'IT companies being led by the clueless', says Memset co-founder

Kate Craig-Wood, MD and co-founder of cloud hosting firm Memset, explains the scale of the challenge in trying to recruit a diverse IT team

It it still almost impossible to recruit women into technical roles within IT, according to Kate Craig-Wood, MD and co-founder of cloud hosting firm Memset.

Computing recently reported on a finding from KPMG that just nine per cent of senior IT leaders are women. The brand also recently announced its Women in IT Excellence Awards, which is still open for entries.

"In my experience CIOs are rarely especially technical (a problem in itself - geeks don't tend to progress well into management, so IT companies end up being led by the clueless), so while that nine per cent is a dismaying statistic it still doesn't get to the core of the issue which is the sparsity of women in hard-technical careers," said Craig-Wood.

She added that Memset tries hard to positively discriminate in favour of women but still struggles to recruit a gender diverse workforce.

"When you strip away the management positions and non-technical roles in companies (ie. Im talking about just coders, DBAs, systems administrators, DevOps, tech architects etc), women are vanishingly rare and incredibly hard to find even when you try hard like we do. We positively discriminate as much as we possibly can within the law and still only 11 per cent are women. I believe that most companies are more like three per cent.

"We also work extremely hard at mentoring women up the chain of command. My new deputy CEO, Annalise O'Rouke being an excellent example. But that's actually easier since about 24 per cent of the overall business is female, with a much higher proportion in administration and sales. My hope is that the overall increase in women's salaries shown in the report is an indication of other companies doing this too, or perhaps just a redressing of the pay inequality."

Imogen Wethered, CEO and Co-Founder of cloud platform Qudini sounded a similar note, explaining that she also struggles to recruit women, often because there are no female applicants for technical roles.

"Having worked in IT for five years, playing an active role in recruiting talent for my tech company, I have found the state of diversity a consistent challenge," explained Wethered. "This is most challenging when recruiting roles for developers.

"Reviewing our past job applications for developers, in the majority of them we have had no female applicants. In only one role have we seen a maximum of a 12 per cent female applicant rate.

"Last year stack-overflow created a survey of developer statistics, the most shocking to me was the fact that just 5.8 per cent of developers were female. The disparity is vast, and in five years in IT I have not seen it alter," Wethered said.

Craig-Wood argued that more female roles models are needed, and that the education system must play its part.

"Fundamentally we still need to get more girls into IT," said Craig-Wood. "There are some great role models out there, like Sophie Louise Johnson, a Scrum Master at the FT as well as a triathlete for team GB, and we desperately need women like her in our geek squads to break up the male group think.

"Schools need to do more to encourage proper IT skills - coding, not how to use word - from a younger age (I was being taught coding at school aged 10). And finally, we need to keep working on the societal stigma that "boys are better at STEM". I keep hearing of parents and teachers unconsciously and unmaliciously perpetuating that myth."

Computing's Women in IT Excellence Awards aims to champion females working in IT, and help to create and promote female role models for the industry.

Entries are open until Friday 30th June.