Nominations are open for the Women in Tech Excellence Awards 2021

For too long, the work and role of women in IT has been unseen and underappreciated. The Women in Tech Excellence Awards 2021 celebrate the essential part women play in the tech space - we'll see you there

Women have always held a key role in technology; from the first programmers to today's leaders, womens' contributions to the field have been just as important as those of men. For years, though, recognition has been lacking, with a culture that seems to actively discourage women from progressing in IT.

Those are just a few of the reasons we launched the Women in Tech Excellence Awards, five years ago. With one of the most successful and well-attended launch years of any event Computing has run, the Awards have gone from strength to strength - and the 2021 edition will be something special.

This year we will be bringing to the fore hundreds of great stories, centering around how women across the technology sector have led the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many women have faced a unique and unforeseen set of challenges in the past 12 months: balancing work and home life, taking on key roles in home schooling, coping with personal and family stress while continuing to make top-class contributions to their businesses are all part of the world we have been unwillingly thrust into. There will be many, many stories of how the women have risen to those challenges, and the new Lockdown Legend of the Year category celebrates them all.

These awards recognise top-performing women from across the technology space and provide inspiration for younger women looking to build a career in our industry. There are categories for women already in senior leadership roles, as well as those just starting on their IT journey - and at every point in between.

The challenge of increasing diversity in IT is now firmly on the agenda across the UK, but it's far from a solved problem. Women are still under-represented across the industry, especially at higher echelons, and they're also likely to be paid less than their male counterparts for the same work.

The issue extends right through the career, starting in schools, where education institutions report little to no growth in the numbers of women taking STEM subjects. More needs to be done to encourage the female IT leaders of tomorrow.

The Women in Tech Excellence Awards are designed to help move us as an industry towards a solution, by recognising and promoting the many talented women and their success stories. There is a place in IT for everyone, and this industry can lead to rewarding, fulfilling careers for all.

The Awards are now in their fifth year and have already celebrated the achievements of over 1,200 women, in front of more 2,000 people. And success isn't just celebrated at the Awards themselves - we also publish videos, galleries and articles from the event on Computing, to ensure that hundreds of thousands of people can see for themselves the talent that's out there.

Click here to nominate yourself or someone else for a spot in the Women in Tech Excellence Awards 2021, which will take place on the 24th November. Nominations close on the 30th April.