441,000. That’s how many women worked as IT specialists in the UK in 2024, according to BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT’s 2025 analysis of ONS labour market data.
It’s a big number until you look at the share. 22% of all UK IT specialists. Up by exactly one percentage point on the year before, which at the current rate tells you almost everything you need to know about how slowly this is moving.
The figure that actually stopped me
I’ve read a lot of diversity statistics over the years, and most of them move a fraction of a point in either direction and get filed away. This one didn’t. BCS found that the gender pay gap in IT nearly doubled in a single year, from 6% in 2023 to 12% in 2024.
That’s a live number getting worse year on year, in one of the most in-demand professions in the country, in the middle of a well-documented skills shortage that every CTO I work with talks about constantly.
Where the gap actually sits
The aggregate numbers hide something more specific and, for a technology leader, more useful. Women aren’t evenly underrepresented across IT roles. They’re concentrated in particular ones, and it’s not the highest-paid technical track.
BCS’s data shows women make up just 6% of IT engineers, the role with the strongest pay and progression. Compare that with 34% of IT project and programme managers, 34% of web designers and developers, and 30% of IT operations technicians. Women are present in technology. They’re underrepresented specifically in the roles that build and architect the systems, and overrepresented in the roles that coordinate around them.
The pipeline problem starts earlier than the workplace. Only 5% of female IT specialists hold an IT degree, against 10% of male specialists. Whatever is happening in schools, universities and early career choices, it’s shaping the workforce years before any employer gets a chance to hire more inclusively.
And one figure has actually gone backwards. Black women make up 0.6% of UK IT specialists, down slightly from 0.7% when BCS first started tracking the figure in 2022. At the current rate of change across the workforce as a whole, BCS estimates it will take almost three hundred years to reach gender parity in UK tech. That’s a straight-line projection based on today’s pace, not a prediction of what will happen, but it’s a useful gut check on how far “slow progress” actually is from “progress.”
Why this isn’t only a fairness argument
It would be easy to file all of this under fairness and move on, and plenty of boards do exactly that. Fairness matters, but treating this purely as a fairness question lets technology leaders file it as someone else’s problem, usually HR’s, rather than a direct input into the systems they’re accountable for.
BCS chief executive Sharron Gunn put it more sharply than I would have. Her argument, in short, is that you cannot build trustworthy, high-integrity AI systems while the profession building them is missing the perspective of half the population. Every blind spot in a team’s lived experience becomes a blind spot in what that team notices, questions and tests for, a direct product quality and risk issue sitting on the same list as your other engineering risks.
There’s a talent argument too, and it’s the one that should land hardest with any CTO currently struggling to hire. Politician Samantha Niblett has described diversity in tech as a competitive advantage rather than a nice-to-have, on the basis that varied perspectives build fairer systems, spot risks others miss, and simply innovate faster. If you’re one of the many organisations that can’t fill technical roles fast enough, and I don’t know a single client who isn’t, deliberately narrowing your hiring pool to the roughly 78% of the workforce that already dominates IT is a strange way to solve a shortage.
What I’d actually do with this
I’m wary of diversity initiatives that amount to a statement and a poster. The BCS data points to something more specific and more actionable than that.
If women are concentrated in project management, web development and operations rather than engineering, the useful intervention goes beyond a generic “hire more women” target. It means asking why your engineering track specifically isn’t retaining or promoting the women who do enter it, and whether your technical career ladder has the same informal gatekeeping that’s produced a 6% figure across the industry as a whole.
If the pipeline problem starts before your hiring process even begins, where you recruit from matters as much as how. Routes that reach women earlier, apprenticeships, bootcamps, and non-traditional entry points, are worth as much attention as another graduate scheme drawing from the same computer science cohorts that produced today’s 6%.
And if the pay gap is genuinely widening rather than narrowing, your own organisation can check that number this quarter. It’s a straightforward spreadsheet exercise, one any CFO can run in an afternoon.
The commercial case here doesn’t need dressing up. A shortage of good technical talent, a widening pay gap, and evidence that homogeneous teams miss things that diverse ones catch, is a business risk sitting in plain sight. It just happens to also be the right thing to fix.
Source: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, “Gender Diversity in the Tech Sector Report 2025” (published 11 December 2025), based on 2024 ONS Labour Force Survey data.