Having left school with high grades in maths, physics and English, Tiffany Hall was tempted to study English at university. In the end, however, she opted for a degree in maths and computing, a watershed decision that led to a highly successful career in IT.

She has been at the BBC - the world's largest broadcasting organisation - for 15 years, and last year was appointed CIO. Her success has been partly driven, she says, by the fact that she is "technical enough to talk about technology but literate enough to explain it to the business".

Hall's story is not exactly a typical one. The number of women in Western countries choosing to enter the IT profession has dropped dramatically in recent years. In the US, for example, the proportion of women in IT has fallen from about 35% in 1990 to fewer than 20% today, while the proportion studying computer science at university has, in some European countries, fallen to 15% or less.

Moreover, a 2010 report, "Women in IT Scorecard", suggests that women are increasingly concentrated in jobs at the low end of the payscale: they make up only 14% of IT strategy and planning professionals, but nearly 60% of database assistants.

Skills shortfall

At a time when the IT sector is expanding rapidly, the lack of access to that female skills-base is clearly bad news - for business, the public sector and the IT profession. Europe is experiencing a shortfall of about 70,000 skilled ICT workers, according to research by the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies.

If Western economies have any hope of addressing such a shortfall they need to tackle the issue on multiple fronts - and CIOs have a critical role to play in ensuring the opportunity is there for individuals and for the organisations who need to recruit them.

Clearly, that chain is currently broken. "Although females taking IT-related qualifications at school are low in number, they consistently outperform their male counterparts. So we can presume that if females were more inclined to participate in IT careers then the pool of talent available to IT employers would improve noticeably," says Karen Price, CEO of e-skills, a UK-based digital skills development agency.

A mixed-gender workforce also has notable - and obvious - benefits. A review of research by the Anita Borg Institute, an organisation that campaigns to improve the impact of women in the technology sector, identified studies that highlight how mixed groups are better at making decisions and solving problems than male-only groups.

And, as Telle Whitney, CEO of the Institute points out, it makes sense to employ staff who understand what both male and female customers want: "If you don't have women involved in the product definition, it's likely your product won't meet the needs of your customers."

But why has IT become such an unappealing profession for women? The problem starts young, says Hall, who argues that girls have little positive association with technical subjects. "There's a whole cultural stigma around girls being good at maths, physics, technology and engineering," she says.

At the same time, the exposure to IT through teaching in schools is uninspiring, she suggests, because teachers are often ill-qualified in the subject and find it difficult to keep up with fast-moving IT developments.

Different attitudes

In contrast to the experience in Europe and North America, the pattern in other parts of the world is strikingly different. In Asian countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, India and the Philippines, women make up close to half of the IT workforce. The reason for the difference seems to lie, at least in part, in the attitude of schools, parents and children to the importance of technical qualifications.

Maria Angelica Rapadas, CIO of the Ayala group of companies in the Philippines, says: "It's seen as a good career choice. In the Philippines, the culture is that we want our children to be educated, graduate and go on to a better life."

Nothing new there; but - unlike elsewhere for women as well as men - "IT is seen as one of the careers that is a route to that better life and the opportunity to work and live in other countries," she says.

Whitney believes another factor is that the education system in some Asian countries tends to channel students into particular courses strictly based on their aptitude. "There are countries where they test you and see what you're good at and they really bring you along," she says. "And in those countries, there tend to be more women going into computing or engineering."

In the West, she points out, 17-year-olds often have no real concept of a long-term career, and often make poor subject choices with little regard to how useful these will be when they enter the workforce.

Selling the IT profession

Anne Stokes, business unit director for retail, transportation, manufacturing and services at Fujitsu, believes the IT profession needs to make itself appear more attractive to young women.

"Establishing the awareness of what technology can do doesn't have to mean being locked in a room with a bunch of hairy-toed engineers working out what the next phase of coding is going to be," she says. "There are plenty of other facets to IT that make it exciting, dynamic. And that variety needs to be exposed by the profession a lot more."

However, the consumerisation of IT is helping to change attitudes, she says. "The level of interest in the innovation, design and use of technology is rising. And that can only increase how women view the application of IT in society and in business."

Addressing the attractiveness of IT as a career choice has been an uphill task in the West. Over the years, there have been numerous programmes that attempt to encourage girls to study ICT at school and beyond. Marcy Klevorn, director of global IT operations at the Ford Motor Company, is also president of the Michigan Council of Women in Technology, which offers university scholarships to female students planning to pursue a career in IT.

Part of the Council's work involves sending female IT experts into schools to address girls' misapprehensions about what IT is like, says Klevorn. "We expose young girls in schools to technology, so we do robotics and web design contests to show that it can be fun, and give them the chance to see some female role models."

Mass exodus

Initiatives like these are important, but represent only part of what needs to be done if any re-balancing of IT is likely. The problem is not just that fewer women are entering the profession, but that - in many countries in Europe and North America at least - they are leaving the profession in droves.

A 2005 report, "Women in the IT Industry: Towards a business case for diversity", commissioned by the UK's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), found that while many women leave the profession after the birth of their children, another, substantial group of women leave in their late 40s or early 50s, after decades of experience.

A follow-up report, "How to retain women in the IT industry", surveyed women on why they had left, and elicited typical answers like "the long working hours", "an aggressively male culture", "a lack of promotion opportunities for women" and "a lack of recognition for their achievements".

The need for flexibility

Many organisations, recognising the importance of not just recruiting women, but of retaining them, have put in place programmes to improve the ratio of women to men. One of the most important of these has been to implement flexible working policies, allowing employees to work at home for some of the week or to work part-time. Domestic commitments remain a huge issue for many women, particularly when their children are young.

As Jane Moran, CIO of Thomson Reuters Markets division, points out, "There are times when you need to dial up and dial down in your career for a number of reasons." Recognising that men too sometimes need to balance domestic and work commitments, Thomson Reuters has recently extended flexible working opportunities to all employees.

Technology itself has come to play an important role in such situations. As Stokes says: "Collaboration technologies that enable mobile and home-based working - videoconferencing, IP telephony, instant messaging and other unified comms tools - have matured to the extent that they offer a significantly better engagement than was possible even five years ago.

"That provides the kind of flexibility that fits with many women's other commitments at certain points in their lives. A lot of women put that to the fore, and flexibility enables organisations to retain their female talent," she says.

The adoption of flexible work policies have been shown to be effective: the UK-based telecoms giant BT has found that by offering home-working opportunities to its employees, it has increased retention after maternity leave to a stunning 98%. But it means getting away from a culture of presenteeism that judges people by the amount of time they spend in the office or in front of their screen, rather than the quality of the work they produce.

So how else can you stop the flow of women out of the organisation as they reach the mid-point in their career? The fast pace of change in IT can be a deterrent to re-entering the workforce after a break. "In the technology arena, it is doubly hard to re-enter because it moves so fast," says Ford's Klevorn. "And if you've been out of the workforce for 10 or 20 years it's going to be harder than in some fields to break back in."

One solution, suggests Maggie Berry, founder and director of the online job board and networking forum Women In Technology, is to implement "returners' schemes" where women who have been away from the workplace for a few years are given intensive training when they return - a cheaper option, she argues, than letting years of investment in an individual go to waste.

Women at the top

If there are few women in IT as a whole, there are even fewer in senior posts. Organisations that have successfully worked to promote women to higher roles have used mentoring schemes to give talented women advice and support in pursuing their career path.

"Mentoring is one of the things that has the most profound impact on the workforce," says the Anita Borg Institute's Whitney. "For women, it's often a matter of confidence, not competence." A mentor, she argues, can give them the confidence to try for more senior jobs.

Similarly, many organisations now provide both formal and informal networks for women, giving them the chance to meet their peers, discuss challenges and share ideas and opportunities. This kind of contact is hugely important, says Berry. "Women are often so intent on doing their job they often don't look up. They just get the job done and then they need to take care of lots of commitments outside of work."

Thomson Reuters has also started to provide transparent job descriptions, says Jane Moran. "Women were previously unsure of what the career path was within the organisation in terms of technology. There's been a huge amount of work completed to make sure we have clear, meaningful descriptions of career directions."

Cause for optimism

All these strategies - improved flexible working opportunities, mentoring and coaching, networking and clearer career development - are proven to work. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of women CIOs, though still disproportionately small in senior management, is rising.

Mark Polansky, managing director in North America for information technology officers at recruitment agency Korn/Ferry, says he sees more women coming through for senior IT jobs. "Clearly the decades-old good ol' boys network in IT has long since died, and as IT becomes a mainstream, more strategic corporate function, management boards are looking for the best athletes regardless of where they come from, regardless of their gender or their cultural or ethnic background."

Stokes suggests that is the hallmark of more mature organisations. "Those that are truly global in terms of their operations and delivery, like Ford, Shell, BP or BAT, are exceedingly balanced in terms of their male/female mix," says Stokes. "They are focused on selecting talent and have the processes that enable the people with the right skills to rise into key IT roles. They also have the work/life balance and career management approaches that draw and retain women."

It may be the changing nature of IT that provides the most hope, though. Organisations increasingly realise that they need staff with a wide range of technical, communication and business skills. Indeed the traditional technology-centric channel, through which most of the male workforce flows, may not be the best source of future business-attuned IT leaders.

By providing women with the opportunity to see the potential impact their careers can make on business and society through the applications of IT, they may eventually be attracted to the profession in suitably healthy numbers.

Photography: Nato Welton

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