The gender gap in the digital industry remains increasingly apparent, a new study has revealed, with almost double the number of men than women working in the sector.
The Candidate’s Women in Digital report, which looks at 150 digital businesses across the north of England, also reveals that there is a severe lack of females in management roles, with 156% more men taking up management positions.
Worryingly – although perhaps not surprisingly – just 18 out of the 150 businesses involved in the research were headed up by women.
Launching at SAScon this week, the report looks at how women are paving their way in a traditionally male-dominated industry, the extent of the male/female divide, whether salaries are gender neutral and the state of flexible working and benefit policies.
The research found that ‘soft skill’ jobs tend to be favoured by women, with the top three roles being in marketing and social media (27%), public relations and communications (18%), and account management (14%), while the more ‘technical’ roles such as search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC), were taken by men.
“We know there is a lack of professionals with digital skills, especially in the North, but we wanted to find out whether a gender gap might be a contributing factor,” said Brian Matthews, managing partner at The Candidate.
“What we discovered in our findings, is that we could potentially be alienating women, and discouraging them from taking up a career in digital – thus missing out on a big proportion of talent.”
The report offers ways to encourage more women into the sector, such as implementing flexible working schemes and closing gender pay gaps, which is currently at 10%.
Alarmingly, it is also estimated that for each year a mother is absent from the workplace her future wages will reduce by 5%.
“We also ask for education providers to be more encouraging when it comes to apprenticeships and work experience opportunities in digital,” Matthews added.
“Our research revealed this has vastly improved in the last 10 years, but we need to put an emphasis on this to bring fresh talent through the ranks.
“We hope that our report goes some way in unveiling some of the issues that might be holding back this sector that has such huge potential.”
