The elephant in the room – something everyone knows about, but no-one wants to discuss. It makes some of them uncomfortable and is personally, socially, or politically embarrassing, controversial, inflammatory, or dangerous. In business, there is often a herd of elephants. Inequality has been laid bare during the pandemic: women trapped in insecure work, as identified in the Gender Matters research carried out by the Academy for Gender, Work and Leadership and the Work Foundation with our support; race barriers faced by Britain’s black communities, highlighted by Black Lives Matter; inadequate access to funding for women entrepreneurs, shown in the Rose Review; and the issue of unequal pay, evidenced by gender pay gap and ethnic pay gap reporting. Inequality seems to pivot on all the axes of race, sex, gender, age, faith, class, and wealth. Addressing inequality is perhaps the single largest elephant in the room, but given most businesses find it difficult to tackle all inequalities at once, progress has been glacially slow. At equality charity Diversity UK, we have addressed many of these issues over the last decade, focusing most recently on the British tech and digital sectors, where gaps are acute but where opportunities to close them are the greatest. In 2022, Tech Nation reported the tech workforce is now 26% female, a significant rise from 19% in 2020. However, women are underrepresented in senior leadership roles. With so few female decision-makers, tech products continue to reflect the gender biases of the industry, discouraging the next generation from entering the room. A recent report by BCS: The Chartered Institute of IT, Coding Black Females, found just 0.7%of the tech industry are Black Women. The imbalances of sex, gender and race persist. The pandemic exacerbated problems. Women are more likely to leave tech sector roles, according to research by InnovateHer. They found 45%more women than men leave their roles, and half of the women in tech leave before the age of 35. In the face of a shortage of skills, InnovateHer reports: • Just 3%of female students say a career in tech is their first choice • Only 20%of Computer Science GCSE students are female • 61%of girls say they have been put off a career in tech • 8%of women progress to a level 4+ STEM qualification We have a cocktail of opposing forces: a lack of skills and attractiveness of an industry desperate for new workers, combined with a high attrition rate of female employees will only add to the chronic shortage of women in tech at a time when UK economic growth depends upon businesses resolving these inequalities. INVESTING INWOMEN ENTREPRENEURS The Rose Review, commissioned by the UK Government in 2019, highlighted stark inequality gaps: • Only 5.6%of UK women own their own companies • Only 13%of senior investors are women • 48%of investment teams have no women • £250 billion could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as men PitchBook calculated only 2.2%of venture capital (VC) funding went to women-led start-ups in 2020. That dropped to 2.0% in 2021. Atomico’s State of European Tech report showed that in 2021, 1.1%of capital raised overall went to all-women founding teams, and 8.8% to mixed-gender 12 |
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