Tech Talent Charter’s annual 2024 ‘Diversity in Tech’ report, which gathered data from over 700 UK tech signatories that employ close to 977,000 people, highlights progress and set-backs when it comes to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) across the industry. This years’ findings explore the disparity in self-reporting processes and the representation of minority groups across the industry including: disability in tech, socioeconomic diversity, trans representation, as well as gender and ethnic diversity in software engineering, plus gender and ethnic diversity in senior tech roles.
While gender disparity has traditionally ruled conversations around diversity, it continues to be a tough nut that many haven’t cracked. This year’s report found that women and non-binary employees account for 29% of the UK tech workforce, representing a mere 1% increase compared to 2023. While it is still the highest proportion of women and gender minorities in tech recorded since Tech Talent Charter started collating tech diversity data in 2020, when we take a closer look at particular roles in tech, this number falls drastically. In fact, only 20% of software engineers are women or non-binary and only 21% senior tech role holders are women, which has fallen 1% compared to last year’s report.
This figure is higher than the UK tech industry average and bucks an overall trend in the UK where the number of women in tech is decreasing, according to ONS data. This suggests that Tech Talent Charter’s signatories’ greater diversity in tech is achievable, irrespective of company size, sector or location.
The report also found that 1 in 3 women in tech are planning to leave their job, meaning any small gain may soon be lost, on top of additional challenges where equality measures such as diversity in senior positions and retention rates across the industry are challenged. All the while reports highlight that the gender pay differences are worsening, as BCS warned that it will take 300 years to close the gender pay gap in tech and companies are discarding their DE&I work.
Tech Talent Charter collects diversity data and strategy insights from over 700 UK tech employers annually, producing one of the largest D&I analyses of its kind. Read the key findings and learn how you can participate.
Please mind the gender gap
In many organisations, it is the mid-point in women’s careers when their career progression begins to stall. This is sometimes linked to when they return to the workplace after welcoming a child. But that isn’t the only influence. The end result is fewer women progressing into senior roles and perhaps more individuals leaving the organisation altogether to find senior opportunities elsewhere. At BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, we spend a great deal of time looking for the leaky valve and supporting women earlier on in their career to ensure once they meet that potential risk point they feel empowered to push for more senior roles.
It’s not an easy problem to fix. It takes a committed effort to change an organisation’s underlying values, culture, policy and practice. And often the people that need to drive change are middle managers who are loaded with responsibility and short of time, compounded by being comfortable operating with what they know. That’s part of the reason why many fall into the trap of doing DE&I by numbers, simply following what they see other organisations doing. This fails to take account of the fact that every enterprise is different, with its own unique set of challenges.
Addressing the lack of significant change in DE&I within organisations is a problem and should be approached like any other business issue. That means reviewing the key areas, identifying the problem, developing a solution and then implementing it. It’s essential during this process to engage closely with employees, our internal customers, to ensure the scale of the problem is fully understood and the solution is fit-for-purpose. Once developed, it should be evaluated repeatedly to allow for adjustments to fix any deficiencies.
Repeatable, sustainable and scalable change that lasts
As we can see progress on this scale is frustratingly slow and DE&I isn’t about quick fix solutions to boost numbers, we know that one off initiatives only make for short term change and without continued investment impactful change can be soon lost.
Key in leading transformative change are three core elements: repeatability, sustainability and scalability. Start by selecting your initiatives with purpose and ensuring they add value to the organisation, then assess the following:
- Is the initiative repeatable over and over again?
- Once it can be repeated you want to ensure you can keep it going. Does it sit within a function? Who owns it? Will it be looked after and enhanced as necessary? Is it sustainable? Unless absolutely necessary avoid one hit wonders that don’t influence lasting change. They can be seen as very tokenistic.
- Finally, once you know you can repeat it and sustain it within your organisation you must ask, is it scalable? Can I build this into more business areas, more regions?
Once you can do this across one area of focus you have a process that can be reused for similar topics, thereby reducing your time to market and ultimately increasing value add impact. I find it incredibly important to make these three elements central to my transformation approach. This ensures that the business is owning DE&I, being proactive in future change with planned intent and listening to our customers along the way.
At BAE Systems, we’re committed to inspiring a culture of inclusion, equity and belonging. A culture in which people can authentically reach their full potential and see themselves reflected, supported and celebrated at all levels of our organisation. The pillars of our approach are People, Wellbeing and Engagement. Through this we strive for two key themes to gauge our success: measureable impact and things that just feel right. The result being the creation of a community where our employees feel as if they are valuable, contributing members, respected for their unique abilities, experiences and differences.
Now more than ever, we as an industry need to double down on gender diversity in tech and beyond to buck the trend on slow and fragile progress, and demonstrate it’s an exciting, supportive and inclusive industry that people want to stay in for the long term. To ultimately improve retention rates, we must show that tech really is for all.
Tech Talent Charter collects diversity data and strategy insights from over 700 UK tech employers annually, producing one of the largest D&I analyses of its kind. Read the key findings and learn how you can participate.
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