So much of the attention on recruiting women to the IT sector, and then keeping hold of them, focuses on qualifications. How can we interest girls in what is often deemed a geeky, boys-only domain? Is it too late once girls have reached the stage of choosing their degrees or possible careers – should we be looking at implementing more IT for girls schemes at primary-school and early secondary-school level instead?

Encouraging more females to follow technology from GCSE through degree-level and into a career is an important objective based on recent education statistics. While at GCSE level, girls constitute 44 percent of IT exams sat, at A-level this figure shrinks to 28 percent. And by the time they get to university, women make up under a fifth of IT graduates.

But the education system is only part of the equation. The majority of women I spoke to during my research for this special focus provide evidence that formal qualifications are not always the answer to drawing more females to IT careers. Most of them had not deliberately studied for a career in IT, but rather had fallen into a job using computers and then progressed into more technical roles; or had worked their way up the business ladder through a variety of roles in sales, marketing and other backgrounds before reaching the top of the tree in an IT firm or department.

Few had technical degrees to prove their IT skills. Rather, the consensus was that on-the-job experience and professional qualifications gathered throughout a career were key to their success.

Confidence, not qualifications, was cited as a key to recruiting more women to IT. The interviewees all agreed that a lack of self-belief and fear of using a computer were core obstacles to more females entering the sector.

The women partly attributed their progression in the industry to not being intimidated by technology. A bugbear for many interviewed was other females in the sector playing down their role by insisting they weren’t technical; or those considering switching to an IT career talking themselves out of it due to a lack of technical understanding. Women considering a career in IT need to have confidence in their abilities, and be less concerned about qualifications, or lack thereof.

Another perception that the women participating in these features wanted to challenge was that women struggle to progress in IT careers compared to other professions. They stressed that female board members and senior executives are in the minority across all sectors. And those who have reached the top pointed out that although they might find themselves the only woman in the room at certain meetings or events, they were always treated as equal.

As this issue’s series of articles demonstrates, there’s still a huge amount of work to be done to redress the gender balance in the IT sector. But it was a refreshing change to hear about the upbeat experiences of so many women already succeeding in technology roles, to counterbalance the statistics and demonstrate the reality of what women considering an IT career can expect.