How to get more Black women into IT roles

Women, and in par­tic­u­lar Black women, are huge­ly under-rep­re­sent­ed in the IT indus­try. Research from the British Com­put­er Soci­ety (BCS) shows Black women account for just 0.7 per cent of IT roles, 2.5 times below the lev­el of oth­er pro­fes­sions.

Black British Busi­ness Awards released a report with J.P. Mor­gan in Jan­u­ary that iden­ti­fies “the gross fail­ings of busi­ness­es to col­lec­tive­ly address and act upon racial dis­par­i­ty in the work­place”.

Afiya Chohol­lo, direc­tor of tech­ni­cal pro­gramme man­age­ment at dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty firm Onfi­do, says: “For com­pa­nies with big pock­ets and all the ideas to solve the world’s big chal­lenges, it’s not an accept­able excuse to not have Black peo­ple and women in your teams, par­tic­u­lar­ly in major cities like Lon­don. It’s lazy and neg­li­gent and bad for the bot­tom line.

“Impor­tant, life-impact­ing appli­ca­tions should not be built by teams that do not rep­re­sent soci­ety.”

Lack of role models

One of the key issues is the absence of Black female lead­ers in the IT sec­tor, which then dis­cour­ages Black women from pur­su­ing a career in the indus­try.

“Role mod­els are impor­tant. It is always affirm­ing to see some­one like you when you walk into a room because deal­ing with micro-aggres­sions is more chal­leng­ing than any­thing,” says Chohol­lo.

Dinah Cob­binah is the first Black female part­ner in KPMG UK’s his­to­ry. She recog­nis­es there are few women in sim­i­lar posi­tions.

“There aren’t many Black women in senior roles, let alone with­in IT. But when you start to fun­nel down in terms of ratios of women in IT roles, there are even few­er Black women with­in that,” she says.

“If organ­i­sa­tions are seri­ous about turn­ing the dial and increas­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for under-rep­re­sent­ed groups, things need to be done dif­fer­ent­ly. Change can­not hap­pen overnight, but we all need to build a sus­tain­able pipeline of tal­ent, rethink how and where we source tal­ent, pro­vide the career path and have vis­i­ble role mod­els. You need to see it to be it.”

Recruitment bias

The prob­lem starts with recruit­ment, says Chi­non­so Izug­bok­we, man­ag­ing direc­tor of Get2Talent, a recruit­ment agency com­mit­ted to pro­mot­ing and dri­ving diver­si­ty in the hir­ing process.

Izug­bok­we believes racism and gen­der recruit­ment stereo­types remain a sig­nif­i­cant bar­ri­er to Black women’s career entry into IT. How­ev­er, it is also dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy and pre­vent.

“Recruit­ment process­es and prac­tices can be designed to reduce the role of gen­der recruit­ment dis­crim­i­na­tion, such as mak­ing the recruit­ment process gen­der neu­tral, pro­mot­ing female can­di­dates in their selec­tion or anonymis­ing CVs. The hir­ing man­agers and tal­ent acqui­si­tion team alike can avoid the neg­a­tive out­comes asso­ci­at­ed with gen­der recruit­ment stereo­types,” he says.

Izug­bok­we adds that lack of recruit­ment guid­ance pro­mot­ing career pro­gres­sion oppor­tu­ni­ties pos­es anoth­er prob­lem. This puts off Black female can­di­dates as they can­not see future oppor­tu­ni­ties for devel­op­ment.

Encouraging talent

There are, how­ev­er, sev­er­al ini­tia­tives cur­rent­ly under­way to encour­age more Black women into tech. Cod­ing Black Females has joined forces with the BCS to offer 50 women mem­ber­ship of the BCS. At the same time, Niyo Enter­prise and Cod­ing Black Females have part­nered to put on a six-month Cod­ing Boot­camp pro­gramme for UK Black women aged over 18 who are unem­ployed or employed with a salary of less than £25,000.

HOST, the Home of Skills & Tech­nol­o­gy at MediaC­i­tyUK, has just launched Skills City in Sal­ford. Offer­ing tech­nol­o­gy boot­camp acad­e­mies, it says it is com­mit­ted to fast-track­ing 450 tech­nol­o­gy career starts for women and the Black, Asian and minor­i­ty eth­nic com­mu­ni­ty in the North.

Addi­tion­al­ly, the TechUP­Women train­ing pro­gramme recent­ly took 100 women from the Mid­lands and North of Eng­land from under-rep­re­sent­ed com­mu­ni­ties, with degrees or expe­ri­ence in any sub­ject area, and retrained them in tech­nol­o­gy. It then gave them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­view with a com­pa­ny for an intern­ship, appren­tice­ship or job.

“There are lots of great ini­tia­tives help­ing to not only upskill women in tech, but also work to change the nar­ra­tive and dis­pel indus­try myths,” says Dr Rasha­da Har­ry, enter­prise account man­ag­er at Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, and founder of Your Future, Your Ambi­tion, which encour­ages young peo­ple to pur­sue careers in sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing and maths.

“This work is crit­i­cal as organ­i­sa­tions and lead­ers recog­nise the impor­tance that cul­tur­al­ly diverse per­spec­tives bring to busi­ness­es, espe­cial­ly in fos­ter­ing inno­va­tion on behalf of cus­tomers and ulti­mate­ly advanc­ing the wider indus­try.”

Diverse workforce

The IT skills gap con­tin­ues to cause prob­lems for organ­i­sa­tions, espe­cial­ly with the pan­dem­ic forc­ing organ­i­sa­tions to accel­er­ate their cloud migra­tions quick­er and dig­i­talise their busi­ness process­es. But there is now an oppor­tu­ni­ty for organ­i­sa­tions to fill that skills gap, while diver­si­fy­ing their work­force.

Organ­i­sa­tions must start by exam­in­ing how acces­si­ble their employ­ment prac­tices are and what bar­ri­ers to entry exist to can­di­dates of all gen­ders and eth­nic­i­ties.

“Being a woman comes with its fair share of chal­lenges, often fac­ing gen­der dis­crim­i­na­tion and bias in the work­place,” says Izug­bok­we at Get2Talent. “But, if you are a woman of colour, these gen­der-based chal­lenges are often com­pound­ed by obsta­cles of racism, mak­ing it even hard­er for Black pro­fes­sion­als to nav­i­gate their way to the top.

“Organ­i­sa­tions need to eval­u­ate their work per­for­mance strat­e­gy to see if they have bar­ri­ers in place stop­ping Black women from reach­ing roles that are more senior.”