Nature of employment

Occupation

Further analysis of the gender balance for specific IT roles shows female representation within the IT professions varying from less than one in twenty for IT engineers (4% over the 2017-21 period), to around one in three IT operations technicians, web designers/developers and IT user support technicians (34%, 33% and 30% respectively).

Women remain very poorly represented amongst IT directors (just 17% of which in 2021 were female) and programmers/software developers (16%).

Gender representation by IT occupation (2021)

Source: Analysis of ONS Quarterly Labour Force Survey by BCS
* Five-year average

Permanency of employment

Female IT specialists were just as likely to be working on a non-permanent basis as their male counterparts in 2021 (4% in each case) though the proportion working in temporary positions was slightly lower than within the workforce as a whole (with comparison figures of 6% and 5% respectively).

Though a detailed analysis of the reasons why IT specialists (female/otherwise) were in non-permanent employment during 2021 is not possible (due to limitations of the data source), it can be said that female IT specialists appear less likely to be in temporary positions as they do not want a permanent job (27% stating this to be the case during the 2017-21 period compared with 23% of males in IT positions).

Sex and unemployment

There were approximately 8,000 female IT specialists in the UK that were unemployed in 2021 i.e. 28% of all unemployed IT specialists in the UK over this period.

At 1.8% the associated unemployment rate^[1] for female IT specialists was marginally below that for males normally working in the IT field (1.9%) but well below the overall unemployment rate for women in the UK (4.4%).

^[1]See data notes.