Figures from the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) have shown an increase in IT workers throughout the country, although increases in male employment continue to outstrip those of women.
Year on year, the figures for April to June 2023 showed an increase of 71,000 workers in the IT sector, to 1.7 million from 1.6 million for the same period in 2022.
The split of the increase represents the uneven divide between males and females in the sector. For males, the increase was 45,000, while for females, the increase stood at 26,000.
Quarter on quarter, employment for females actually decreased by 3,000, while for males, the figure increased by 89,000.
The number of women in UK cyber security has also fallen in 2023, according to UK government data on the cyber security workforce published earlier this year.
The proportion of female workers dropped from 22% to 17%, putting the figures on par with 2021 and 2020 statistics.
Published today, the latest ONS figures are broadly consistent with the earlier cyber security findings, suggesting that gender diversity in IT remains an industry-wide challenge, rather than a sector-specific one.
Before the pandemic, research highlighted the lack of gender balance in the tech sector and attributed this, at least in part, to attitudes in the workplace.
IDC: The Key Requirements of Modernization and the Role of IBM Power10
Discover a platform that can take on extremely large workloads without choking on data volumes, transaction volumes, or processing and transaction speeds
Despite efforts by both the private and public sectors in the UK to address gender diversity, the latest ONS figures show there remains work to do.
In terms of the UK IT sector as a whole, the figures represent good news, although the quarterly data shows the turbulence experienced over the last few years.
Employment reached 1.75 million between July and September 2022 before falling back to 1.65 million in the first quarter of 2023.
Previous years do not show the same level of variability, demonstrating the volatility of the IT jobs market over the last 24 months.
Overall, the UK tech jobs market has remained strong, despite some international headwinds.
In April 2023, analysis showed almost half a million (454,000) IT job vacancies in the UK market, with DevOps engineers and Java developers highly sought after.
The vacancies are in spite of companies such as Microsoft and Google announcing thousands of job cuts in the last year, resulting in uncertainty and a feeling of job insecurity within the workforce.
