Dr Clare Walsh from the Institute of Analytics discusses the persistent gender disparity in computer science and proposes alternative pathways and inclusive strategies to encourage and empower women to participate in the tech industry.
The ratio of men to women in STEM occupations overall in the UK is around 3:1. The percentage of women creeps up slowly around every ten years.
For any regular observer, waiting for evolution to bring gender balance back to the field is going to be a very long wait.
In my field, computer science, the figures are far worse. We’re seeing worrying signs that attrition rates in tech are threatening the little progress we’ve made so far.
Does STEM have a problem with women?
It certainly has in the past and in the present. I would say that the majority of women I know in STEM have come through non-traditional routes.
In my case, my interest started when I saved up my pocket money to buy a Dragon Computer and learnt to code in Basic at the birth of the PC age.
Myself and a boy called Justin founded the Baden Powell Middle School Computer Club on Tuesday lunchtimes, mostly because we both wanted access to the one PC in the whole school without the other kids around.
Me and Justin went our separate ways and I moved to an all-female secondary school. In my first year, they gutted the typewriting room and turned it into a PC lab. It was not good news for me. The curriculum stayed the same – slightly more efficient secretarial skills.
Fast-forward to my early career. My friend Ian candidly told me not to bother applying to the computer department of the household-name bank where he worked. The supervisor had a policy of not employing women.
He had employed a woman once, and it didn’t work out, and he felt justified generalising from that one experience to all the women of the world. So much for a scientific approach!
This field has a dirty past.
The absence of women in computer science
Fast-forward a few decades, and I’m now the Director of Education at the Institute of Analytics. With a PhD in Web Science, I advise governments on their AI regulations. There are low numbers of women in STEM in general, but the absence of women my age and in tech in particular really stands out.
I can’t speak for the other STEM subjects, but in computer science, if we’re going to turn around the figures for representation of women in the working lifetime of any of us, we need to stop making the entry criteria ‘attended a computer science course at the age of 18-21’.
Why alternative routes are needed to get women into computer science
There are several reasons why we need alternative routes to get women into the field; most of them found where I first hit problems back in high school.
Firstly, let me make it clear that women are missing out. STEM subjects are an amazing career to get into. There are so many problems that women care about that we could work on fixing, while earning a good enough salary to support a good life.
If we look at how digital technologies are about to transform the workplace through data analytics and AI, women need to be involved. AI is making all kinds of decisions on our behalf. None of us want to leave it entirely to men to decide what kind of society we want in the future, but if we keep opting out of the technical discussions, that’s what’s going to happen.
Low percentage of girls enrolled in computer science courses
But the number of girls enrolled in computer science courses is not nearly enough. In England and Wales, the overall number of girls who took GCSE computing increased in 2023, but that was after a dismal free fall the previous year.
Ten years ago, in 2013, 47% of ICT candidates were female. Fast-forward to 2022, and the number dropped to just 21%. That’s only one in five, with similar figures for subject choice at 14-16 in Scotland. Numbers for A-Levels and university enrolment are not much better.
Women only make up 15% of the workforce in the tech industry
Once in the workforce, counting female participation in tech becomes challenging as the data simply isn’t there. Recruitment data can give some indication. One study suggested that it’s not just a problem that the overall number of women in tech is low, at around 15% of the workforce.
The number drops to around 10% in senior positions. This can partly be explained by problems of repelling women in the past, but studies suggest that there is a troubling dropout of women working in tech around the age of 35, just when they might get promoted to more senior roles.
Boosting the number of women in computer science
The solution is clear to me. If we really want a healthy number of women in computer science, we have to create avenues for them to enter the field later in their careers.
The idea of a mid-career pivot for all older workers was mooted on 26 February by the Singapore Government. They announced financial support for anyone who wanted to return to university after the age of 40 to retrain in a new field.
Careers are long, and society changes fast, and the government is responding to the obvious problem that skills learned 20 years ago just aren’t standing up well to the test of time. I retrained in my 40s. This time around, the field didn’t find ways to repel me.
I was selected for a conversion project at Southampton University. It was led by a visionary team, among them was Professor Sir Tim Berners Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, and Prof Dame Wendy Hall, who led the UK AI Strategy review.
I think it probably took the leadership team’s unquestioned pedigree to get past the obvious resistance to bringing social science specialists into a top international computer science department back then.
The programme’s goal was to improve understanding of how socio-technical machines work as they interact with society. An unexpected bonus was that the department saw a small but very significant influx of female students compared to previous numbers. More than that, it worked. Retraining mid-career workers works, and the result is highly interdisciplinary thinkers.
If we know that, for whatever reasons, girls are systematically not receiving STEM training, we need to find new routes into STEM for women.
I’m proud to say that the work I do currently at the not-for-profit Institute of Analytics offers supportive ways for anyone to join this field. They belong here, no matter what their background.
And there is a world of tech today that will not make them feel excluded and unwanted, whether it is because of gender, ethnic identity, age, or any other reason. Inclusive technology benefits everyone.
