Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what recent assessment his Department has made of levels of gender diversity within the UK tech industry; and if he will make a statement.

The UK Digital Strategy set out our commitment to enabling a more diverse digital workforce. As the digital revolution progresses, many more jobs will require digital skills and many more tech roles will be created, both in technology companies and in the general economy. We cannot afford for women, who we know only make up 19% of the tech workforce (Tech Nation Report 2018), to be excluded from or unable to progress within these roles.

While there is substantial progress that still needs to be made, there are also significant initiatives aiming to solve the issue.

For example, over 270 companies, from international tech giants right through to start-ups, SMEs and charities, have already signed the Tech Talent Charter (TTC) - an industry led initiative, supported by Government. The TTC gives organisations tangible actions and principles they can adopt to change their hiring and retention practices to become more gender-diverse and commits signatories to measuring the diversity profile of their UK employees and to share this data for (anonymous) collective publication in an annual report.

There are also other industry-led programmes, across the tech ecosystem, doing valuable and innovative work to help make tech more diverse. These include the #SheMeansBusiness initiative (by Facebook in collaboration with Enterprise Nation and FSB); PWC’s Tech She Can charter, focused on getting more school-age girls to choose STEM subject and see a career in tech as a viable option for them; and Backstage Capital, which is an investment fund committed to investing in start-ups with diverse founders.

The West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) Local Digital Skills Partnership (LDSP), launched in Coventry this month, has increasing diversity built in from the start. The PWC-led Tech She Can project mentioned above has piloted their Tech We Can lesson plans in 4 schools in the Coventry area (all with very diverse and different pupil-bases), with a view to replicating and scaling the programme nationally after the pilot phase. In a similar vein, TTC has created regional ‘communities’ of tech employers to share best practice on regional diversity, with the WMCA LDSP a future regional focus for this work.