Labour must form a coherent approach to promoting women and girls in tech

Fewer than one in five people in Britain’s tech industry are women. I am one of them. We are less of a rarity than we were 20 years ago. But there are still too many obstacles to girls and women progressing in the sector.

There’s the perennial glass ceiling – with over three quarters of tech director roles filled by men. It is the single biggest reason why women shun the industry. For BAME women, the picture is even worse – they account for just 0.7% of the UK tech workforce, 2.5 times lower than other professions. And at school, female GCSE candidate numbers in computing dropped from 16,919 in 2020 to 16,549 in 2021 despite the overall number of students sitting the exam increasing – when they take the exam, however, girls outperform boys.

There are too few role models and received perceptions about the type of person accepted in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) careers hold back girls’ interest. It means that so much talent is undeveloped, so much energy unused, so much innovation undiscovered, so much prosperity lost.

As a conference delegate in Liverpool last month I was delighted by Labour’s industrial strategy. It states: “Britain needs to be at the cutting edge of technological development if we are to prepare for and benefit from the digital future. That will require being much more ambitious about how much we spend – private and public sector alike – on research and development.” I spoke in the debate at conference, urging that we encourage more women and girls like my 15-year-old daughter Lillian into the industry so we can make that vision a reality.

It was so heartening to hear our Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson commit from the platform to “recruiting thousands more teachers to help children excel in science and maths”. That is just the kind of ambition we need together with the fantastic idea of Skills England to upskill our country. And it was brilliant of Anneliese Dodds to expose the Tories’ complacent attitude to the government’s social mobility commissioner who said in April that “physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy… There’s a lot of hard maths in there”.

To confront such absurd thinking, there is a great social enterprise called ‘Stemettes‘, which promotes girls and young women in STEM careers. Its founder, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, makes the point that so many innovations have been created by women – everything from safe NASA missions, wifi and bluetooth to bulletproof vests. Stemettes are brilliant and I am so grateful for what they do, but it should not be left to such organisations alone to change views and create openings for women seeking training or careers in the sector.

It will take a deliberate and concerted effort between multiple public agencies and government departments to make the really big changes. But it will not necessarily need a penny more of public expenditure if we get the relationships right with business, schools and local authorities. We can then work on reducing and eradicating the multiple structural and cultural barriers that make STEM so off-putting. So, in government, I hope that Labour can join up its equalities agenda with our industrial and education policies so the party has a coherent approach to promoting girls and women in tech. It is not only the right thing to do, it makes absolute economic sense.

In the wonderful 2016 film Hidden Figures, which tells the story of the achievements of the African-American women “human computers” behind NASA’s space programme in the 1960s, there’s a character called Katherine Johnson. She was an extraordinary mathematician who calculated the trajectories for John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission. The actor who plays her – Taraji P. Henson – confessed, after shooting a scene in which Johnson explains a difficult equation to her perplexed male colleagues, that: “Math and science scares me. It makes my heart palpitate.”

I would love Labour to help make these subjects palpitate the hearts of women and girls for the right reasons. So, to promote these ideas in the party, I am setting up a new network: Labour Women in Tech, for activists working it IT, tech, data and allied industries. If anyone is interested in helping work with me on this, please contact me at [email protected].