SBA

Bring Me Your Women

We are periodically reminded of the huge crisis faced by employers of ICT workers. The European Commission says “It is estimated that there will be 825,000 unfilled vacancies for ICT professionals by 2020”. The Isle of Man Government controversially recently removed work permit restrictions for all but the most junior and unqualified of ICT workers (and perhaps even more controversially we discovered that the Minister for Economic Development cannot tell the difference between a half and a quarter) with, we are told, the support of the Institute of Directors, the Chamber of Commerce, the Manx eGaming Association and other employer representatives. Obviously there is a desperate shortage, employers simply cannot find enough techie workers to go around.

Why is it then that the Higher Education Funding Council for England found in 2015 that the highest unemployment amongst all first degree graduates is for the Computer Sciences? Only about 70% of Computer Science graduates even find employment within six months of graduation. Further research by the UK’s Higher Education Careers Services Unit finds that of those who do find employment, only 58% were working in IT jobs - over 10% were doing Retail & Hospitality jobs.

In short, despite the incessant whining by employers that they can’t find ICT staff to recruit, only about 41% of UK Computer Science graduates find jobs working in IT (but at a guess 100% can tell the difference between a half and a quarter).

(The difference between a half and a quarter - as reported by the Celtic League last week the Isle of Man Section of BCS The Chartered Institute for IT did a very quick poll of its members to discover their feelings about the proposed work permit exemption, and then sent Mr Skelly a document stating that half of the respondents who expressed an opinion were opposed to the proposal. Mr Skelly stood up in Tynwald when proposing the work permit exemption order and told the Court that 25% of BCS members who voted opposed it. The BCS document is a matter of fact, Mr. Skelly’s statement to Tynwald is faithfully recorded in Hansard.)

Needless to say, the low ICT employment rate of Computer Science graduates is a matter of grave concern for the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) and is being investigated for the UK Government by Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Principal of Jesus College Oxford. His report isn’t due until later this year, but statistical information from CPHC shows that around 56% more BME students study computer science than the average for all courses - and BME (Black and Minority Ethnicity) graduates have much higher unemployment. The noise doing the rounds in some educational circles is basically to the effect that unemployment in Computer Science graduates is so appallingly high because employers are so appallingly bigoted; it will be interesting to see if the Shadbolt Report finds a similar conclusion.

So what about the women?

Currently about 17% of the whole ICT workforce is female, and under 12% of programmers are female. Sitting in front of a computer all day being clever working out complicated things is obviously “Men’s Work”. Innumerable studies have shown that there is no statistically valid difference between the intelligence or IQs of men and women, although a few have shown that women might have a slight edge on the blokes. Also, I can tell you from forty years of personal experience that it really doesn’t take much physical strength to pound the keyboard. Further, and much more tellingly, academics in the USA published in February that women are better programmers than men. They established this by blind review of a large body of software and found that the code written by women seemed more admired by fellow programmers than the code written by men - as long as the gender of the programmer was concealed.

I know a little about all of this from personal experience - I am one of very, very few UK IT leaders who has succeeded in building a gender-balanced IT team, and their exceptional talent enabled our rather down to earth laundry equipment company to be one of six finalists for the “Most IT-enabled business in the UK” in the Computing Awards (and yes, I squeezed some BME talent in there as well).

The reality is that women, it is statistically proven, are as good or better at IT than men - so why is less than a fifth of the IT workforce female?

I wish I had an answer. I can tell you that far fewer women present themselves as candidates for ICT jobs than men. I can tell you that as a consequence many IT departments and IT companies are very male-dominated and exude culture which is unappealing to some women. Unfortunately I can’t tell you why women don’t put themselves forward more, because if they did they could make the IT profession their own very quickly.

A well-known feature of the IT industry is that it changes quickly. By implication it doesn’t take a lifetime of learning to do the job, because the technologies a techie learned to use ten years ago have been superseded. One by-product is that you can enter the IT industry at thirty, forty or fifty and soon catch up. I won’t claim that having thirty-plus years of experience behind you doesn’t help, it does because you’ve been there and got the tee-shirt for so many more situations, but the reality is that entering IT as a second career is entirely feasible - if you can get past the ageism barriers. The majority of my last IT team were converts - they came from established careers in teaching, HR, retail, accountancy, engineering etc. The UK Age discrimination legislation has helped but ageism is still rife in ICT, all that the legislation means is one no longer sees, as I sometimes used to, IT job adverts blatantly specifying that candidates must be under forty.

I think by now you’ve got the drift. IT recruiters and employers don’t seem to want new Computer Science graduates, or Black and Minority Ethnicity candidates, or the “Disabled”, or Old Farts - despite clear evidence that they can do the job and are available. Somehow we’re also pushing away most women. ICT recruitment has a huge problem, and it’s nothing to do with work permits.

Unsurprisingly I know many IT employers, and I can’t recall ever having met one who seemed to be a bigot, but the appalling statistics above are all factual and produced by highly reputable sources. It is, frankly, difficult to avoid the conclusion that, however big the ICT skills shortage problem may be, employers are making it a heck of a lot worse for themselves by leaving good candidates on the shelf. Here’s another statistic - 100% of employers say they’re not prejudiced, but 98% have never had Unconscious Bias training. OK, I made that one up - but it’s probably not far from the mark.

On March 22nd the Isle of Man hosts the first International Diversity Conference, with a stellar cast of speakers put together by my friend Jean-Paul Nguegang (not of Anglo-Saxon descent). Anyone who complains about the shortage of ICT skills should be there - go learn how to tap all that wasted talent and get an edge on your competitors. The website for conference details and registration is http://idc.co.im/