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UK tech sector cuts fall disproportionately on women

Women make up less of the UK tech workforce than they did five years ago. Reversing this trend will be on the agenda of the Women in Tech Festival in October.

The Women in Tech Festival is taking place on 31^st October in London and will bring together hundreds of the sharpest and most influential women working in technology to connect, share experiences, and inspire.

Among the keynotes, panel discussions and fireside chats are sessions focused on how to encourage teenage girls to consider tech careers, and how to reduce the rate of attrition for more experienced women, which remains higher than that of their male colleagues.

Female attrition from technology is a complex topic. It is difficult to unpick the forces a company can control from wider societal and cultural expectations, and the effects of socialisation.

That said, one guaranteed way to encourage a woman who might be a few years into her career to leave the sector and never return is to cut the proportion of women working with, around or for her. This has been the reality playing out over the last couple of years.

A US analysis a few months ago suggested that global tech job cuts were falling disproportionately on women and other groups underrepresented in technology, with the outcome that tech was becoming less diverse. Now, a study of National Statistics data commissioned by Integro Accounting has zeroed in on the UK and confirmed that here, redundancies have fallen disproportionately upon female employees.

According to this analysis, the proportion of female employees in the UK tech sector has fallen for the first time in five years. In 2018 the proportion of female UK tech employees stood at approximately 17%. This proportion increased, albeit slowly, to 22.7% in 2021. In 2022 the figure stood at 20.1%.

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Percentage of UK tech employees & contractors who are female

The proportion of tech contractors who are female declined at a faster rate, from 16.8% in 2021 to 12.1% in 2022.

The data also shows that the number of female tech employees fell in absolute terms between 2021 and 2022 from 384,025 to 359,154, a decline of 6.5% in a single year. Interestingly, the number of tech workers (both employees and contractors) increased by 4.1% from 1,827,851 in 2021 to 1,903,671 in 2022.

Logic therefore suggests that the number of male tech employees has also risen; and it has, from 1,306,833 in 2021 to 1,419,590 in 2022. For readers disinclined to do the maths, this is an increase of 8.6%.

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UK tech sector cuts fall disproportionately on women

Women make up less of the UK tech workforce than they did five years ago. Reversing this trend will be on the agenda of the Women in Tech Festival in October.

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Women disadvantaged by pandemic decisions

How has the UK tech sector managed to reverse the small amount of progress it had made in reducing the extent to which men dominate it?

Much of the answer to this question relates back to the pandemic.

Some of the explanations are simple. These redundancies have happened quickly. The imperative to strip cost out of businesses which had, by their own admission, over recruited and overpaid during a period of unsustainable growth in 2020/2021 would likely have overcome any other consideration. Markets and investors must be reassured in the short term. It's hard to imagine many of these companies conducting impact analyses on workforce diversity before announcing redundancies on Twitter.

The long tail of the furlough scheme is also part of the problem. Female tech workers were disproportionately more likely to be placed on furlough, which capped pay at a maximum of 80% or £2,500 per month.

Furlough also had the effect of widening the existing gender pay gap in tech. Between 2020 and 2021 the median gender pay gap for IT professionals in the UK widened from 10.9% to 12.9%, meaning that female tech workers were being paid on average 12.9% less than their male co-workers.

At the time, many women tech workers were probably relieved by furlough. If they were parents they were far more likely to be picking up the majority of the burden of home schooling, errand running for older relatives and absorbing the mental stresses and strains of their families. It was helpful in the short term but made them more vulnerable to being made redundant when people started returning to offices.

Women were also more likely to accept new remote or hybrid roles. Whilst the flexibility that these arrangements bring is attractive to everyone, it tends to be even more so to women trying to bend their work around other responsibilities.

This is why so many tech companies, expanding at pace and encountering acute digital skills shortages made these options available. Unfortunately, short tenures meant that workers taken on in late 2020 or 2021 were the cheapest and easiest to shed.

It is also possible that women working remotely more than their male colleagues have been discriminated against, perhaps unconsciously, when lists of those to be made redundant have been drawn up. In the vast majority of tech businesses women are less well represented at leadership level than lower down. The fact that so few women will have been involved in these decisions will have counted against other women in the business.

As Christian Hickmott, Managing Director of Integro Accounting which published this research commented:

"Women are less likely to be represented in senior roles, which in turn are less likely to be targeted for redundancies. Under 15% of IT Directors are women, compared to nearly a third of tech workers in support roles. Given it is the IT Director who normally wields the axe and the support roles most likely to be cut, the challenge is to increase female representation at senior levels."

When discussing how to attract more women into tech jobs, and reduce attrition rates, the conversation invariably returns to the necessity of more women at leadership level. It's a subject that the Women in Technology Festival will examine in depth. Tech employers tirelessly broadcast how much they value diversity of their workforce. The data tells a very different story.

Join us at this year's Women in Tech Festival on Tuesday 31 October in London; the meeting place for women working in tech, those who aspire to and for any tech organisation wanting to enhance diversity, make unrivalled connections, and empower and cultivate women leaders.

Individual delegates will have opportunities to connect with mentors and access practical advice on how to progress their careers.

Find out more here.