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Story Posted: 06 September 2007

"The IT sector has one of the better records of attracting women within engineering but still only 20 per cent of the workforce is female, so a large reservoir of skills continues to go untapped."

The IT and engineering sectors face unique but not impossible challenges in creating a workforce that truly reflects modern society, according to a new report published by researchers at Roehampton University.

Led by Dr Christina Evans from the School of Business and Social Sciences, the Royal Academy of Engineering and Equalitec report, Implementing Diversity Policies: Guiding Principles, calls on engineering and IT companies to diversify their workforces.

Dr Evans said that while IT, electronics and computing in particular were major aspects of most businesses, skills shortages exist both in these sectors and in the wider engineering industry.

“The IT sector has one of the better records of attracting women within engineering but still only 20 per cent of the workforce is female, so a large reservoir of skills continues to go untapped,” said Dr Evans.

“The nature of work in IT is changing, particularly with the growth of offshoring and outsourcing, changing the skills needed by many companies. Many employers are now looking for employees with ‘hybrid’ skills – behavioural as well as technical skills.

“This is a combination which women in particular are seen as been able to contribute. However, the culture of many IT and engineering workplaces – macho, nerdy and involving long hours – can make it difficult for women to gain entry and reach their full potential.”

The report calls on business leaders to provide vision and respond creatively to the challenges of improving diversity, in particular making succession planning more open and transparent and sharing data with other companies to establish industry-wide benchmarks. This is particularly important in addressing the gender pay gap.

The new Gender Equality Duty may bring about change, says the report, as any private sector organisation that is seeking to provide a service for the public sector will need to show at contract stage that it is gathering gender-disagreggated data of various kinds – one standard indicator will relate to equal pay.

Co-author Cornelia Wilson said making the business case is almost as important as effective leadership, at the simplest level linking cost/benefit directly to budgets.

One respondent to a consultation on returners said: “If it’s someone you know, who was a good employee, who wants to come back and they need £2,000 of training, but you’re not paying for an agency to recruit them, it’s a no-brainer from a business case viewpoint”.

Ms Wilson said the diversity agenda needs to be an integral part of the strategic business planning agenda: “Diversity policies must be embedded throughout engineering businesses – like writing in a stick of rock.”

The report contains many examples of good practice from a wide variety of companies to illustrate how policies on retraining and flexible working have paid dividends in staff retention.

The results found that attracting and retaining talent, and managing the workforce had become more complex with the impact of globalisation and social transformation driven by technology. Companies need to be focused and active if they want to attract and retain more women. Workplace cultures which value work/life balance and offer different, more flexible ways of working and focus on output and results are good for women and for men.