Women CIOs massively under represented

The 2012 CIO Survey from Harvey Nash the recruitment and outsourcing specialist found the representation of women to be “highly unrepresentative of the population at large”. Ninety three per cent of respondents to the global CIO survey are male.

But not only are there too few female CIOs, the overall number of women IT workers is very low, 24 per cent of CIOs responding have no women in their technical teams. Yet 51 per cent believe women can improve relationships between the business and IT.

“For every woman Harvey Nash recruits into a CIO role there are nine men placed in a similar position,” the company states in its report.

Not only are there too few women, their reporting line was found to be less strategic than men with 41 per cent reporting to the CEO, compared to 48 per cent of male CIOs. This is in turn leading to greater churn amongst senior women IT leaders, the recruitment firm claims. In the last two years 16 per cent of women have changed role.

“Women CIOs are pursuing more change programmes than their male counterparts, they are improving the success rate of projects and using technology to engage better with customers, while men focus more on delivering consistent and stable IT performance for the organisation,” Harvey Nash state.

Pay scales for female CIOs are also lower with the global average of $201.944 compared to $204.854 for a male and 73 per cent of women have been working with a pay freeze compared to 61 per cent of men.

• Read the full CIO analysis of the Harvey Nash CIO Survey
• Women CIOs? Not one of us