Girls and ICT Careers

Julie Hilling Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chi Onwurah]

I agree that we need to be very active in encouraging girls into the industry. I am pleased to hear about the job opportunities in Northern Ireland. There are other job opportunities throughout the country, and we need to ensure that girls are in a position to take advantage of them.

Gender segregation is at its most extreme in skilled trades such as that of electricians. Women constitute only 1% of the work force in such occupations, which is barely significant in statistical terms. I commissioned House of Commons Library research which has armed me with a large—depressingly large—number of similar statistics. It is clear that we are doing much worse in this regard than many of our European and OECD counterparts. I want to focus on what we can do about it, “we” being the ICT sector, civil society and, as I hope the Minister will acknowledge, the Government.

I worked in ICT as an engineer for 23 years. I must emphasise that I was often fortunate enough to have great male bosses who were determined that working in an all-male, or almost all-male, environment should not be a barrier to a successful career for a woman. However, I have known other managers who were not so supportive, and company cultures that worked against attracting girls and women into ICT and did absolutely nothing to help them to stay there.

Last year, when I was a shadow business, innovation and skills Minister, I wrote to 10 of the leading companies in the engineering and technology sector to ask what they were doing to improve the situation. I wrote to BAE Systems, Google, Microsoft, IBM, ARM, Rolls-Royce, BP, Shell, Ford and Jaguar Land Rover. Their responses are summarised on my website. What was quite amusing was that two of the companies addressed their letters of response to “Mr Onwurah”. I shall not name them, but it did make me wonder how accustomed they were to engaging with women.

Not surprisingly, nearly every company claimed that it was hiring women in proportions above the national average. The exception was ARM, which candidly said that the proportion of women was higher in its divisions outside the UK, especially in India. Female literacy in India is just 65%, while male literacy is 82%. The fact that India is doing so much better than we are in regard to ICT gender balance is particularly striking for that reason.

It is also striking that IBM did not respond to my inquiry despite repeated entreaties, while Google and Microsoft responded but refused to release any figures. As relatively young companies, at least in comparison with, for instance, Shell and Rolls-Royce, they might be expected to be at the forefront of gender equality. Both Google and Microsoft cited confidentiality as their reason for not revealing the proportion of women whom they employed in ICT. That is rather strange, because it suggests either that Google and Microsoft do not know how to aggregate and anonymise such information—which, given that they are leaders in big data management, is worrying—or that they have so few women employees that giving the figure would necessarily identify individuals. That is also very worrying.

The more traditional companies were more open about releasing figures, with Ford giving the most detailed breakdown across different job types. Most firms said that the main problem was a lack of qualified female candidates in ICT, engineering and science, and all the firms said that getting more women into those fields was a corporate priority. Most outlined steps that they were taking, from overhauling corporate procedures, for example, making sure that women were on interview panels, to intervening early in schools to steer girls towards STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths—subjects and careers.

Companies emphasised the importance of female role models in encouraging female graduates or apprentices to join them, and detailed the steps they were taking to develop networking forums or to push high-potential females up the employee hierarchy. ARM was the most forthright when asked what private or public sector initiatives firms found useful. It said

“most initiatives that directly address the issue are clearly failing at a national level and make little difference.”

According to the ARM representative, the most effective means would be role models and TV commentators or presenters who make the subjects sexy and exciting. I agree in part. A high profile ICT series on TV would probably change perceptions overnight. We saw what the success of “Silent Witness” did for the proportion of women in forensics.

The responses I received showed that there is such a wide range of challenges to address that we need a wide-ranging response, as was mentioned earlier.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that employers could do much more by offering work placements, early apprenticeships and visits to factories, and that the Department for Education needs to do more to encourage interaction? Young people could then make decisions much earlier about whether ICT was a career they would be interested in. Often, it is too late when they are 18.

[Chi Onwurah]

I thank my hon. Friend. She raises an extremely important point and I shall dwell on it in more detail later. She is right. One of the key messages that I hope the Minister will take from the debate is the importance of ensuring engagement with employers. Often employers are willing to make arrangements to go into schools, but do not feel that they can identify schools or know how to set about it.

We should encourage employers to engage with schools. One of my first parliamentary questions was to ask who was responsible for ensuring engagement between industry and primary schools. The response was that no one in the Government was responsible, in either the Business or Education teams. Perhaps the Minister could comment on that in her response.

As well as improving the image of ICT, we need to look at the working environment of women in ICT, and at higher, secondary and, very importantly, primary education, which my hon. Friend mentioned, and careers advice. We also need to look at our culture, which socialises girls to think that ICT is not for them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

Because we are making the subject universal, girls will be doing programming as well as boys. That is important. As the hon. Lady said, it is important not to gender divide this technology, which underlies the whole of our society and politics. We have programmes for getting girls to study physics, such as the Stimulating Physics Network. However, our view is that so few students are learning programming skills at an early age that the best thing to do is to have a universal programme that reaches everybody.

A lot of organisations work in this area—the hon. Lady mentioned some of them—such as the Computer Club for Girls, the Code Club, the Computing at School network and Apps for Good, the chief operating officer of which in the UK, Debbie Forster, is an excellent role model for girls in the industry.

There is a particular issue with girls that we need to address. However, I believe that our focus on ensuring that teachers are trained up so that they understand the career opportunities in IT and know what programming is and how to teach it to young children will be critical in shaping the future and in shaping young girls’ expectations of their potential.

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising these issues.

[Julie Hilling]

Before the Minister moves on, will she say more about careers? There is now a deficit in the careers advice for all young people, but particularly for girls. Such advice often rests with teachers, who might not have any experience of industry, having gone from school to university and back to school. How will she bridge that gap and provide more careers education that allows young people to understand the vast range of jobs in engineering, and in ICT specifically?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank the hon. Lady for making that point. Our approach is to engage with industry through the British Computer Society to ensure that there are more direct links with schools. It is helpful for students to see a local business person in the classroom and to understand what they do and what opportunities are out there. It is therefore helpful for businesses to engage directly with teachers. We have made the new national curriculum much more flexible so that teachers can design their own curriculum that is based on the national curriculum, but that reflects the resources available locally and engages with the master computer science teachers that we are creating.