Drive to get more women into IT

LENA Wilson, the chief executive of Scottish Enterprise, will tomorrow preside over the launch of a new group aimed at growing the number of women taking leading roles in the technology sector.

The Scotland Women in Technology (SWiT) group, backed by Cisco, Dell, IBM, HP, Scottish Enterprise and Oracle, aims to redress the declining number of women making a career in IT. It is estimated that this may be one reason why Scotland currently lags the UK by 30 per cent on productivity gains derived from the IT industry.

The group is the brainchild of Silka Patel, an executive assistant at Cisco.

She said: "This sector is a brilliant place for women to work and progress, yet we are very much in the minority.

"With this group we hope to encourage more women into this exciting area, to develop their skills and so maximise the contribution to our economy," she added.

In Scotland, women account for less than 20 per cent of the workforce in science, engineering and technology. In the UK 1.2 million people are employed in the IT workforce, a figure that has doubled since the early 1990s, yet the representation of women has steadily declined and continues to do so.

The group claims that although females taking IT related qualifications in secondary education are low in number, they consistently outperform their male counterparts.

It argues that if females were more inclined to participate in IT careers then the pool of talent available to employers would improve, with a positive effect on the economy.

Wilson said: "It's networks such as these that can help women build a successful career, think globally and really fly the flag for Scottish businesses."