As another International Women’s Day comes by, it is a stark reminder of the glacial progress in closing the UK tech industry’s gender gap.
Much work is being done. A recent report from the women-led high-growth enterprise taskforce, led by Starling Bank founder Anne Boden, made a handful of practical recommendations for businesses.
A women-led campaign was part of successful lobbying efforts to push the Treasury into reversing a law change that would have cut thousands of women out of angel investing.
Other initiatives, such as Playfair Capital’s long-running Female Founder Office Hours programme, will see 150 VC funds hold remote office hours for female founders in April.
Despite positive tech industry action, there is much more to be done to change perceptions and attitudes. A recent survey of 1,000 men, conducted by Nigel Frank International, found that 80% agree men and women are treated equally in the tech world.
A recent viral video of a man at an AI hackathon in San Francisco, who was wearing a t-shirt depicting photo-realistic exposed breasts, shows the real-world impact of these attitudes.
Much like on last year’s IWD, the data indicates at best mixed signs that the tech gender gap is moving in the right direction.
UK leads Europe in funding for women in tech
Data from Pitchbook found that tech startups with at least one woman founder in the UK secured £3.3bn in VC funding across 726 deals.
This puts the UK firmly ahead of Germany, France, the Netherlands and the rest of Europe in total funding for women-founded startups.
The figures suggest the UK is a leader in funding women-led businesses, however, within the UK, the share of total VC funding going to female-founded startups has remained fairly unchanged in the past five years at between 1% and 2%.
Separate data analysis from Beauhurst – of both announced and unannounced UK equity funding deals last year – found that £2.4bn went to companies with at least one female founder, out of a total £17.3bn.
Female representation remains low
Last year, 20.1% of active UK companies were female-led, according to the Gender Index Report 2024. Newly incorporated female-led companies decreased to 21.2% in 2023. This was mainly driven by a decrease in England, while the number of new female-led businesses also declined in Scotland. However, there was a small rise in the number of new women-led companies in Northern Ireland and Wales.
The gap is even starker for high-growth companies, with just 12.4% of those led by women.
“Transparency is a powerful tool that will help us combine what is known and measured to drive meaningful transformation,” said Bailey Morrow, managing director, head of climate tech, consumer internet and frontier tech at HSBC Innovation Banking UK. “That’s why a clear, objective picture of the reality of the UK’s female business community shown through The Gender Index is so important.”
It’s a similar story for women in STEM. IT firm Experis’ survey of 2,000 UK businesses found that a fifth had not set initiatives to increase women candidates in STEM roles and more than a quarter (28%) said there was either slow or no progress in this area.
Among the businesses that were making progress, less than a quarter (24%) said they were on track with their measures to increase women in STEM roles.
AI bias reflects real-world bias
The AI sector has become bigger than ever thanks to models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. Yet for all the growing mainstream uptake, many remain concerned about about real-world bias against women creeping into AI systems.
Cindi Howson, CDSO at ThoughtSpot, said “the underrepresentation of women in tech” has “gone as far as to weave its way into the very fabric of technology itself”.
Howson said: “Gender bias in generative AI exemplifies how pervasive stereotypes lurk within the data used to train these models.”
Whether the bias is intentional or not, Howson said it is largely down to a lack of women being involved at these high levels.
“As more women join the ranks of developers, researchers, and AI leaders, this will bring a wider range of perspectives to the table that will be vital in developing models that reflect the full spectrum of human experiences.”
Read more: The UK tech industry’s woeful gender equality in five charts
The post IWD: Data shows tech gender parity progress remains slow appeared first on UKTN.
