EC: Tech industry must recruit more women

The tech and telecoms industry needs to get more women on board or risk confronting a shortfall of 300,000 IT workers in 2010, according to the European Commission.

The Commission is hoping to influence more girls still in compulsory education to consider pursuing a career in IT, in an effort to keep the tech workforce on track. Sixty-six percent of telecoms companies have no women on the board.

Despite growth in the number of students across Europe studying ICT-related subjects, the Commission is pushing for more techies in universities — currently 2.3 percent of all students study IT — to keep Europe up to speed with its industrial rivals, such as the US, where 5 percent of graduates are techies, and South Korea, where the figure is 6 percent.

Getting more women into IT is the answer, says the Commission. In 2006 a mere 22 percent of those undertaking tech studies were women.

At the top of the corporate ladder, the picture is even bleaker. In 66 percent of telecoms companies, there are no women on the board and in 14 major IT companies the figure is less than 10 per cent.

UK IT body Intellect has also warned recently that women are deserting IT, prompted by the long hours and macho culture. The group said only 16 percent of tech workers are women, and even that meagre number is a drop from 18 percent a couple of years ago.

BT is one company trying to redress the balance. The telco has announced a £200,000 "apprentice attraction campaign" in an attempt to woo more female telecoms engineers into its training schemes. Last year, the company launched a drive to recruit hundreds of teenage apprentices, but it now claims that only 8 percent of those expressing an interest have been female, against a target of 25 percent.

ZDNet UK's David Meyer contributed to this report.