Businesses must take the next step to improve gender equality
The gender equality issue must be raised at management level. It is we who must take responsibility for something happening now, no one else will do it for us, writes Jonas Persson, Microsoft and Anne-Marie Fransson IT&Telekomföretagen in Ny Teknik today.
In 2015, few people questioned that gender equality and diversity in organizations are good for business. Yet the Swedish business community as a whole is far from equal, and the worst is at managerial level. The industry we work in is often highlighted as particularly poor at utilizing women's skills. The IT and telecom industry has difficulty attracting and recruiting women, and the proportion of women is low both in companies and in IT education.
The challenges for women's participation in the sector are twofold: too few girls are enrolled in IT-related courses, and career and development opportunities in much of the sector are still not designed to promote women as much as men.
On 29 September, the government commissioned the National Agency for Education to develop a new IT and digitalization strategy in which programming is given a more prominent role. This is a step in the right direction, but we will not be able to reap the benefits for several years. Therefore, there is an opening here for the business community to take the lead on a highly urgent issue. That of greater gender equality.
The business community must take action to ensure that women who are currently working are more likely to want to, and choose to, stay in the IT industry. Efforts that promote gender equality, development opportunities for women and that allow women to take leading positions in the IT industry are crucial for Sweden's future.
We can no longer afford to passively wait and believe that change will come by itself. Already in 2020, the European Commission estimates that there will be a shortage of almost one million programmers and developers in the EU. In the Swedish IT and telecom sector, including businesses with high IT content outside the IT and telecom industry, there is a major skills shortage: unless strong measures are taken, a shortage of 60,000 people is expected already in 2020. This shortage will have major consequences for Sweden's and Europe's competitiveness and risks putting a wet blanket over growth and digitization of various areas of society. If we are to overcome this, we need to take immediate action to harness all skills - as an industry, we simply cannot afford to lose women.
According to figures from the Boston Consulting Group's report "Launching a new Digital Agenda", the internet economy accounts for 8.2% of GDP, which is equivalent to around SEK 318 billion and is larger than the Swedish tourism sector. More than 5% of Sweden's workforce consists of IT specialists. At the same time, statistics from the Swedish IT and Telecom Association show that the share of women in the IT and telecom industry has fallen from around 32% in 2006 to 29% in 2014. These are dismal figures for a country with a high profile in gender equality issues.
Some efforts are already being made to address the problem. One example of initiatives with a noticeable effect is the Womentor leadership and change program, which since 2006 has been run by the IT and telecom companies with the aim of supporting companies that want to work systematically to increase the proportion of female managers. By setting and working towards clear goals, a majority of the companies that have participated so far have improved significantly. At Microsoft, for example, the proportion of female managers in Sweden has increased from 19% in 2005 to 37.5% in 2014.
Despite these positive developments at company level, not much has happened in this area if we look at the industry as a whole. Efforts and commitment need to increase.
When Womentor started, the proportion of women in management positions in the IT and telecoms industry was 25%. Almost ten years later, the proportion has increased, but only to 28%. In CEO positions in the industry, women make up no more than 14%. And things are not much better in the wider business world: the proportion of women in management positions is increasing very slowly, by 10 percentage points over the past 12 years, which means that just over 35% of Swedish managers today are women.
So the pace of development is at best very slow, and elsewhere more or less stagnant. That is not good enough.
In 2016, the bar will be raised for companies that are part of Womentor, with the ambition that the share of female leaders in the industry will exceed 40% by 2025. The target is challenging for companies, but not unreasonable.
What the evaluations from Womentor, among others, show is that it is the companies that work actively and at management level to achieve a more equal organization that also achieve results. It's about simple things like setting clear goals, having the right tools to work towards them, and not giving up until they are achieved. In other words, the very factors that are broadly crucial to running successful businesses.
Sweden can be the best country in the world at creating the conditions for digitalization and technological development that drive the economy forward, create jobs, and increase productivity. But to do that and keep growth going, Sweden needs to invest in the future - and that means investing in women, in schools and in the workplace.
The key is to raise the issue of gender equality at management level, and to make it a priority. Many companies, including Microsoft, will take up the challenge, and are calling on other business leaders, regardless of industry, to do the same. We need to take responsibility for making something happen now, because no one else will do it for us.
Jonas Persson, CEO Microsoft
Anne-Marie Fransson, Director of IT&Telecom within Almega