if not more so – than ever before and it’s imperative that we don’t let it slip off the agenda. D&I can no longer be viewed as just a tick box exercise or a bolt-on enterprise initiative; it is a complex issue that requires continuous work and we all have a duty to change and improve current practises.”

It seems, however, that facilitating real change is easier said than done. According to PwC’s recent D&I survey, 79% of leadership engagement on D&I remains at a basic or emerging level, only 26% of organisations have D&I goals for leaders, only 17% have a C-Suite level diversity role in place and nearly 30% have no D&I leader at all. Meanwhile, the 2020 Parker Review Report has found that 69% of the FTSE 250 companies analysed have no ethnic diversity on their boards.

Take a deep dive into the tech sector, and the picture is even gloomier. 2017 research quoted in the UK government’s Digital Strategy estimated that 17% of tech roles were filled by women. Compare that with a 2019 report from WISE which put the number at 16%, and it becomes clear that we are heading in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, data from the Office of National Statistics’ 2019 Labour Force Survey point to a lack of progress in increasing both the representation of women and ethnically diverse tech workers in the sector over the past five years, with just 1% and 2% uplifts respectively.

According to Tauhidah Shakir, chief diversity officer at cloud-based payroll technology provider Paylocity, however, these numbers don’t tell the full picture. “There has been meaningful progress when it comes to the way people understand bias, discrimination and the way people think about D&I,” she says. “Ten years ago, the words ‘unconscious bias’ were only heard in academic circles, but now many organisations are training employees on this very topic. Similarly, organisations used to approach D&I from a compliance perspective to meet all requirements they were legally obligated to. Now, leaders understand that levelling up their D&I efforts is critical to attracting and retaining top talent while instilling a culture of care.”

Debbie Forster, CEO of UK-based non-profit organisation Tech Talent Charter, is also hopeful that things are starting to change. “With the widespread Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, companies can’t hide behind empty statements and we’re seeing more meaningful action,” she says. “At the same time, this has come up against the hugely damaging impact of COVID-19 which has disproportionately affected women and ethnic minorities. We are hopeful that businesses will continue to see diversity as a priority – research we carried out earlier this year suggested that 68% of business decision makers still consider diversity vital for their business success, despite the pandemic.”

Taking decisive action

In order to take action, then, it’s time for businesses to start focusing on how they can implement an effective diversity strategy, instead of why they should do so. “We are fed up with talking about the issue – we want organisations to commit to taking concrete actions to address it,” says Forster.

With that in mind, IT Pro asked a number of experts for their take on what makes an effective diversity strategy. Here’s what they said:

Focus on inclusivity first

“If you can focus on becoming a truly inclusive business first, then diversity will often follow,” explains Forster. “Too many organisations take a check-box approach where they think having ethnic minority team members, or an LGBTQ person (for example) on the board means they have no more work to do, but research shows that people from minority backgrounds experience discrimination at work every day. Focus on building a truly inclusive culture – and remember that inclusion is something you must do with people, not to them.”

Lead from the top

“Any initiative needs to be supported from the top down, so getting buy-in and commitment from the organisation is a critical first step,” says Lisa Roberts, senior director of human resources and D&I lead at US-based software company Deltek. “Over time, organisations should see movement in reaching their goals and in related metrics, and more importantly a mindset shift in employees.”

Improve hiring practices

“One of the most effective places for tech companies to start is looking at their incoming and outgoing talent,” says Shakir. “The rate at which they’re hiring and separating from employees of diverse groups gives them a sense of where their workforce is heading and lets leaders know where to focus efforts. From there, IT companies should work with their hiring managers and recruiters to ensure their job postings are reaching diverse candidate pools. Though not all candidates will self-identify all these different demographic categories, being intentional about the candidate pool is impactful and the best way to make real progress towards changing the diversity outlook for the tech industry.”

Improve education and awareness

Paylocity has incorporated diversity and unconscious bias training into its internal continued learning program and expects all employees take part. “Meanwhile, to heighten awareness around human rights and social justice issues, we host forums and dedicate episodes of our PCTY Talks podcast to discussing important topics like the Black Lives Matter movement,” explains Shakir.

Training is also a critical piece of the puzzle at Deltek. “We have D&I focused training not only for our leaders, but also for people managers and every employee at Deltek,” says Roberts. “We use resources from LinkedIn Learning – which are phenomenal – as well as professional workforce experts, including Dr. Shirley Davis.”

Measure results

“A successful D&I programme combines metrics and data with actions that will achieve a fundamental culture change within a business,” says Arun Batra, a partner at consulting firm EY, and CEO of the National Equality Standard. “We need numbers and targets to hold an employer to account and to help measure the progress that is being made and to understand the makeup of a workforce. However, this must go hand in hand with actions that will achieve underlying cultural change, such as targeted talent programmes, mentoring, sponsorship, and allyship alongside a review of legacy talent processes and procedures.”

Intel’s Jones agrees: “Only by uncovering the inconsistencies that are contributing to a lack of diversity can we introduce the change needed to better our workforce and society as a whole.”

Think about the words you use

Deltek has made a concerted effort to think about the words its employees use when communicating with each other, as well as what they write in documentation and code. “Words like ‘blacklist/whitelist’ and ‘master/slave’ have long been used and accepted, without much thought as the origins of those words,” explains Roberts. “The words we use matter, and our team is committed to finding the right words – such as ‘denylist/allowlist’ and ‘parent/child’ – to replace those less inclusive terms.”

The path to a more diverse future

While instigating real change is a large undertaking, those firms that pay attention now will be much better placed to achieve success in the future.

“[In addition to] moral reasons, embracing diversity has brought new ideas, voices and perspectives into play helping to push the boundaries of creativity and innovation,” says Jones. “This has been proven by McKinsey, whose research shows that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity outperform their competitors by 15%, and those in the top quartile for ethnic diversity outperform their competitors by 35%.”

Recent Intel research, meanwhile, suggests that Gen Z will make their career choices based on diversity and inclusion. Over half (56%) of 18-24 year olds say they would be hesitant to accept a job from an organisation that does not have any underrepresented minorities in senior leadership roles. Not only this, but the majority of Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) in the UK say a company’s stance on D&I is almost as important as the pay offered.

“For Gen Z, D&I matters,” says Jones. “From climate change to social equality, this is a generation that takes positive action. As Gen Z employees enter the workforce, they will not shy away from expressing their demands and expectations of D&I.”

With the impact of the pandemic continuing to play out, many businesses are reviewing investments and future planning as they consider how they might operate post-COVID-19. Batra says that, during this process, there is a unique opportunity for leaders to cement their commitment to D&I and use lockdown learnings as a catalyst for sustainable change. “This will be key for maintaining the loyalty of their customers, their brand reputation and investor confidence,” he says.

Forster shares this opinion: “It’s hard right now,” she says. “We see great intent from big and small companies who have the power to make a real difference, but the effects of Coronavirus pandemic have dramatically set back progress for women and minorities. And our whole society will suffer for it. We are hugely energised by the positive action we see from our signatories and we are seeing those numbers continue to grow, which fills me with hope. Ultimately, the UK’s economic recovery will depend on a diversity of talent to succeed.”

When YouTube announced this summer that it would no longer let users improve its automatically generated subtitles, we were dismayed – and so were the half-million people who signed a petition calling for YouTube to change its mind.

YouTube blamed users for the decision to ditch Community Captions, saying not enough of us used the tool. But the furore over its loss shows how important accessibility features are to web users. If you’ve ever streamed TV in bed next to a sleeping partner, watched a downloaded film on a train or tried to hear Hollywood dialogue above the din of CGI explosions, then you’ll sympathise.

Accessibility is a vital ingredient of the web. It makes sites, streams and apps available to everyone, including the growing number of us with some degree of hearing and vision loss, not to mention anyone who finds devices’ tiny text and buttons tricky to control.

For this feature, we’ve rounded up the most useful and ingenious ways to get the best out of your favourite websites and tools, without having to strain or squint.

Turn on subtitles when streaming

Enable YouTube’s automatic subtitles

Despite what some responses to the #DontRemoveYouTubeCCs hashtag suggest, YouTube hasn’t removed subtitles completely and still automatically adds AI-generated captions to videos that feature speech. To enable these captions, click the subtitles icon next to the player window’s Settings cog. If the icon isn’t there, it means there are no subtitles available for that video.

Unfortunately, the captions aren’t very good. As The British Deaf Association says: “The standard of YouTube’s auto-generated captions is poor and should not be considered as a viable substitute (for the ditched Community Captions tool).”

Meanwhile, you can at least create subtitles for your own YouTube videos. Use free software such as www.aegisub.org to generate a subtitles file, then include the file when uploading your video via studio.youtube.com.

Get Netflix subtitles on all your devices

Netflix’s subtitles are significantly more accurate than YouTube’s AI-generated efforts, and you can enable them on downloads as well as on-demand streams by clicking or tapping the subtitles icon. Depending on the film or show, you may also see language and audio-description options.

To customise the subtitles to suit your preferences, go to www.netflix.com/YourAccount, click your profile if applicable, then click Change next to ‘Subtitle appearance’. Click the Font and Shadow drop-down menus to see previews. The ‘Window’ option lets you add a box behind the text for even easier reading. Netflix will remember your preference for next time, whatever device you’re watching on.

If you’re happy to watch in your browser, you can use an extension for further customisation. Netflix Subtitle Options for Chrome automatically integrates with Netflix as soon as you install it, then lets you configure the text size, colour, style and background of subtitles.

Watch classic TV with subtitles via BritBox

When BritBox launched in the UK last winter, barely any of its shows came with optional subtitles. We found this maddening, given that BritBox specialises in vintage British TV shows that often have low-quality audio. But the streaming service has caught up, and you’ll now see a CC icon on nearly every film or show, which lets you toggle captions on and off. BritBox remembers your preference next time.

Now TV also now offers subtitles for most shows and films, but you have to enable them every time you watch. Disney+ and Apple TV+ have both offered subtitles since their launch.

Find Amazon Prime Video’s captions

Amazon tends to rely on filmmakers to provide captions rather than creating them in-house, so many films don’t have them. To check before playing, hover over a film’s thumbnail and look for the speech-bubble icon (or, in the mobile app, tap the thumbnail and look for ‘Languages: Audio, Subtitles’). You can then enable and disable subtitles during playback by hitting Pause, clicking the subtitles icon and choosing ‘English CC’ (or your preferred language, if available). Customisation options are available under Subtitles Settings.

The steps differ slightly on smart TVs and TV sticks, where you may have to enable subtitles or closed-captioning in the device Settings before looking for the speech-bubble icon in the Amazon app. Unlike Netflix, Amazon doesn’t sync your preferences across devices.

Watch BBC iPlayer shows with sign language

The Beeb repeats many programmes with a British Sign Language interpreter in the frame, and these signed versions often remain on the iPlayer long after the non-signed versions expire. To find all current signed shows and films, visit the website or select the Signed category in the BBC iPlayer app (tap Menu on the main screen, then swipe under Categories).

Nearly all iPlayer films and shows have subtitles, too. Hover your mouse over the video player to show the controls, then click the subtitles icon.

In the iPlayer app, tap ‘S’ in the player controls. This works with downloaded shows as well.

Add live captions to your video chats

Skype’s mobile app can now display AI-generated subtitles while you’re in a video or audio call. Tap the three-dot menu and select ‘Turn subtitles on’ during a call or, to keep them on by default, go to Settings, Calling, ‘Call subtitles’, ‘Show subtitles for all calls’. Tap ‘Only show subtitles for other participants’ to avoid seeing your own words spelled out.

Google Meet also provides real-time captioning and transcription in your browser and on your phone and tablet. Zoom is a few steps ahead and has just added the option to keep a sign-language interpreter’s window in view for all participants, a feature that Google Meet users have been requesting.

Zoom lets you enable live subtitles in its desktop version as well as its mobile app, and saves a downloadable transcript. The PC version also lets you (and other participants) add your own subtitles, as well as using AI-generated captions. Find out more from Zoom’s support site.

Find missing subtitles for films and shows

Amazon Prime Video, Now TV and BritBox have improved their subtitle provision, but you’ll still come across films and TV shows that lack the option. The easiest tool for finding and adding subtitles is the browser extension Substital (Chrome and Firefox, substital.com). Click Substital’s toolbar icon on any page that contains streaming video to automatically find a matching subtitles file uploaded by a user. The extension then automatically displays it over the on-demand stream, without interfering with the website. Use the ‘Synchronization’ slider to nudge the subtitles into sync with the audio.

Alternatively, you can download a subtitles file. The best sites for TV and film subtitles are Subscene and opensubtitles.org, both of which stock thousands of files created and uploaded by users, which are all free to download. Then upload the file to Substital, and use the slider to get it in sync.

Make websites easier to read

Enlarge tiny text on websites and apps

Windows 10 has a built-in Magnifier tool (search for ‘magnifier’) that you can move over web pages to enlarge tiny text such as links and photo captions. However, it’s fiddly to use and there are easier alternatives online. The free Zoom browser extension (no relation to the chat service) lets you zoom in and out of any web page using a quick and easy slider.

On your phone and tablet, you can “pinch” the screen to zoom in and out or switch to an easier three-tap zoom gesture by going to Settings, Accessibility and toggling on ‘Magnification gestures’ (Android; Fire OS) or Zoom (iOS).

Many apps and mobile sites disable zoom, and you can’t zoom your home screen. To get around this on Android, install the free app Big Font to scale your device’s font size to up to 1,000% (10 times bigger). It works with text in apps and mobile websites, as well as system text. Reading Glasses lets you zoom with one tap of a giant button, and has buttons that sharpen text.

For iPhone and iPad, Magnifying Glass With Light lets you zoom using a slider, as well as pinching, and can also magnify text on paper, using your device’s camera. BigMagnify also has a zoom slider, plus filters to make on-screen text sharper and clearer.

Boost colour-contrast for easier reading

One in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour-vision deficiency and even for those who don’t, colour contrast makes on-screen text much easier to read.

Windows 10 has a ‘High-contrast’ option (search for ‘contrast’) that you can apply to your PC’s text, but it won’t work with most websites. Browser extension Colour Enhancer for Chrome displays a visual grid that you can use to adjust text colour and background.

High Contrast, also for Chrome, automatically switches a page to inverted colour (white on black), but the toolbar icon lets you choose a different filter, such as Increased Contrast or ‘Yellow on Black’. Press Shift+F12 to link a filter to a specific website.

To boost colour-contrast on your phone and tablet, use the free app NowYouSee (available on Android and Apple iOS). Swipe left and right to cycle through various colour filters which, for example, help you tell red from green.

Does dark mode do your eyes more harm than good?

It’s long been assumed that the glare from your screen can strain your eyes and give you headaches. Hence the popularity of dark mode, which inverts the display to white text on black, dims the screen and lets you overlay warm colours.

But if you have astigmatism (as half the population does), this is really bad news because your eyes will struggle to read white on dark. Even non-astigmatic eyes read better in ‘positive polarity’ (black text on a white background), because the pupils don’t have to dilate as much. That means easier focusing and less eye strain.

Meanwhile blue light, supposed enemy of restfulness, has been shown to be vital for mental performance and healthy eyesight. If your eyes feel sore after reading from a screen for too long, researchers suggest it’s because you were blinking less, and frowning while focusing. So ditch dark mode and get blinking!

Listen to the web read aloud

Use a screen reader while browsing

Screen-reader tools free you from squinting by converting on-screen text into audible speech, like your own personal narrator.

Windows 10’s built-in screen reader, Narrator, has a pleasant voice (‘George’ by default in the UK) but it makes a mess of reading web pages. We had better luck with Read Aloud, an extension for Chrome and Firefox, which reads any web page at a clear and easy-to-understand pace with one click of its toolbar icon. It also displays a large-text transcript and easy controls. However, it has a rather grating robotic US twang and no customisation options.

The Chrome extension Selection Reader has a UK accent and reads only the text you select.

Let your phone or tablet do the talking

The excellent built-in screen readers on Android and iOS offer different options depending on the device, but are all great at articulating what’s on screen and explaining how to navigate.

Head for Accessibility in Settings, look for Voice Assistant or TalkBack (Android) and VoiceOver (iPad, iPhone and Apple TV), then tap to enable. You’ll notice changes to familiar controls – for example, on our Samsung phone, Voice Assistant replaced the usual one-tap and swipe with double-tap and two-finger swipe. The friendly UK accent explained everything and read out any text we tapped, including links and button text. Relevant interactive elements were highlighted with a blue outline.

You can configure gestures in Voice Assistant or VoiceOver Settings, along with options such as password reading (this is turned off by default, for security reasons), vibration feedback and a braille keyboard. To find out more about the options, see the official accessibility overviews for Android and iOS.

Hear (and record) books and articles out loud

Free Android app @Voice Aloud Reader adds numerous extra screen-reader options, including the ability to create a reading list by integrating with Pocket, setting a sleep timer, waking the voice up by inserting headphones, and downloading its narrations as sound files.

Read Aloud, also for Android, lets you create a playlist by pasting text, entering a URL or opening a file – such as an ebook or document – then reading chosen items out loud for you, even when you’re offline. Like many screen-reader apps, it supports Google Text-to-Speech to let you customise the voice and speed.

For iOS, Voice Aloud Reader reads out web pages and documents in custom voices, and can narrate any text you’ve scanned with your iPhone or iPad’s camera.

Get audio descriptions of online films and shows

The BBC iPlayer has always offered an audio-described option for many of its films and shows, with a narrator explaining the action in between the dialogue. Go to this page on the iPlayer website or the Audio Described category in the app to see the current selection. Click Audio Described below the player to toggle it on and off.

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video both display an AD icon on the main info pages of titles with optional narration. The process is the same on both sites: play the film or episode, click the subtitles icon and click Audio Described.

Hear foreign-language films in English

Netflix Subtitles Reader for Chrome automatically converts subtitles using text-to-speech technology and speaks them out loud, in a language of your choice. This makes it ideal for translating foreign-language films whose English subtitles you struggle (or don’t want) to read. Toggle it on and off by clicking the extension’s icon, then Start or Stop. Bear in mind that the add-on automatically generates speech using AI, so it doesn’t always sound altogether human or get the pronunciation right (“sake” pronounced as “saké” made us giggle).

Make the web easier to operate

Ditch your mouse for pain-free gestures

Computer mice certainly weren’t designed with delicate wrists in mind. You can shell out for special supportive mouse pads, but the best solution is to use the keyboard instead. Many keyboard shortcuts work across browsers in websites – for example, press Space to toggle Play and Pause in a video stream, and Ctrl+D to bookmark a page – but many others are specific to individual browsers. Click here for Chrome shortcuts, Firefox shortcuts and for Edge, bit.ly/3jeVgEa.

To remap even more mouse gestures to your keyboard, the Chrome extension Caret Browsing lets you select text, scroll through pages and click links, all by tapping keys to move a cursor around the screen.

Browse the web using your voice – privately

Chrome’s voice-search tool has been around for six years – just click the microphone icon in the Google search bar, then speak. Mozilla has gone a step further with its new Firefox Voice tool, which lets you navigate the entire web using your voice. And, unlike Google and Amazon, this open-source tool doesn’t store voice recordings by default.

The tool is still quite new, only works with the desktop Firefox browser and is limited to understanding English, but it’s free for everyone to try. After installing the extension and allowing the permissions (of which there are many, as is explained on the same page), you can then activate Firefox Voice by clicking the microphone icon on your toolbar. The first time you use it, make sure to click ‘Don’t allow’ to avoid having your recordings saved.

The best Chrome tool for full web browsing by voice is LipSurf. This fabulous extension has more than 100 preset commands such as checking Gmail messages and switching between tabs, and you can add your own. Advanced features such as speech-to-text dictation require an upgrade to LipSurf Premium ($6 per month, which is about £5).

Write text messages using voice or braille

Hands-free controls are built into Android and iOS. Apple’s Voice Control app (iOS 13+) is particularly good, and displays a full list of commands – from swipes to screen locking – when you speak the words: “Show me what to say”. On iPhone 6s and later, you can dictate text instead of using the keyboard.

On Android, Google Assistant lets you perform all basic actions by voice, including making calls and sending text messages. But it is fiddly to set up, and you may find it easier to use an app. For example ‘Write SMS by voice’ converts speech to text for sharing via any messaging app. If you don’t mind paying £8.99, e-Dictate Pro is a more powerful alternative, with excellent speech-recognition and editing tools.

Android’s free Accessibility Suite has a basic braille keyboard built in. If you have an external braille display, it’ll work with Google Assistant and the TalkBack screen reader by installing the free Google tool BrailleBack.

Apps that make the real world accessible

Websites and apps can be hard work if you’re hearing or sight is impaired, but they can also be your best accessibility friend. The free Android app Live Transcribe effectively displays text and audio subtitles for real-life conversation, using technology that’s similar to Google Translate. You can save your transcripts for searching later, which is handy if you struggle to remember the details of what’s been said.

Letmetalk for Android lets users communicate using pictures rather than words. It has more than 9,000 easily understood stock photos, and lets you add photos from your device.

Several free apps can describe the world around you by “seeing” through your device’s camera. Android app Lookout by Google is particularly good at recognising people and animals; TapTapSee – available for both Android and iOS – is great for navigating obstacles around you; and Envision AI for Android can read documents and handwriting in 60 languages. The iOS app iDentifi is an AI-based audio-recognition app that can identify, out loud, whatever you point it at – which is useful for all of us.

Leading tech companies have formed a collective that seeks to create a new lexicon that companies and developers can use to replace problematic language when building new technology.

Organisations including Red Hat, Cisco, IBM, VMware, and the Linux Foundation have established the Inclusive Naming Initiative following unilateral decisions earlier this year by some companies to scrap certain naming conventions that had been deemed exclusionary or insensitive.

GitHub, for example, retired the ‘master’ label for its default branch structure in June in order to address concerns about the term's association with slavery. Several other companies followed, including Twitter and Linux in July, stripping out potentially racially insensitive terms.

The initiative aims to coordinate this effort across the wider industry, rather than leave it to individual companies to replace what are commonly-used terms with a mix and match of alternatives. The fundamental aim is to remove all harmful and unclear language and replace it with an agreed-upon set of neutral terms.

“We knew from the beginning that this would be a complicated endeavour. On a technical level, change has to be made in hundreds of discrete communities, representing thousands of different projects across as many code repositories,” said Red Hat’s senior vice president and CTO Chris Wright. “Care has to be taken to prevent application or API breakage, maintain backward compatibility, and communicate the changes to users and customers.

“As big of a lift as that is, the technical change is only part of the challenge. We all come to this work with a different perspective, a different cultural grounding, and different levels of understanding of how certain words can impact others. Our hope is to start the discussion, provide context and answer questions, and inspire change across the open source ecosystem.”

The drive to change the language used in tech is a recent phenomenon, brought on by the death of George Floyd earlier this year and the subsequent mass resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. As such, companies have been motivated to be more conscious about the working environment they create and promote by re-examining much of the terminology that’s been used by default for decades.

The project, which will begin next year, has devised an early list of words it considers falls into the bracket of harmful language, including whitelist and blacklist, and master and slave. While concrete alternatives will be agreed on by the initiative in due course, some early proposed alternatives include allowlist/denylist for whitelist/blacklist, and primary/secondary for master/slave.

The Inclusive Naming Initiative has said that “while master, in and of itself, is potentially neutral, the propensity in which it is associated with the term slave in computing makes master on its own guilty by association”.

The group recommends that companies adopt a replacement immediately, which may include main, origin, source or control plane.

Companies involved in the project will define the best practices and replacements with the wider tech community from the start of next year, which includes a discussion at a KubeCon community meeting. From the third quarter of 2021, the initiative will showcase case studies and success stories as well as big wins at KubeCon 2021. Towards the end of next year, the Naming Initiative will then develop a certification programme if there is enough demand.

For many tech firms, their mission is to develop products that are suited to the broad brush of the population – things that anyone would feel confident using.

That’s a taller order than it might at first sound. We’ve known for a long time that people with different backgrounds have different understandings of the world. Many organisations intellectually recognise the merits of a diverse workforce, which can bring different views based on different life-experiences to the table when coming up with new ideas. Developers might even employ social anthropologists to help them understand users in different parts of the community better.

But there’s another more insidious problem that can be harder to deal with: Unconscious bias. How does an organisation know if it’s got that kind of bias within it and once identified, how can it be rooted out?

What is unconscious bias?

To understand something we need to know what it looks like. Hilary Stephenson MD at Sigma – a UK user experience (UX) and design agency that works with the likes of the Department for Education on UX, accessibility and inclusivity projects – defined unconscious bias as: “Making decisions and communicating from a position of privilege, and in some cases prejudice, without being aware it’s a problem or even part of your thinking or behaviour.”

Within that comes all sorts of sub-categories with two in particular – affinity bias and confirmation bias – being among the most common in business.

Affinity bias is often seen where companies make hires for good ‘cultural fit’. Ultimately this just means the range of views available when ideas are discussed is narrow rather than broad. Confirmation bias – liking people because of characteristics they have that are familiar or comfortable, for example in recruitment feeling positive about a candidate when you recognise a school, university or previous employer. Again this just narrows the pool of talent rather than broadening it.

The problem is that such biases can be buried deep, with people having no idea they hold these attitudes. Even if they’re presented with evidence through tests or training, some will dismiss it believing they are ‘better than that’.

External help is useful – but beware

It’s not just people who can hold biases, either. Unconscious bias in particular can often bleed into data, which in turn creates prejudices within systems like artificial intelligence (AI). As Big Data LDN founder, Bill Hammond, explains to IT Pro: “Data disproportionately weighted is unreliable and low-quality. It can impact all business functions which rely on the data, including an organisations’ decision-making, algorithms which determine customer interactions or the business’s ability to digitally transform.”

Hammond says that external help can be useful in overcoming problems with identifying unconscious bias in an organisation and then rooting it out. “The definition of unconscious bias itself states that businesses are often unaware their data is disproportionately weighted,” he explains. “External expertise can often see bias that has gone unnoticed to date, bringing it to the forefront and also offering strategies with which to identify and eliminate the issue.”

Sigma’s Stephenson adds a word of caution on using external help, however, saying: “There is some criticism of organisations doing one-off training sessions. That’s often just the starting point or the diagnosis and it takes a plan and commitment to build from the theory. Listen to the experts, who will have a good view on where you need to improve.”

Striving for continuous improvement

For Stephenson in her world of UX design, rooting out unconscious bias is a process of co-production, and this is about much more than the odd workshop. “It’s about building and sharing power between people who come together to focus on user needs, and to understand constraints around technology, and what financial exclusion or low digital confidence feels like,” she tells IT Pro. “This is how you make a product or service better for people. I’ve seen this done to great effect for people who’ve experienced homelessness, or those managing ongoing mental health challenges.”

Looking again at the question of data and guidance from outside an organisation, Hammond says: “External experts can also implement business processes and train or upskill internal teams on specific processes to identify and remove disproportionately weighted data moving forward. These processes can include how to neutralise data collection and data analysis.”

Both agree that there is no one-off cure-all to rooting out unconscious bias. For Hammond, firms need to ensure they are “continuously working to identify and remove data bias; they need to invest in data-driven initiatives and implement a data-driven culture throughout the organisation”.

Meanwhile Stephenson looks at continuous commitment from another angle, noting that organisations should avoid a “one size fits all” approach, even – or especially – in unexpected situations and moments of crisis, as it will undoubtedly lead to exclusion. Giving a real world example, she says: “During the pandemic, our team has worked hard to find ways of engaging people in research, design and testing activities who might be excluded because they are older, shielding, or they have specific access needs that mean remote design processes need to be adapted.

“We have hired people who have a personal understanding of bias and exclusion, but we can always do more. Continually reviewing your processes and methods from the perspective of how you might be excluding, hindering or harming is useful.”

While technology is transforming the way we work at what feels like an ever-increasing pace, there’s one seemingly intractable problem holding it back: the tech talent crisis.

According to a recent study by Harvey Nash and KPMG, the tech talent shortage is at the highest level now than it has been since 2008. Skills in data analytics, cyber security, artificial intelligence and transformation are particularly scarce – and these shortages act as a bottleneck to growth.

Many businesses are already beginning to feel the pain from this. 65% of respondents to the Harvey Nash and KPMG survey said that hiring challenges are hurting the industry. Left without action, the issue will only amplify; according to research carried out by Korn Ferry in 2018, there will be a global shortage of 4.3 million tech workers by 2030. The United States, currently the world’s leading technology market, can expect to lose out on $162.25 billion (£130.6 billion)as a result. China, meanwhile, could miss out on $44.45 billion (£35.78 billion), and the UK will fail to realise almost 9% of the sector’s potential revenue.

Despite this burgeoning problem, there’s a large group of individuals that have the skills to fill these jobs, but that have been largely overlooked by the industry to date: the neurodiverse population, specifically those with autism.

An untapped talent pool

Autism affects more than one in 100 people in the UK, according to Autism UK, and it is estimated that around one in seven people (more than 15% of the population) are neurodivergent – a broad term that refers to people who have autism, ADHD, dyspraxia and other neurodevelopmental conditions. “Unfortunately, unemployment and underemployment for these individuals can run as high as 80%,” explains Thorkil Sonne, the founder and chair of Specialisterne Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that is working across the world to help neurodiverse people achieve core functions in the labour market.

The traditional recruitment and selection process is the biggest barrier for neurodiverse adults in entering the job market. Conventional recruitment processes typically use the interview as a means to gauge a candidate’s suitability for a role, but this only really tells the employer how well someone can sell themselves and build rapport in a short window of time – very unreliable markers for the neurodiverse, especially those with autism.

“Job interviews can cause extreme fear and anxiety for someone on the [autism] spectrum and adversely affect how the employer sees that person,” says Julie Robertson, CEO at Specialisterne Australia. “We find that many autistic adults won’t even apply for jobs that they are well-suited to purely because they know they have difficulties with the interview process.”

Sonne agrees: “Many neurodiverse people don’t have the social skills to do well in a job interview – they really struggle to impress an employer because they can’t effectively communicate their strengths and they struggle to make eye contact,” he explains. “They often play down their abilities because they set the bar higher than neurotypical people – to some, anything short of perfection is unacceptable.”

Despite this, Sonne believes that neurodiverse people, especially those with autism, are perfectly placed for the technology sector.

Pushing for change

Sonne has first-hand experience of why this might be the case. In his previous role as technical director of a Danish software venture, he faced multiple challenges in sourcing the right talent. “We really struggled to find people with good memories, superior recognition skills, great attention to detail, high accuracy in repetitive tasks, who were honest and straightforward and who had a pride in what they were doing,” he explains. “But these are common traits of those who are neurodiverse. In fact, autistic people could actually have an advantage over many neurotypical people when it comes to many of these skills.”

With all this in mind, Sonne is working hard to effect change. He set up Specialisterne, which translates from Danish as “The Specialists”, in 2003 to create meaningful job opportunities for neurodiverse people.

“We work to support neurodiverse candidates in a number of key ways,” explains Peter Brabazon, CEO and general manager at Specialisterne Ireland. “We identify and assess candidates to get a full understanding of what they can or can’t do. We then work with employers to create neurodiverse-friendly interviews that are competency-based. Once a candidate is accepted, we make sure we identify a buddy or mentor that can support them. We also provide ongoing support for candidates in the months and years that follow.”

Robertson says what’s key is to take a patient approach to observing the talents, passions and skill sets of candidates over a period of weeks. “This enables the employer to interact with candidates to observe and foster the skill sets and traits they are looking for in their employees, which makes for a more informed hiring decision,” she explains. “Equally, the candidate comes to learn more about the job role, work environment and team to enable them to make a more informed decision about the suitability of a position for them.”

Specialisterne’s efforts are already paying off. Today the organisation has a presence in 12 countries across the globe and is working with a large number of partners including the United Nations and the World Economic Forum to fulfil its mission to facilitate one million jobs for the neurodiverse.

Steady progress is already being made towards this goal. One of Specialisterne’s biggest clients is global technology firm SAP, which, through its Autism at Work programme, has committed to filling 1% of its workforce with individuals on the autistic spectrum.

“Our candidates, now employees in SAP, have shown and continue to show great loyalty to the company and are highly committed workers with a wide range of skills and talents,” said Brabazon.

IBM, meanwhile, has been working with Specialisterne teams across multiple countries. “We have had a long association with IBM both globally and in Australia,” says Robertson. “Following on from a successful programme in the USA, IBM partnered with Specialisterne Australia to run the IBM Neurodiversity Program at the Client Innovation Centre in Ballarat, Victoria. There were 10 various roles in IT identified including testing, developing, data analytics and business analytics. Across Australia there was massive interest from autistic jobseekers in these roles. The candidate’s skills were assessed over three weeks with various hands on activities including a pre-selection activity created and administered by IBM.”

And software engineering and technology firms Nagarro and Tricentis have been working with Specialisterne Austria to train neurodiverse talent for jobs in software testing. They’ve created an eight week programme which prepares candidates – some of whom may not have any prior experience in IT – for an internationally recognised ISTQB certification, among others. The programme is now in its fifth year and is seeing a placement rate of 80% and over.

Unprecedented benefits

These industry pioneers are quickly realising the great benefits that neurodiverse teams can bring to their organisations.

SAP reports examples of neurodivergent employees participating on teams that generated significant innovations, including someone who helped develop a technical fix worth an estimated $40 million (£32.2 million)in savings. A programme at HPE, meanwhile, suggests that the organisation’s neurodiverse testing teams are 30% more productive than others.

That’s not to mention a pilot at multinational professional services firm EY, which compared the work generated by neurodiverse and neurotypical account support professionals. Quality, efficiency and productivity were comparable, but the neurodiverse employees excelled at innovation. In the first month, they identified process improvements that cut the time for technical training in half. They learned how to automate processes far faster than the neurotypical account professionals they trained with. They then used the resulting downtime to create training videos to help all professionals learn automation more quickly.

“Our experience shows that neurodiverse teams can prove to be an incredible asset, driving business value in places that strive for excellence and innovation,” says Christine Krautzer, managing director at Specialisterne Austria. “Businesses benefit by finding a perfect match for an open position, but they are also very likely to see increases in productivity in the team overall. The onboarding of neurodiverse talent can furthermore lead to a minimisation of errors, process optimisations and thus cost savings. The individual is meanwhile empowered to lead a self-determined, economically independent life. It's a clear win-win and with regard to UN’s sustainable development goals of inclusion and greater equality to labour market access, it is also a powerful result for society as a whole.”

Clearly great progress is being made – and an increasing number of technology firms are opening their eyes to the benefits of hiring neurodiverse employees. However, Sonne believes that there is still a lot of work to be done.

“In general, businesses are still very laser-focused on social skills when it comes to employees,” he says. “This needs to change. Instead of training autistic people to behave like non-autistic people, we are working on changing the labour market to make it more inclusive and adaptive for the benefit of all. We want businesses to understand that, given the right support, a neurodiverse adult could not just hold down a job, but be the best person for it. The adoption of neurodiverse teams could also help many technology firms to avoid a potentially devastating talent shortage in the years to come.”

In 1964, a 26-year old Columbia graduate was selected by IBM Research to join a team working on the Advanced Computing Systems project, which gave rise to a number of innovations that have paved the way for modern high-performance computers. After four years of working on the project, Lynn Conway lost her job after she revealed her intention to transition to a female gender role. Despite this, Conway returned to IT the same year and went on to work for Xerox PARC, the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and, in 2014, Time Magazine named her one of “21 Transgender People Who Influenced American Culture”.

The world of tech, just like any other industry, has participated in the systematic persecution and erasure of its LGBTQ+ community. One of the most famous examples in this country is that of World War II code-breaker and founder of computer science, Alan Turing, who in 1952 was convicted for having sex with another man. Barred from continuing his cryptographic work, or indeed any government work, and forcibly chemically castrated, he died by suicide two years later.

Although the UK’s society and legislation have become increasingly more tolerant towards queer people, few are willing to take the risk of being open about their identity in their professional lives.

Hilary Stephenson, managing director at software provider Sigma, kicked off her career in tech in 1997, starting out in software development and moving to information design when services moved online and the internet became the priority for new product development. Over the years, she has witnessed her transgender friends being mistreated and fired, which influenced her own relations with coworkers.

“For many years I remained closeted at work, as it just wasn’t something I felt comfortable talking about and I’d made the huge, probably self-preserving, assumption it would certainly be an uncomfortable topic for others,” she says. “I understand this was quite a common position for people in the LGBTQ+ community to take, where we sought to avoid everyday embarrassments, awkwardness or shame by simply keeping quiet, or lying where needed.”

Nevertheless, Stephenson is positive about modern attitudes in tech workplaces, with noticeable improvements made over the course of the past two decades. There is, she says, a “very real and meaningful focus on diversity and inclusion I now see across the digital community”.

“Our digital emphasis on human-centred design, accessibility and user research means we’ve driven the need to understand context, behaviours and experience into the tech sector,” Stephenson adds. “That kind of empathy, interest in intersectionality and a desire to appreciate other people’s stories allow me to be much more open and comfortable in my environment and networks.”

Trans people often do not have the option to leave their identity outside of the office. While cisgendered members of the LGBTQ+ community have the privilege to choose whether they remain ‘in the closet’, the physical changes while transitioning are noticeable at first glance and may impact professional interactions.

Three years ago, Arora Ashani founded Non Binary in Tech, a conference that highlights the work of non-binary people in the technology industry and seeks to ensure that their attendees feel “comfortable being themselves, making friends and building their network”. She started the conference inspired by her own experience in the technology industry.

“As a queer woman of colour, it's definitely harder to find roles than my white cishet [cisgender and heterosexual] friends,” says Ashani. “When interviewing, it's hard to figure out if companies are actually inclusive to women, POC [people of colour] and queer folks, and sometimes asking directly means recruiters ghost me.”

Today, Ashani works as a front-end developer for YOOX Net-a-Porter. She says that being an LGBTQ+ person in the tech industry “has its ups and downs” and credits “a senior, openly-queer woman on the team” as one of the reasons she applied for her first job at Samsung.

“It's hard to find older role models in the tech industry, which is one of the reasons I created the conference – to create role models for myself and other people,” she says.

For a young queer person starting their career in tech, having an openly-queer supervisor and mentor helps create a positive impact and a more welcoming environment. In a predominantly cisgender and heteronormative workspace, it’s too easy to feel out of place.

Mel Woolfenden, chair of Fujitsu’s Pride LGBT+ Network says that 74% LGBT people have mental health problems related to work, referring to the Mental Health at Work survey by the Business in the Community (BITC) organisation.

“One of the things that we've been doing is trying to engage senior leaders,” she says. “They have been a real catalyst in making changes of acceptance across our organisation.”

That is why Fujitsu implemented reverse mentoring, which focuses on creating a "professional friendship" between a junior and senior team member in order to exchange skills, knowledge and understanding.

Woolfenden says that the strategy has been “really helpful, from the LGBT point of view” and helped senior leaders realise how seemingly minor changes, such as adjusting the language used in the office or making sure to involve everyone in a meeting “can make a massive difference”.

In the US, tech giants are no stranger to being represented by prominent LGBTQ+ figures: Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Ana Arriola, Backstage Capital’s Arlan Hamilton, or Linux’s Jon Hall. The UK does not have as many tech giants as the US, but is that the only thing stopping queer people from coming out?

Rachel Clancy, co-creator of Get Closer, a text adventure game that teaches 10-12-year-olds how to help a friend experiencing depression, agrees that the UK and Ireland are still very far from being open about gender identity and sexuality.

“My partner is Spanish and she always thinks it's very funny how people from these countries are very uptight – we are very conscious of not oversharing,” she says. “Maybe people see their sexuality as something that is their personal information. I mean, I'm guessing, because the tech industry is so male-dominated. And that's one of the reasons why the Sky scholarship [Women In Tech, of which Clancy is a recipient] happened because they were trying to figure out as many avenues as possible to combat that gender imbalance.”

For Clancy, an understanding of LGBTQ+ issues was important when choosing a developer for Get Closer. That is why she and her business and romantic partner, Aida Sancho Lopez, decided to collaborate with the queer-owned Tea-Powered Games, which was founded by another couple, Destina Connor and Flo Minuzzi.

“Our game doesn't deal explicitly with things like sexuality and gender identity,” says Clancy. “We do have a non-binary character in the game, but we needed to know that we were working with someone who was aligned with our personal kind of beliefs and had that sensitivity towards things like gender identity and sexuality.”

If tech firms want to step into the new decade with confidence that they will be on the right side of history, they should embrace their queer workforce. The huge societal, professional, and legal changes that the UK had undergone since decriminalising homosexuality should not be diminished. However, as Alan Turing once said: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done”.

The cyber security industry is still failing to attract a diverse workforce. Figures from non-profit organisation techUK show that globally women make up just 11% of the cyber workforce, while in the UK specifically only 15% of the digital tech workforce comes from a Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic (BAME) background. A recent study by the Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec) – formerly known as the Institute of Information Security Professionals – meanwhile, noted that 89% of respondents were male and the same proportion were over the age of 35.

According to the Enterprise Strategy Group, the number of organisations reporting a problematic shortage of cyber security skills has increased every year since 2015, with the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, or (ISC)2, estimating that businesses are currently suffering a cyber security workforce gap of over 4 million employees.

Unless the security sector can embrace greater diversity – in gender, age, ethnicity, disability and experience “it will face a stagnating workforce and be unable to keep up with the rapidly expanding skills gap,” says Amanda Finch, CIISec CEO. “Without fresh blood, the industry will have to accept reduced protection and overworked security staff.”

Demystifying cyber security

There are a number of reasons people from a wider range of backgrounds are reluctant to become cyber security professionals, including a lack of knowledge of where to start.

“As a relatively new field, the pathways into the profession tend to be poorly defined,” says Joanna Cox, head of policy at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

Not only does it need to be easier to understand the routes into cyber security, the role also needs to be demystified, according to Talal Rajab, head of Cyber and National Security Programme at techUK.

“When one thinks of a person who works in cyber, your instant idea is that of a ‘hooded hacker’ creeping over a computer. There are more roles in the sector than that of an ethical hacker and there exist multiple pathways for someone to enter the cyber security,” he explains. “More needs to be done to amplify this.”

Challenges for specific groups

There can also be challenges specific to some minority groups. For example, Cox has heard anecdotal evidence about the difficulties for those with neurodiversity entering the profession. The types of analytical skills required in many cyber security jobs are of a higher prevalence in people with neurodiversity but Cox says since UK schools are “generally failing this group”, frequently excluding them from mainstream education, many may not get the base level of qualifications needed to enter the job market.

“While this is party a funding issue in schools, it also represents a failing in the school system to adapt teaching practices for this group and to understand their value – particularly in sectors such as cyber security,” she says.

More generally, however, there’s a feeling that the biggest way to improve diversity within cyber security is by educating students and changing the perception of parents. This way people will start to see that the profession is a career option for everyone. Knowledge and understanding is key, and there are a number of initiatives and groups that have been created to help with this.

Promoting women in cyber security

A stark sign of the lack of gender diversity in the cyber security industry is shown at technology conferences where women are in such a minority that they rarely have to queue for the toilet – unlike every other public event they attend.

In 2018, techUK helped launch one of the most quirkily titled diversity initiatives: ‘Queue for the Loo’, which was made up of a series of events and online resources aimed at women in the cyber security sector.

“The initiative, spearheaded by Sian John of Microsoft, includes quarterly networking events for female cyber professionals to network, exchange ideas and find mentors,” says Rajab. “It looks to not only create a stronger network between women in cyber but also to encourage them to do more to get others to consider their options in this space. The aim is to increase the breadth of talent in our industry by encouraging more women to join, so that we are more included, and a sign of success will be when women have to start queuing to use the facilities at cyber security conferences.”

As well as supporting those already in the sector, it’s also key to engage with girls of school age, in order to inspire the next generation. One interesting project designed to do this came from a partnership between GCHQ and the National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC). Working with Girlguiding South West England, they introduced a new ‘cyber’ badge that showcases how technology can work to keep us safe, aiming to inspire and ignite the girls’ interest in developing cyber skills.

Support from government

The UK government is also playing its part to improve diversity within the cyber security sector. This summer it launched the third round of funding through the Cyber Skills Immediate Impact Fund (CSIIF), which allows training providers to bid for up to £100,000 to work with employers to design programmes to retrain a diverse range of individuals for a career in the sector.

It has also announced a new Cyber Security Council, with the IET being put in charge of designing and delivering alongside an alliance of cyber security organisations. The council be charged with, amongst other things, creating clear pathways for people wishing to join the industry.

The business benefits of diversity

Work is needed to break down the barriers to entry in the cyber security sector and the business case is compelling. “A more diverse workforce can mean a wider talent pool, improved creativity and better customer insight,” says Jo Foster, IET equality, diversity and inclusion manager.

A Boston Consulting Group study found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation, and according to Rajab, gender-diverse companies are 45% more likely to improve market share and 70% more likely to successfully capture new markets.

While the government and non-profits are playing their role, it’s also important for businesses to commit to diversity efforts in-house. As Foster points out, “Developing an equality, diversity and inclusivity strategy, and gaining top-level support in embedding it throughout an organisation, is key to addressing the skills shortage and promoting equality for all.”

It's the very tail end of 2019 and we are still writing articles about the lack of diversity in the tech sector despite clearly understanding the benefits that it can bring. Can you believe it? But the facts speak for themselves. Survey after survey shows that the sector still lacks diversity, not just in the big companies, but across the board.

So, the problem remains, and the time is right as we ring out the old year and ring in a new one, to take another look at what’s going on and why diversity is such a good thing for the tech sector.

Are we there yet?

A major report from Inclusive Boards, which encourages organisations to develop more inclusive and representative boards and senior teams, found that the tech sector’s senior leadership is woefully lacking in diversity.

The report revealed that 65% of boards in the top tech firms had no female directors, while over two-fifths of executive teams had no female representation and just 8.5% of senior leaders in the sector were from a black, Asian, minority ethnic (BAME) background. Additionally, 35% of board members and 26% of senior executives in the top tech firms attended Oxford or Cambridge universities, compared to just 1% of the general population.

The makeup of the workforce is similarly problematic. Research from Tech Nation has found that just 19% of workers in tech are women and 15% are BAME. When it comes to age found that 72% are over 35 years old, giving the lie to the fact that this is a young sector. The BAME figure is 5% higher than the proportion across the UK workforce as a whole, but is still not reflective of the country’s demographic makeup and in general it seems both the tech workforce and its board directors are a long way from being representative.

A cautionary tale

Joy Buolamwini from the MIT Media Lab has researched bias in facial recognition technology, and found that the darker a person’s skin, the less easy it is for the technology to tell the difference between men and women. The much reported work cites facial recognition databases populated by mostly white, male faces as the cause of errors in recognition in wider, more diverse real world situations.

Would a more diverse workforce involved in developing the facial recognition AI Joy Buolamwini investigated have spotted the problem before it was let loose on the world? Well, it is certainly a possibility.

Diversity breeds success

Where diversity is in evidence in a workforce, it can really breed success. Deloitte’s Fast 50 programme celebrates success in technology companies. In its 2018 report, Deloitte paid particular attention to diversity, and the report notes that almost 70% of its winning 50 companies see diversity and inclusion as “extremely important or very important to the growth of their company.”

The companies don’t just talk the talk either, but put this into practice. For example, in a survey of the Fast 50 companies around half have a more than 20% BAME, which is 5% higher than the average as reported by Tech Nation. Where women are concerned half the Fast 50 survey respondents have a workforce that’s over 40% identifying as female, up from a third of companies in 2015.

Reap the business benefits

The Deloitte report found three areas where diversity plays a big part in driving a business forwards: enhancing products and services, business development in new markets, and hiring and retaining talent. The Deloitte report is also clear in its correlation between diversity and profitability, saying “The diversity and inclusion among our survey respondents drives diversity of thought and has helped them to achieve outstanding revenue growth.”

Revenue benefits don’t just come to the high fliers like the Deloitte Fast 50, but they can come to all tech companies embracing diversity. Tech Nation’s report identifies a £70,000 turnover premium for directors on boards with gender diversity, for example.

Drilling down into the reasons for this revenue premium, the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) lists five business benefits from a diverse team: increased creativity and innovation, better problem solving and decision making, increased profits, higher employee engagement and better reputation.

So, a diverse workforce can help a company eliminate conscious and unconscious bias in its products, and that means everything from product design right through to marketing and after-sales. It can help companies find the most talented people because talent isn’t the exclusive domain of one group of people. Diverse teams produce better products, they are more creative, more engaged at work, and a company’s reputation is enhanced through its diversity.

What’s not to like? Isn’t it time more firms in the technology sector step up to the plate to embrace diversity and reap the rewards?

Diversity is a persistent problem within the tech sector, and a lack of diversity leads to less-capable IT teams and lower-quality end results, as well as contributing to a less welcoming atmosphere for minority candidates.

In the latest episode of the IT Pro Podcast, Adam and Jane are joined by CW Jobs director Dominic Harvey to discuss how organisations can improve diversity and plug their skills gaps by upskilling existing employees from other areas of the business.

We also discuss whether or not the DDoS Labour was hit with counts as a hack, the future of Docker after the Mirantis acquisition, and why the Motorola Razr is the original status symbol.

Footnotes

News

• Labour Party targeted by ‘large scale’ cyber attack
• Apple sales boss claims children using a Chromebook will 'not succeed'
• Mirantis snaps up Docker's enterprise platform
• Motorola gives the iconic Razr a stunning 2019 redesign

Feature

• Male attitudes the biggest barrier to women in technology
• Amazon reveals funding scheme to get more women into tech
• Diversity not a company priority claim nearly half of women in tech
• Young women likely to have the coding skills employers want
• Why diversity in AI is critical to building a fairer society
• AI Industry "overwhelmingly" white and male
• Tech Talent Charter: Micro-organisations leading the way for gender diversity
• Why women are better at coding than men

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HPE CEO Antonio Neri has restated his intent to continue improving diversity within the company, emphasising the importance of creating a strong pipeline to bring diverse staff into the organisation at all levels.

Speaking at HPE Discover, the company's annual conference in Las Vegas, Neri told IT Pro that the company was still committed to the ongoing process of building a more diverse workforce.

"We went through six and a half years of transformation, which changed our demographics quite a bit," he said, "but this is a journey. You can't just reverse it overnight... This is something that we have to work on all the time."

Neri highlighted the number of female staff members that work within Hewlett Packard Labs, the company's technical research division, as well as women like vice-president of AI, Beena Ammanath, and Susan Benzel, the senior engineering programme manager behind the memory-driven computing project known as The Machine.

"For someone who used to work in an Italian company with only one man and 75 women, it's not a problem for me," he joked, adding "you have to make an effort, and we have to hold our people accountable to it."

While HPE has committed to making progress, it would appear that - in the UK, at least - it still has room to improve. According to the company's latest gender pay gap report (which companies in the UK are legally required to release) its workforce is more than three-quarters male, and the ratio of men to women in HPE UK's top pay quartile is around seven to one.

The workforce stats are similar to Google's latest diversity report, published last week, which shows little progress in the four years since it started revealing such statistics.

At HPE Discover Europe 2017, outgoing CEO Meg Whitman acknowledged that the company had not done enough for diversity during her tenure, saying "we all have got to do a better job of hiring a diverse group of individuals in early careers out of college and graduate school".

In addition to gender diversity, Neri also indicated that he wants to focus on making HPE more racially diverse. "Diversity comes in different forms," he said; "one form is obviously hiring females in the executive branch, but also ethnicity." As an example, he pointed out the hiring last year of Archana 'Archie' Deskus as the company's global CIO.

He stated that while diversity is used as a metric by the company, HPE also makes a point of having diversity candidates as a specific part of the pipeline whenever it's hiring for a new position. "It's not just about executives; it's also career technical path," he said.

Like HPE, its sister company HP Inc has also signed up to a UK initiative to improve diversity in tech workforces, called the Tech Talent Charter, which wants to commit 500 companies to publishing diversity stats by 2019.

The PC and printer business's UK MD, George Brasher, recently outlined some of the measures it's taking to improve diversity in its business in an interview with IT Pro, such as return to work programmes for women who've taken maternity leave, and having a woman on every vacancy shortlist.

Picture: Bigstock

Girls now comprise less than a tenth of Computer Science students in the UK, with 0.4% of female pupils choosing to study it at A-Level.

In comparison, nearly 5% of boys studied it at that level, according to the Department for Education's report on take-up of academic subjects in 2017.

This disparity is similar for other STEM subjects, like maths, where the ratio of girls studying it drops to 18.1% compared to 33% of males.

Though girls made up more than half of A-level students in 2017, boys formed 56% of tech-level students - equivalent to A-levels - and 57.9% of tech certificate students.

Professor Robert Stevens, head of the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, wrote on the university website: "Computer Science is a good choice for anyone who wants the means to give vent to their curiosity, imagination and creativity."

Women comprise 24% of the Computer Science staff at Manchester, which Stevens called "unusually high" for a UK university - but not high enough, saying: "I'd like this number to be even higher; for Computer Science in the UK we do well in terms of numbers of women, but I want to do much better."

The university's page on career prospects reports that the number of graduates with Computer Science skills is dropping worldwide, but that the demand and potential earning capacity for graduates are high.

Microsoft faced nearly 240 complaints of discrimination and harassment from women in technical roles between 2010 and 2016, it has been revealed.

A court filing made public on Monday as part of a 2015 lawsuit also alleges that the company systematically denied pay rises or promotions to women, all accusations that Microsoft denies.

Of the 238 complaints referenced in the filing, 118 related to gender discrimination specifically. Microsoft, however, only upheld one of them following internal investigations.

The plaintiffs' lawyers, who are attempting to proceed with a class action lawsuit that could cover more than 8,000 women, called the number of complaints "shocking", and "lacklustre" in the filing, first revealed by Reuters.

Microsoft has countered the claims by saying those taking legal action have been unable to cite a single example of a pay or promotion problem that its investigations team should have acted on but didn't.

Redmond told IT Pro "We want employees to speak up if they have concerns and we strive to make it easy for them to do so. We take all employee concerns seriously and have a fair and robust system in place to investigate employee concerns and take appropriate action when necessary."

The filing is part of a number of documents being exchanged ahead of an upcoming trial, first submitted by Microsoft for the lawsuit's discovery process in October 2017. The filing was kept secret until now as Microsoft argued making the number of complaints and their outcomes public could deter other women from coming forward to report incidents of discrimination or harassment in the future.

However, that scenario was "far too remote a competitive or business harm" to justify keeping the documents sealed, a court official found, which led to the document being made publicly available this week.

A date for the trial is yet to be set and the presiding judge is yet to rule whether or not the case can be turned into a class action.

Main image credit: Bigstock

We constantly hear that there's not enough women in technology roles, and most statistics suggest it's absolutely true.

While women form half of the global workforce, that drops to under a third in IT, according to Gartner, and women fill just 22% of tech leadership roles.

But while there's plenty of advice on getting more women into the tech industry, there's not so much guidance on how to keep them there. This is surprising given the financial incentives - there's a proven link between having a more diverse workforce and earning more money, with McKinsey research pointing to higher profitability as a result.

So IT Pro spoke to Tech Talent Charter co-founder Debbie Forster, and Forrester's security and risk research director, Stephanie Balaouras, to discover their biggest tips on how to retain female tech talent. Here's what they told us.

Examine your culture and avoid 'brotopia'

As Uber discovered, a toxic workplace culture can drive women away and even prove catastrophic for your business in the long-term, making it a priority to get right.

Forster says: "Companies must ensure they understand what their culture is and that's not just what they say it is on the website. It's actually talking to people and understanding what's going on."

She warns against "brotopia" - a borrowed phrase - but adds that change can't simply come from the top down.

"It's about starting those conversations through line management, through department meetings," she explains.

"You need to empower people to ask questions. I don't think there's a point in encouraging confrontational behaviour but I do think it's worth being able to draw attention to things and helping people see ways they can constructively raise attention when they see ways things are going wrong."

The most important thing is to involve everyone in your company, Forster adds. "Getting it wrong brings risk and threat, but getting it right brings opportunity and bottom line profit."

Track your hiring data

Any tech employee worth their salt knows the value of data, and Forrester recommends bringing it to bear on your workforce too.

"Data is critical in two ways," explains analyst Balaouras. Historical data about applicants, hiring, retention rates, promotions, performance reviews and more can expose conscious or unconscious hiring biases, for one thing, she says, but it also helps provide a baseline overview of where you're at, and help you learn from it and set targets you can progress to.

Offer flexible working and encourage normal working hours

We've written a lot about the benefits of flexible working here at IT Pro, and it's no surprise that letting employees work from home now and again is a good way to generate goodwill and loyalty, whatever their gender.

"Long hours is something that drives women and some men out of great tech jobs," Tech Talent Charter's Forster says. "We sometimes find that doing long hours doesn't necessarily mean we're doing better work, we're not necessarily more productive."

"Really working towards genuine flexibility on both sides is a benefit for everyone," explains Forster. It's also a way to ensure that if people are working late, at least they don't then have a long commute home.

By encouraging people to make use of these benefits, "you not only retain great talent but you'll get better work from your talent", Forster argues. "Whenever I gave that flexibility [to work from home] I spent more time checking on my staff and saying to people, 'okay, it's 10pm, you need to sign off soon'."

Get mentoring right

Mentorship and good management are important for all employees, but Forster and Balaouras tell us that providing encouragement and role models is especially vital for female staff.

Balaouras says: "If security teams can formalise or strongly encourage leaders to mentor women, this is important in and of itself because so many women we interviewed said that having mentors inside and outside the organisation was key to their success and their longevity in the industry."

It's important to differentiate mentoring from line management, too, adds Forster: "Line managers are most often focused on what's happening now and what needs to happen next," she says. "A mentor can think more broadly about what might happen in the long-term, what are the possibilities [for your career] and what might be the bigger next step. They help give a wider perspective in terms of reframing situation opportunities to help women see where their assets and strengths are."

Forming good relationships to feel able to provide honest and clear feedback is key for mentors here, as Forster warns that many women have left jobs where they've been passed over for promotion, all because somebody hasn't been straight with them on how to improve, whereas they have with male staff.

"Once relationships are established, providing guidance on career and professional development, encouraging women to apply for new roles and promotion, helping women increase their network throughout the industry et cetera are all very helpful," continues Balaouras.

Rethink your maternity leave support

In a mad rush to finish their tasks and perform handovers in the months before giving birth, one danger is companies can focus too much on a seamless passing of the baton when a member of staff goes on maternity leave, rather than on how best to support that person.

Forster advises more planning before maternity leave begins, and gaining an understanding of how staff want to stay in the loop. There's three official 'keep in touch' days over the course of maternity leave, but some women will want more or less interaction, or to stay in touch in different ways.

"[You have to ask] what would the woman like to see happening in a perfect world, and try and plan that out and see how can you help her keep up to speed on these things in a manageable way," she says. "Whatever you discuss before they leave, give them that flexibility [to change their mind] because we never know what happens when we have a child."

Coming back from maternity leave is just as crucial to get right, and Forster recommends spending the same time and effort on doing it properly as you would on inducting a new member of staff.

Providing bootcamps to upskill women in code bases that have changed, or new technical skills they should learn since their maternity leave, show you remain invested in their development.

Be relentless about professional development

For women re-entering the workforce after childbirth, or women just looking for the next step in their career, professional development is crucial, and can help avoid costly recruitment when you have the right staff already working for you.

"Internal candidates are an excellent funnel for new security talent and a great way to recruit women to the security team," states Balaouras. "The institutional knowledge and influence internal candidates have about the organisation and throughout the organisation are invaluable to security teams - especially teams that struggle with business alignment, engagement and effective communication."

For women coming back from maternity leave, it's worth seeing where they want to take their careers, adds Forster. Those seeking an alternative route might be a better fit for that vacancy you're struggling to fill because they already know your company inside out, and you know the value they can bring already.

Contribute to wider change in the tech industry

The RSA conference, the biggest security event of the year, used to be fine with vendors hiring scantily-clad women for their stands, Balaouras points out (and is now under fire for the lack of women headlining this year's event), but that doesn't mean vendors have to follow suit.

"If every enterprise and vendor made a commitment to promoting a positive, inclusive culture for women at all security events, I really believe the collective effort would make a difference," she says.

Another step is to bring more of your own female tech workers to these events to take an active part in improving the culture.

"Many times I'll find that at the vendor's booth, most of the women are from the event staff, they're not necessarily solution architects and engineers conducting demos and answering attendee's questions," the Forrester analyst states.

Earlier this year, EasyJet's chief executive Johan Lundgren announced he cut his pay to match his predecessor Carolyn McCall. It's a commendable move and one that went some way to setting an example that other companies can follow. But while this should be celebrated, actions like this alone will not be enough to close the gender pay gap.

For that, we need to look at the root cause: the lack of women in senior positions.

In tech roles there simply aren't as many women as there are men a quick scan through the diversity breakdown of top tech firms will show you that. Yet even the women who do take up these roles tend to get the short straw when it comes to chances for career advancement. In fact, the Women, Work and the State of Wage Inequality report, launched in April last year, highlighted that 53% of the time, companies only interview male candidates for a given role.

It's not just a lack of opportunities once they're employed, either. A US survey called Elephant in the Valley found 75% of women have been asked about family life, marital status or children in an interview, highlighting further bias in the interview process simply because some women want to start a family. And those returning from maternity leave can expect to be financially worse off, too, earning a third less than men, according to an IFS report.

Until we solve these issues, the gender pay gap won't be going anywhere.

Unconscious bias

Unconscious bias is one of the underlying reasons for this imbalance in hiring and compensation. Try as we might, prejudice will work its way into our minds and influence our choices; as humans we can't help it.

In business this affects the hiring process, in particular at the interview stage, which can work against us when trying to create a balanced workforce with equal pay; research has found that unconscious bias can profoundly influence recruitment and selection decisions. As part of a recent experiment, researchers asked people to rate two identical CVs, one with a male and one with a female name. The participants, made up of an equal amount of males and females, both rated the male candidate as significantly more competent than the identical female one, and they also suggested a higher salary for the male applicant.

One way around unconscious bias is to hire new employees and set their pay based on data rather than human judgement. This means every decision on pay is made using data. Data doesn't lie, and it can't be biased. It doesn't take into account the fact the employee might be female -- it simply looks at their skills and experience. The benefits of doing this are huge, not only for the individual employees but businesses and the wider economy.

According to research by McKinsey, companies with more gender or racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians. They also rank higher on indicators of organisational cooperation and health, and report higher profitability and returns on equity.

More than that, $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 "if every country matched the progress towards gender parity of its fastest-improving neighbour," according to another McKinsey study. These claims were further bolstered by a London Stock Exchange report that revealed 1,279 women-led companies have contributed a total of 25.9 billion in revenue to the UK economy.

I'm hopeful we'll close the gender pay gap eventually, but it won't happen overnight and will require collective industry action for parity to be achieved. At Hired, we ensure we not only champion this level of transparency in hiring and pay, but that we too publically share our wage and diversity figures.

It's important that we all work together to close the pay gap. For now, making these small but significant changes will help us move towards that ultimate goal.

Gordon Smith is head of UK at Hired

This article originally appeared on Alphr