OU academics, Professor Parvati Raghuram and Dr Clem Herman, will be investigating why the numbers of women have been declining over the last 10 years with women making up only 11% of IT specialists in the UK. Dr Herman sees their research as a way to develop new thinking and approaches to the issue.
Women make up only 11% of IT specialists in the UK.
She says: “A lot of people are concerned about the low numbers of women in tech in the UK. Employers, educators, policymakers are all puzzling over why can we not recruit and retain more women in the IT sector as a whole. It is time we brought new thinking to this problem.”
The academics are investigating this issue further through the £550,000 research project, Gender, Skilled Migration and IT; a comparative study of India and the UK, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, which compares the UK scenario with that of India.
“One way of addressing the problem of gender inequity in the UK is to compare it with other countries like India where there is a much higher proportion of women in IT, about 30%,” said Professor Raghuram.
Between now and the end of this two-year project, the researchers will conduct surveys and interviews in partnership with a range of IT companies to understand in more depth the experiences of women in IT both in the UK and India.
Watch the video here.This research is part of the OU’s research in International Development and the OpenSpace Research Centre which are working towards a fairer, more sustainable world.
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