Sheffield-based HR software providers myhrtoolkit will be celebrating their best gender diversity ratio yet, as a company within the male-dominated tech sector, in time for International Women’s Day on Sunday 8th March.
Myhrtoolkit’s Sales and Marketing Director, Bob Teasdale is enthused about the company’s improved ratio in this essential area of diversity:
“As we’ve grown over these last few years and welcomed more new recruits on board, we’re proud to report that our employee gender ratio is now 40% women to 60% men, following from us welcoming our new Partner Manager on board earlier this month.”
This is up rapidly from January 2018, when the company had a gender ratio of 23% women to 77% men.
“As a SaaS company, we’re especially proud to have such a gender-diverse workforce, with companies in the technology sector lagging behind others when it comes to gender diversity.”
In the 21st century, women are still struggling to get an equal footing within tech. It was reported in 2019 that women only accounted for 16.8% of workers in the UK’s tech sector and that the industry needed to hire 1 million women to achieve gender parity.
Men within the tech sector also earn a lot more than women on average, with Mercer reporting a gender pay gap of 25% in comparison to an overall gap of 18% in the UK. The imbalance in representation increased for managerial and senior positions, with women comprising only 13% of the tech workforce as executive level (up from 49% at junior support level).
When it comes to redressing gender imbalance in the workplace, the last decade has seen several major companies and organisations in the spotlight. From 2017, companies with 250 or more employees have been legally obliged to disclose their gender pay gaps to the Government Equalities Office annually.
The data submitted revealed that many businesses still have major pay gaps in the average amount that women earn compared to the average amount that men in the same company earn. This is often since there are more female part-time workers than male, and that men are more likely than women to be in senior positions.
Changing these facts is likely to require assistance from both government and employers. Currently, fathers or partners of the mothers of newly born children are only entitled to a maximum of two weeks paternity leave at statutory pay. Mothers, on the other hand, can take up to 52 weeks statutory maternity leave.
Despite the introduction of shared parental leave in 2015, which gives mothers and their partners an equal share of maternity leave, the take-up of this initiative in the UK has been much slower than several countries with similar offerings.
