Female IT workers believe it’s harder to get their foot in the door than progress up the IT career ladder, according to a recent study by the Training Camp.

Two thirds of the 100 female IT professionals surveyed said it’s more difficult to get into the industry as a woman than to progress and be promoted once they have secured a tech job. 

The survey suggests this is because companies don’t think women are as technically focused as men and that females looking for their first job have to work hard to convince potential employers of their genuine technical potential.

For me, it would be interesting to know how long the female IT workers surveyed here have actually been in the industry because I don’t think this would reflect female IT first-jobbers’ experiences today.  These days at graduate level the industry is incredibly open to recruiting women. 

The truth of the matter is that it is now very tough for women – and men - to break into IT because of the decline in entry-level positions, due to the offshoring and automation of this type of work, which in turn exacerbates the skills shortage situation. 

In terms of the lack of women in IT, this is really down to perception – women are not really aware of what a fulfilling career choice it can be.  With responsibility for a company’s critical business systems, being technically competent and commercially aware go hand in hand.  A career in technology is so much more than just sitting in a corner coding.  I doubt that anyone thinks that a musical composer has a boring job, but he has to do a highly-technical coding job too in order to implement his vision.

Our research of 1,000 UK teenage schoolgirls showed a strong interest in technology with 76 per cent claiming to be ‘very interested’, yet the majority of these (76 per cent) just were not interested in a job in IT.

Somewhere between secondary school and university, girls decide that IT isn’t for them, or perhaps they just don’t consider it.  Either way the UK is missing out on wealth of talent. 

As I’ve said before (and as fellow bloggers like Mark Samuels have agreed) we collectively need to get the message across that IT can be a fulfilling career choice for all; consider running IT apprenticeships and work with outsourcers to create opportunities for IT juniors in the UK or we will all miss out in the long term. 

My last post dealt with the merits of smarter, flexible working and how businesses need to define policies for remote working and WFH (working from home) before rolling out a scheme company-wide.  The use of IT to improve process efficiency is ingrained into our every thought and decision; we now need to consider environmental factors in the same breath as cost saving. 

Findings from a recent study by Oxford University show that flexible working and WFH is definitely one way to help cut our carbon footprint.  WFH means employees can dodge rush hour and traffic jams, and less commuting means less carbon.  Broadband, web and phone conferencing for homeworking and international virtual meetings are all technologies which can reduce the energy demands of the business.

Aside from flexible working, IT can employ a number of measures which can help the business become more environmentally friendly.

Workforces are growing ever-more dispersed and the physical office is being replaced by a virtual one.  This means that today’s documents are stored on servers rather than in filing cabinets.  Less paper might mean more trees but with computers, printers and servers running all day, technology is a major consumer of energy within businesses. 

IT leaders need to identify IT management or IT controllable practices that can help the business reduce power consumption.  For instance, in a global business it’s not reasonable to shut down all servers overnight, but it’s not unreasonable to set policies that require PCs, monitors and printers to be switched off (not just left on standby) when not in use, that office lights are controlled by timers or movement sensors, and that heat generated by computer equipment is used to offset the office heating bill.

Printing will be with us for a long time yet but we can more actively promote electronic data interchange for most commercial documents, saving on printing, postage and transport costs and their associated energy demands.

To find out more about how IT can go green, Computing is running a four part web seminar programme which introduces a seven-step plan to improving our green credentials.