INDUSTRY VIEW
THE UNDER REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN
MANDISA NTLOKO-PETERSEN , CMO , BCX
two years later , nothing had changed . In 2022 , the statistics remain just as woeful . In fact , the number of women versus men in the technology industry has declined in the past 35 years . A recent study by Deloitte Insights predicted that firms are likely to reach 33 % female representation this year , only up by two percentage points from the same survey three years ago .
Perhaps what ’ s even more telling is that the Deloitte Insights survey said that this tiny percentage increase of only 2 % was notable . Progress is slow .
Female representation in the technology sector is dropping ; how can the world reverse this trend to gain the immense value that women bring to the digital table asks Mandisa Ntloko-Petersen , CMO , BCX , a South African-based subsidiary within Telkom Group , one of Africa ’ s largest systems integrator and Digital Transformation partner for enterprises and public sector organisations across various industries within South Africa , SADC , and the UK .
The business of women in tech , as they say in Swahili , is ‘ Amara ’ – urgent business – because women are still under-represented in the technology sector . In 2020 , a Guardian article asked why the percentage of women in the digital workforce still sat below 20 %, and today ,
Organisations should be asking what can be done to reverse this trend , and what tangible steps they should be taking to pull diversity out of the gender mud and into a more equal and engaged workforce .
Organisations should be asking what can be done to reverse this trend , and what tangible steps they should be taking to pull diversity out of the gender mud and into a more equal and engaged workforce . After all , the research has proven time and again that having more women in the workplace fundamentally benefits the bottom line , employee engagement , productivity , and innovation .
Change the narrative
First , change the narrative . The number of women working at a company isn ’ t a metric by which an organisation should be measured . There are plenty of non-technical roles in a technology organisation . Instead , the diversity of women in a technology company should be assessed against their jobs as engineers , data analysts , and more . The World Economic Forum currently puts those statistics at very low levels , with only 14 % of women in cloud computing and 32 % in data and Artificial Intelligence ( AI ).
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