Nature of employment

Occupation

Further analysis of the gender balance for specific IT roles shows female representation within the IT professions varying from around one in twenty IT engineers (6% over the 2019-23 period) - to nearly one in three IT project/programme managers and web designers/ developers (i.e. 30% in each case).

In addition to IT engineering, women were very poorly represented amongst telecoms engineering positions (8%) along with programmers/ software development roles (16%).

Gender representation by IT occupation (2023)

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 2023 (3% in each case), though the proportion working in temporary positions was lower than within the workforce (6% in each case).

Female IT specialists also appear less likely to have been in temporary positions, as they did not want a permanent job (18% stating this to be the case during the 2019-23 period compared with 27% of males in IT positions).

Gender and unemployment

There were approximately 11,000 female IT specialists in the UK that were unemployed in 2023, 27% of all unemployed IT specialists in the UK during this period.

At 2.5% the associated unemployment rate for female IT specialists was notably higher that for males normally working in the IT field (1.8%) but still well below the overall unemployment rate for women in the UK (3.8%).