IT: Will women smash the digital ceiling?

They may have shunned computing at school, but women are now getting some of the best jobs in IT. Skill shortages have helped drive companies to address the gender balance in an industry where little over one in 10 workers is female.

Things are changing fast. Women themselves are keen to spread the word that it's OK to be a female geek. Networking groups such as Girl Geek Dinners and womenintechnology.co.uk are tackling the stereotype that working in IT is for men, or simply pedestrian.

The gender imbalance is a serious problem for the sector. Many observers believe it starts at school, where girls are more likely than boys to be bored by the focus on word processing and data handling in ICT lessons and exams. "Women see computers as tools whereas men see them as toys," says Eileen Brown, a system engineer with Microsoft. While boys can enjoy learning to work the machine, girls want to see a point to what they are doing.

But once they get into the workplace and see technology in action, girls are much more likely to be interested – which could explain why the fastest growing area of female recruitment is among career switchers.

It is widely believed that women are put off by a negative image of a job in computing, but one of the biggest bars is in fact a lack of qualifications, says Sarah Blow, the founder of Girl Geek Dinners, a network of women in IT that began in London and has spread to five cities in the UK and seven other countries. Women are less likely to have the maths or science A-level that most computer science degrees require, and are far less likely to have any qualification at all in computing, she says.

As skill shortages bite, companies are increasingly employing graduates from a range of disciplines, and conversion courses are springing up to meet the demand. Nearly half the 45 students on a new MSc in financial computing at University College London this year are women, an unheard-of proportion in the department, where the average is 20 per cent. The 12-month course, promoted as a qualification for graduates of other disciplines, attracted nearly four times the number of students expected.

"The Masters programme is sponsored by some of the big banks and especially designed as a conversion programme for people who get interested in computing later in life," says the course director, Christopher Clack. "Our women students, in particular, like the career-oriented nature of the degree and the fact that they can see a purpose to all this computing stuff."

Among the first intake is Asma Cassim, who has a degree in English from the University of the West of England and is on a placement with Goldman Sachs. "It was only a year ago that I submitted a dissertation on Shakespeare, and now I'm working within IT, programming a stock loan account management tool in Java," she says. "It's very different and it's been hard work, but I can see new opportunities opening up for me in the industry.

"I always planned to go into teaching," she says. "Then I thought I'd do a postgraduate course in something quite different and saw this advertised for people with no IT or maths background."

One of the biggest employers of women in technical jobs is Microsoft, where 28 per cent of the staff is female, against an industry average of 11 per cent. Women also occupy 27 per cent of senior management positions in the company's UK operations.

You don't need a degree in computing to do well, says Brown, 47, who entered IT after a career in the merchant navy. "It's true there aren't many women in the industry but the women here are high quality. I have a job I love and I want to inspire other women to seize the opportunities."

First steps

* Join a networking group

* Attend a career fair – womenintechnology.co.uk and the British Computer Society are organising one in London in February 2009

* Get involved in an IT project at work

* Volunteer to help out a charity with its IT system

* Seek a summer internship or work experience

* Consult the jobs and career pages of company websites

* Send your CV to an agency recruiting for the industry

* Do a conversion MA

* Enrol on a starter course

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