Jobs for the girls: Can tech turn a corner?
Published: 12 Mar 2008 15:04 GMT
...female workers to apply for positions in IT departments. These included: a high level of maternity pay for a good duration; a golden handshake on rejoining after maternity leave; job-sharing; flexible working; and career breaks.
Of course, such initiatives may be costly to implement, but Peters is among those who believe they merit consideration because they widen the potential talent pool from which organisations can draw.
ZDNet.co.uk asked five of the country's top tech employers — BT, Cisco, Google, IBM and Microsoft — what initiatives they had harnessed to help them achieve diversity in their workforce.
BT: A diversifying telco
BT was first out of the blocks to respond to our enquiries, having invested in a multi-channel advertising campaign to recruit more minority groups into the engineering workforce at its Openreach division.
Few could have missed the upheaval brought about when Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, insisted two-and-a-half years ago that BT create a completely separate division to manage the country's local-loop infrastructure.
Among other results, the structural changes required BT to increase the size of its engineering workforce by 800 staff; the telco would not only have to service its own end-user customers, but those of its competitors as well.
It was a tall order to diversify such a large workforce, which was over 98 percent male at the start of the campaign. However, the telco was keen to drive change because it wanted to better reflect the demographics of its customer base.
One of the main prongs of the campaign was the use of advertising to attract more female staff. As part of this, BT bought advertising space on the likes of popular fashion site handbag.com and in glossy women's magazine Cosmopolitan.
"We wanted to encourage women to not confine themselves to the office, the shop [or] the factory. The message was: our job gets you out and about," said Dennis Gissing, head of diversity practice for BT.
The media campaign had some success in terms of garnering a response from women, although Gissing conceded that it also attracted a lot of men.
BT met its target of 10 percent of applicants being female, although men were slightly more successful in the interviews, leading to women constituting only nine percent of the actual recruits.
"We attracted around 10 percent, which was our target," said Gissing. "We're still under-represented in terms of women. It will take a long time to get from two percent to 50 percent. It won't happen in my lifetime, I suggest."
One of the campaign's success stories was Harjit Cholia, a young graduate from West London. Successfully recruited through the programme, Cholia became BT's first female, Asian engineer.
Cholia said BT had been "very supportive" and that her manager had been "great", making sure everyone was treated fairly. But customers haven't always been so kind.
"The way some customers react to me is a challenge in itself," she said. "The mindset is: it's a man's job."
But some female customers were so impressed, they have started asking for female engineers to attend, Cholia said. Unfortunately, BT says it can't guarantee to meet those requests at the current time.
The way some customers react to me is a challenge in itself. The mindset is: it's a man's job
Harjit Cholia, BT engineer
Cholia surprised her friends and family by being offered the job. "In the Asian culture, it's not heard of to be an engineer," she said.
Although Cholia is an IT graduate, not all of BT's latest recruits have undertaken previous technical training: two of her closest colleagues gave up being housewives to join the company.
BT is keen to discuss its open policy towards flexible working, and this attitude has won Cholia's backing. She works an early shift each day, which gives her time to undertake a study course in her second favourite subject, hairdressing.
Google — engineering female success
Google is refreshingly open about its efforts to promote diversity. Its considerable work towards increasing its female workforce won it the much sought-after Women in IT Award from the British Computer Society in December.
"[Google] demonstrated an ingrained ethos to developing a diverse workforce and was also widely recognised for its career advancement and opportunities for women within IT," said Grahame Winman, business development manager for IT recruitment company GCS, and one of the lead judges for the award. "Its culture of supporting the IT industry as a whole, not just its own internal IT staff, is highly commendable."
One of Google's main focuses is Google Women Engineers, a networking group which the search giant's female engineers can opt to join, in order to discuss issues and share stories.
"We put a lot of energy on women engineers. We want our management to be tuned in to the challenges that women face," said Doug Fraley, head of HR for the EMEA engineering division at the search giant. "Our users are very diverse people, and we think we can address them better through a diverse set of people here."
Fraley said that the proportion of women in Google's engineering team was increasing, but he declined to reveal the male:female ratio. He added that, of eight engineering directors at Google, three were female.
Google also reaches deep into its pockets to fund...
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