Women in IT

Waterstons' Consultant Vanessa Karnebogen talks about Women in IT, or rather the lack of...

I recently read an article about a Gartner study on women in IT. It stated that only 25% of employees in the IT sector are female with a decreasing trend. So why is that? Is this industry still very much a male domain? Or are the majority of women simply not interested in IT and technology as soon as it goes beyond mobile phones and the Internet?

According to the article a mix of female and male employees in an IT department will undoubtedly contribute to success as the difference between the genders and the way they work and interact with colleagues and business partners will be an ideal mix.

This is especially true as IT organisations now attribute more importance to areas such as sourcing and vendor management – an area where female strengths could be very useful. However, is this not a confirmation of the old stereotypes and roles – something the article was trying not to promote?

It concluded that employers should proactively recruit women interested in IT. Though working in IT myself I assume that this is not going to be easy – among my (female) friends I don’t know anybody who would be interested to learn more about virtual servers, data security or intranet applications.

Admittedly, this might seem daunting for someone who is not technically inclined. Nevertheless, I think it can be very fascinating especially as technology becomes more and more important in our everyday lives – regardless of the gender. So any woman reading this should think about including the IT sector in the next job search. It can actually be very helpful to understand the theory behind a data backup before your PC crashes – or at least to be surrounded by capable people in case it happens....

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