The technology industry has launched a new initiative to break the stranglehold men have jobs on the sector, in an effort to boost the number of women – who currently account for just 17% of tech and IT workers – taking up a career in the business.
The Tech Talent Charter is backed by 80 organisations, including Nationwide, BT and the BBC, which will share their employment and diversity data anonymously to a central database for annual publication.
The first target set by Jacqueline de Rojas, president of TechUK, is to raise the share of women in the tech workforce to 20% by 2020.
She said: “We’re creating more jobs than we can fill in technology and clearly it’s for us to turn to the women to fill those roles. With Brexit we may not be able to fill these roles externally as easily as we could have before.
“Culture trumps strategy every time and what we definitely have to do is make sure there’s a culture of opportunity equality and no room for sexism in our industry.”
It is a subject close to the heart of many working in the data industry, too.
As part of her ongoing campaign, data industry pioneer Edwina Dunn has recently joined forces with Women in Data UK to launch the “20 in Data” project, designed to shine a light on 20 exceptional stories of female achievement and inspire data practitioners across the UK.
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