Supporting Digital Women
I am deeply grateful to Digital Leaders for giving me the opportunity to sponsor a topic so close to my heart. It is really important that women who are leaders in the Digital sector visibly support and champion initiatives that seek to redress the sector gender imbalance. I passionately believe that we must challenge the current barriers, cultural resistance and casual prejudices that prevent and dis-incentivise girls and women from following careers in Digital and ICT. This, in turn, limits the UK’s ability to create and fill well paid jobs in an industry that presently suffers a huge skills gap.
Informed Solutions are delighted to become sponsors of Digital Leaders’ ‘Digital Women’ initiative. Digital Leaders have identified ‘Digital Women’ as a key topic to help promote and raise awareness of the inequalities that persist in the IT sector, while offering key engagement opportunities to those interested in the subject. This will provide a platform for companies, the public and thought leaders to discuss and debate this important area of debate.
As a nation we are struggling to keep pace with the need for digital skills. A National Audit Office report stated that the ‘UK digital skills gap across all industries exacerbates the government’s situation, even before considering demands of transformation’. In this digital age of technology infiltrating every aspect of our lives, you would think we would have women positioned at all levels of IT. However, a recent Computer Weekly report revealed that the average percentage of women working in technology teams in the UK is 12 per cent – down from 15 per cent last year.
Yet companies with more women at board level tend to outperform companies with more men. According to a report by Catalyst, businesses with a high proportion of females had on average, 42% greater return on sales, 53% better return on equity and 66% greater return on invested capital. Digital Leaders contends that our national digital skills gap is amplified by the lack of visibility of women and the rarity of senior positions held by women across all sectors.
In this new partnership, Informed Solutions are keen to highlight the significant benefits that women can bring to both their workplace and professions. At Informed we look to champion diversity at every opportunity and we are thrilled that this collaboration with Digital Leaders will encourage others to do likewise.
