Men and women have complementary strengths and weaknesses; we have evolved this way to avoid over-design and make best use of our resources. We are designed to work well in the smallest family units, and in the work place. Numerous studies have shown that corporations with gender-balanced teams at all levels of the organisation perform significantly better. Today’s technology industry is in dire need of the “softer” skills often associated with women.

An example is the multi-talented Sophie Johnston. Top of her year in Computer Information Systems at Liverpool University, she is now working as a junior ScrumMaster using the agile programming methodology. A ScrumMaster is an agile project manager who emphasizes facilitation, leadership and communication over traditional command-and-control activities, skills that women tend to bring to a team.

Earlier this year Sophie also helped dent the “IT Crowd” image of IT professionals, stereotypically seen as sandal-wearing blokes lacking social skills. She won the most votes in the Miss Universe GB competition, showing that brains and beauty can indeed come in one package, but that is still a surprise to many people in the industry. This achievement alone is not going to change the public perception but it’s a start.

The perception that “girls are not good with tech” is perhaps the toughest battle of all. As someone who has had the extremely unusual experience of seeing life from both sides of the gender divide I can assure readers that sexism is alive and well in our industry today, and the perpetrators are not always men. Where this attitude is doing the most harm is in our schools, with girls even today being discouraged from taking computing and ICT. It’s an alarming fact that the number of young women taking A-Level computing has fallen from 13% to 9% in the last 5 years. Ironically this is despite girls performing better than boys in GCSE and A-Level Computing and ICT.

When growing up my sister and I (as a boy, remember) were encouraged towards different topics – humanities and arts versus science and maths. Speaking with teenagers today I fear that the same stereotyping which encouraged my sister and me to take different paths two decades ago is still prevalent. I am confident that if my female brain had been born into a normal female body, rather than a male one, I would not be the successful technology entrepreneur that I am today since I would not have been encouraged in that direction.

My favourite geek-girl, Sophie, is the exception, not the rule to the rule; only 5% of her course was female. We desperately need to encourage more young teenage girls towards maths, science and technology, and that is something that each and every one of us can and should do something about. Leaving the gender issue aside, we need the girls simply to bolster the ICT professional workforce. In my capacity as an employer I am disturbed by how hard it is to find good ICT graduates of any gender and I can’t afford for it to be a constraint on the growth of my business. Above all persuading more Sophies to enter the industry is fundamental to the success of the UK technology sector and indeed UKplc. The wider industry needs to take up the cudgels.

This article was also published in iQ magazine – the publication for the high-technology sector.

The Times saw fit to make the point that close to two-thirds of the women included in Management Today’s list studied what some still think of as “male subjects” at university and more than half work in “traditionally male sectors”. The very fact that they sought to make such a distinction highlights the problems with getting girls into STEM subjects; people still think they are “subjects for boys”!

Now, before you start shouting “What about Lisa Myers?”, yes she is indeed in the list and does indeed work within the IT sector. I know Lisa in fact; she has helped with the optimisation of memset.com. However, unlike me she is not a technologist – she is a marketeer, and has entered the sector in that role. That is not to dismiss her talents (which are prodigious, and I would recommend her), but we already have a good representation of women working in non-IT roles within the sector (40%).

What I am deeply concerned about the lack of girls entering the profession. According to the BERR, Intellect & BCS Women in IT scorecard, women now account for less than 11% of IT professionals working within the sector.

The IT sector is ever-more critical to our nation’s economic prosperity, with the knowledge economy employing 41% of our workforce. Further, ICT has been identified by the WWF, Gartner & McKinsey as being the key to reducing our society’s collective carbon emissions. The lack of diversity in IT threatens to compromise our sector’s potential.

I was a self-taught computer programmer,and my first job was with Arthur Andersen business consulting as IT consultant. I was their fastest “Internet poach” went on to head business development for Easyspace and subsequently formed Memset with Nick in 2002, and am now a renowned business woman. Hopefully, girls looking at their career choices today will be able to see the potential in examples like me (even if I did not start out quite like them!) and go for a career in IT.

However, at present something is turning them off IT, and that is the courses at schools. Ask any 11-15 year old about IT, and you’ll hear about how boring it is because they have to do stuff with word processing and Access databases, and clueless teachers try to teach them now to use Google (which they can do in their sleep). We is alienating a generation because of bad course design and bad teaching. Perhaps renaming courses “computer science” and actually making it interesting might help?

At age 11 I was working my way through “Datalog”; BASIC programming for the BBC Micro. It was fun – a lot of fun! I got to make the computer play bad tunes, and draw pretty shapes on the screen. My passion for technology is borne out of those days. Why have we taken such a giant leap backwards, and why are we now muddying IT’s good name by forcing kids to do pointless, boring user-activities instead of showing them the wonder that is information technology?

Update 14th May: Late yesterday, Dell removed the elements I was complaining about! Not sure if I can take credit, but a win regardless. Still work to do there though Dell-folks.

Earlier this week Dell launched a new Website subsection targeted at women called ‘Della‘. The site is incredibly patronising and grossly sexist, offending me and many other women, both techies and non-techies alike. You can see the PDF here, or a transcript in HTML below:

Re: ‘Della’ Web site

I am writing to you in two capacities:

1) My company, Memset Dedicated Hosting, is a significant customer of yours. We are one of UK’s top Web & IT hosting companies, and have a strong ethos of corporate responsibility. We exclusively use Dell servers for our infrastructure, and even in this recessive climate we expect to spend several hundred thousand pounds on Dell equipment this year.

2) I am a spokesperson for Intellect’s (the UK’s high tech trade association) women in IT forum, and I am also closely involved with the British Computer Society’s Women’s forum strategic panel. In short, I am a strong voice in the movement to challenge the stereotypes and sexism that pervade the UK technology industry, and to encourage more girls towards careers in IT. These are my views, however, and you will get more diplomatic letters from those organisations individually.

My female colleagues and I (IT professionals and non-technologists alike) find the Della Web site to be patronising and sexist in the extreme. As IT companies, we all have a moral corporate responsibility to challenge the incredibly damaging stereotype that “women are clueless about technology”, and it is all the more important with a product that will certainly appeal to impressionable girls!

The “tech tips” section leaves me positively fuming with its derogatory implication that most women are vain housewives who need to be treated like children when it comes to computers! Here are some of the particularly offensive “tech tips”:

2. Get healthier: Use your mini to track calories, carbs and protein with ease, watch online fitness videos, map your running routes and more.
3. Eat better: Find recipes online, store and organize them, and watch cooking videos.
4. Get organized: ‘Remember the Milk’ is a free, tweakable online task manager that’s easy to use.

Please remove the offensive content immediately. I realise that it is part of the US Dell site, but we are in a global economy and the Internet does not recognise International borders!

You are already getting significant bad press as a result of this site’s launch:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/12/dell_launches_della/

The Register is the UK’s leading technology news Web site, incase you did not know.

Further, I strongly urge that Dell Europe sign up to the Code of Best Practices for Women and ICT, produced by the EU Directorate General for Information Society and Media, and launched by Commissioner Reding last March, at a conference in Brussels. Please see the document “Cyberellas are IT”, downloadable here:

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/itgirls/doc/proceedings_09.pdf

Please feel free to contact via telephone on +44 1483 608010 or via email at md@memset.com to discuss this matter, or preferably just remove the insulting content elements.

Yours sincerely,

Kate Craig-Wood
Managing Director
Memset Ltd.

Kate.

5. GENDER PAY AND EQUALITY REPORTS

Nearly forty years after the Equal Pay Act, the gender pay gap remains at
22.6%. It is higher in the private sector where around 80%9 of all employees
work. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s inquiry into the
fi nancial services sector has revealed gender pay gaps of up to 60% in
annual gross pay and as much as 79% in annual incentive (bonus) pay.
We cannot tackle pay discrimination if it is hidden. Shining a spotlight on
the problem, workplace by workplace, will help employers and employees
identify the causes and take action.

The private sector

The Bill will contain a power to require reporting on the gender
pay gap by employers with 250 or more employees. However the
Government has committed not to use this power before 2013 and it will
only be used if sufficient progress on reporting has not been made. The
Equality and Human Rights Commission will develop a set of metrics for
gender pay reports in consultation with business, unions and others over
the summer. The Commission will monitor progress on reporting within the
private sector annually.

Another very sensible element is banning secrecy clauses:

Banning secrecy clauses on pay

According to research carried out in 2003 by the former Equal
Opportunities Commission10, 22% of employers did not permit employees
to share pay information with their colleagues and women were more likely
than men to be in the dark about colleagues’ pay.

The Equality Bill will ban pay secrecy or ‘gagging’ clauses which
stop employees discussing their pay with their colleagues.

This does not mean that people will be compelled to disclose their pay
details. But in situations where colleagues work closely together but are
paid different amounts or have different benefits packages, it is right that
they should be able to compare them if they want to.

The bill also encourages positive action:

The Equality Bill will expand the way positive action can be used
so that employers can pick someone for a job from an under-
represented group when they have the choice between two or
more candidates who are equally suitable, provided they do not
have a general policy of doing so in every case.

For example, the new positive action measures could mean:
The board of a bank that is 100% male decides to appoint a woman
when making a choice between two equally suitable candidates.
Choosing a woman will help to address the gender imbalance at the
top, making the management more representative of its customer base,
which is 50% female.

The Bill will not allow positive discrimination, which will remain unlawful.
Positive discrimination means employing or promoting people just because
they are from an under-represented group, even if they are less suitable. The
Equality Bill will not allow this to happen and will not allow employment
quotas.

All in all, it appears that the bill is sensibly worded in order to address the key issue of pay inequality, which badly affects the IT sector as seen in the women in IT scorecard, and is also not something for businesses to fear.

The IOD’s knee-jerk “it will hurt business, especially SMEs” is totally unjustified:

1. The pay audit requirement only applies to companies with over 250 staff.
2. I am an owner-manager of an SME, and I do pay audits already. They are not onerous, and I regard them as a prudent part of good business management anyway.

The other negative reaction from old-school male-dominated business groups like the IOD was that this would force pay rises at a time of recession. There are again two key things they have missed:

1. You don’t have to do anything until 2013.
2. It does not require you to pay staff more – just pay the guys less, perhaps? If making redundancies, then fire the expensive people first.

I think that the gender pay gap can be put down principally to one thing: Women, in general, tend to care more about the collective and less about the individual. Testosterone makes people a little more selfish and little less altruistic. Yes, a sweeping generalisation, but I am one of the few people who can speak from personal experience. This means that guys put themselves forwards for promotion and pay rises more than women, who are generally more happy to keep working towards the greater good as a smaller part of the large machine. The equality bill will finally start helping to reward that better, more feminine mentality.

Kate.

PS. And yes, I will be resigning from my position as vice-chair of the local IOD branch.

The Women in IT Scorecard, a partnership project by BCS, BERR, e-skills UK and Intellect, has been updated with figures for 2008. These are some of the figures I have taken from it:

• Overall numbers of women in IT occupations have dropped from 24% in 2002 to 19% in 2008.
• Only 11% of IT professionals working within the industry are women.
• Women in IT occupations outside the IT industry account for 25%.
• Men in IT are paid up to 30% more than women in IT.
• The number of girls taking A-Level Computing has fallen from 13% to 9% in the last five years.
• Girls do better than boys in GCSE and A-Level Computing and ICT.

Women are leaving the sector in droves thanks to massive pay discrimination and pervasive sexism. The situation is further worsened by the fact that fewer-than-ever girls are taking computing or ICT at GCSE & A-Level despite being better at the subjects than boys!

As I recently stated in my FT article ‘Why IT skills need to be sold to girls’, the technology sector promises to be one of UK PLC’s routes out of recession and a future engine of economic growth, however it is being hamstrung by a lack of women. There is plenty of evidence that a good gender balance makes teams and companies perform better.

Government needs to take this issue very seriously, and must take action to prevent the technology sector being severely harmed by the lack of women. We have been trying to “tweak” things in this area for years, but numbers are still falling. Therefore, I advocate a number of changes, some with large scope:

Actions: Employment law

1) Address the massive gender pay gap in IT (30% in the 40-49 bracket 14% for 16-29 year olds), through mandatory, publicly published pay audits for large companies as is the case within the public sector.

2) Career breaks do hold people back, therefore bring equality to maternity leave (12 months) and paternity leave (1 month) so that women can at least have the option to get the husband to stay at home.

3) Remind companies that “positive discrimination” specifically means hiring someone because of their gender, not just trying to help a minority group advance their careers. For example, ensuring there are a certain number/percentage of women on all candidate shortlists is acceptable (and helps!).

Actions: Education

5) Encourage more girls into computing, or at very least science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects at school. 80% of my technical staff have hard science/maths degrees despite being IT professionals, so I think STEM is a good place to start. Build on initiatives like BigAmbition.co.uk – try promoting it on Facebook targeted to girls for instance!

6) Most ‘computing’ degrees are hopelessly irrelevant and out-dated even before the students start them. Equally, ICT & computing GCSE’s and A-Levels are becoming laughably easy (and more about using IT than how it works), and are not challenging for the bright young people that we need to be studying them. Apparently the good GCSE courses are out there, but teachers don’t select them because they are challenging!

7) There is nothing like an inspirational teacher to get make a child passionate about a subject, but many GCSE IT teachers (in particular) appear to have limited subject knowledge and do not sell IT well. Therefore, encourage more technology graduates towards teaching.

- IT Companies Should Look At Who Costs The Most Before Making Redundancies -

Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom – 9 March 2009, Kate-Craig-Wood, MD of Web & IT hosting company, Memset and recent NatWest Everywoman of the Year winner is calling on technology companies to look at who costs the most before making redundancies.

Kate Craig-Wood is reacting to Friday’s report from the International Labour Organisation, which warns that the recession world-wide could increase the number of unemployed women by 22 million in 2009.

“In the IT industry women earn a massive 23% less than male counterparts, despite being equally capable.” says Craig-Wood, “Before making redundancies IT companies should conduct a quick pay audit, then let go those who are on higher wages for the same job.”

“Such actions will also serve to counter-act the danger of the boy’s club mentality within the sector resulting in women being preferentially targeted for redundancy,” Craig-Wood claims.

Craig-Wood, 32 and a member of the Women in IT committee at the IT industry’s trade body Intellect, argues that sacking the ‘more expensive’ first would also help to redress the serious imbalance in an industry massively dominated by males. The number of women has plummeted from 21 per cent to 16 per cent in the last five years.

“According to Intellect, ‘the under-representation of women in IT remains a significant and worsening issue’,” she says. “We also know from research by Cataylst that companies with the highest representation of women on top management teams perform more than 30% better financially.”

Memset itself, which is a Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 company, is in the fortunate position of not needing to make redundancies as it is growing fast, thanks to the current wave of cost-driven IT outsourcing. Regardless, Memset remunerates staff in line with merit, not gender, unlike many IT companies.

For further views and coverage of Kate’s advocacy around women in IT, please see:
kate.craig-wood.com/news#women

I became the first woman to tandem skydive past Mount Everest and I was very, very nervous.

It took us about 45 mins to climb from the airstrip at 12,000feet (the highest airstrip in the world) to 29,500 feet (in-line with the top of Mt. Everest), but we were certainly not bored – we were treated to what must be some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet. Titanic mountain peaks reaching into the sky, wreathed in cloud and wearing heavy coats of snow were all around us, and dwarfing them all was mighty Everest itself.

Five minutes to go, and Wendy (our hugely-skilled, and thoroughly lovely camera-flyer) disconnected me from the plane’s oxygen and put me onto my own personal bottle. At this point I was definitely having trouble restraining my nervousness!

What seemed like moments later, it was time to open the door, and I should have been terrified but for the fact that as Tom, my instructor, pushed it back there was Everest, directly to starboard, thrusting magnificently above the sparse clouds! I had to sit in the door for a couple of minutes, feet dangling over the edge in the freezing 120 mph wind, but that was actually rather nice – it gave me a chance to get used to the rushing sensation and calm a little.

But then, all that calm was shattered as our Swiss-pilot, Rudy, gave the green light and Tom, Wendy and I manoeuvered into the door, and then we were out – AAAARRRGGGHHH!!



I kept my eyes tight shut. Then the air started to support us, and, feeling like I was flying, I opened them to see the most amazing sight of my life.

Within moments the terrifying falling sensation faded though, and I was flying over the Himalayas, falling past Mt. Everest’s snow-clad slopes!! I cannot adequately describe how that felt, but it was without a shadow of doubt one of the most intense, beautiful and amazing experiences of my life.

So what possessed me? Well, I am raising money for Computer Clubs 4 Girls, a national schools programme to encourage 10-14 year old girls to consider the IT industry as a career. Already I have raised over £3,000 so far.

CC4G is a cause I passionately believe in as there is a crisis in IT when it comes to women. The industry trade body of which I am a main board member, Intellect UK (the UK’s IT trade association, of which I am a main board member), says the under-representation of women in IT “remains a significant and worsening issue”. In fact in 2007 only 18 per cent of IT and Telecoms professionals were female.

And research just released by Intellect in their most recent Perceptions of Equal Pay Survey shows that less than a third of women in IT believe their pay reflects their experience and skills respectfully. This is hardly surprising as the gender pay gap in IT is 23 per cent – 6 per cent more than the average in all other sectors.

Another finding shows that nearly 60 per cent of those women surveyed believed that their company did not have a transparent pay structure.

So, as well as campaigning for equal pay for women in IT, I am also campaigning to get pre-teens and teenage girls to consider the opportunities, as there are few professions that can give them such broad access to almost all industry sectors.

It is not just about encouraging the girls towards fulfilling and rewarding careers though. We, the IT industry, badly need them; there is good evidence that companies with gender-balanced management teams are more effective and more profitable, in some cases by as much as 34% on the bottom line (Catalyst, 2005).

Hence the jump. It was really worth it – a fantastic flight, but certainly no flight of fancy. Read about my trip through the Himilayas and see some pictures of Nepal on my Jump Everest blog.

Congratulations also to my friend Holly Budge – the first woman to solo-skydive Everest!