IT industry works to attract more women

The Digitalization Commission's Jan Gulliksen writes in the DN debate (8/3) about the lack of gender balance in the IT world, while the industry is crying out for workers. "We agree with much of what he says," writes Anne-Marie Fransson of IT&Telekomföretagen, "but we also believe that the industry is working hard to recruit women.

It is a major problem that so few women choose IT training. The skills of half the population are thus lost. And as Gulliksen points out, half of IT users are women, which should be reflected in the developers of systems and products.

At the same time, from my perspective, I can see that the industry is working hard to recruit women to the companies and get more female managers. In the leadership development program for female managers in the industry, Womentor, which is run by IT&Telecom companies within Almega, the management's commitment to setting concrete goals for gender equality in the company is one of the most important elements. Of the companies that have participated in the program, almost all have reached or are approaching their respective goals, which shows that there are great opportunities to address the shortcomings.

Approximately 30% of the total of around 100,000 people working in our member companies are women. And the more "technical" the work is, the fewer women there are. 28% of all managers in the industry are women, which is above the average for the business sector in Sweden (25% according to Statistics Sweden). The proportion of female CEOs, on the other hand, is embarrassingly low at 8%, which is partly explained by the fact that the IT industry has a vanishingly low proportion of female entrepreneurs.

It is worth noting that the proportion of female project managers is overrepresented in our member companies - 34%. Unlike Gulliksen, we see that managers are recruited from this group to a greater extent than programmers. Instead, they generally pursue careers as specialists, system architects or similar [...].