Women in technology: closing the UK tech gender gap
The conversation about women in technology has been running for two decades, and the number that matters has barely moved. It is moving now, slowly, and understanding why it moves at all is more useful than another round of concern.
This is the hub for everything we publish on women in technology in the UK: the size of the gap, what women in tech actually earn, where women leave and why, the routes in that work, and how to tell a decent tech employer from a good careers page.
Where women in technology actually are, in numbers
The best UK source is BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, which analyses Labour Force Survey data each year. Its Gender Diversity in the Tech Sector Report 2025 found:
- 441,000 female IT specialists in the UK in 2024, which is 22% of all IT specialists, up one percentage point on 2023.
- Women were 49% of everyone in work, so if IT matched the workforce norm there would be roughly 530,000 more women in IT roles than there are.
- Black women make up 0.6% of the UK IT specialist workforce, down from 0.7% when BCS started tracking it in 2022.
Twenty-two per cent is not evenly spread, and the averages hide the interesting part. BCS found representation across the 2020 to 2024 period ranged from around 6% of IT engineers to 34% of IT project and programme managers, 34% of web designers and developers and 30% of IT operations technicians.
That spread tells you something practical. The tech gender gap is not one gap. It is narrow in delivery, product and web roles, and very wide in infrastructure and engineering roles. If you are choosing where to point a career, that matters more than any headline percentage.
What women in tech earn
Two separate measurements, both worth knowing.
BCS found the median hourly earnings for female IT specialists in 2024 was £23 an hour, 12% below the figure for men working in IT positions, and that this had widened from 6% in 2023. One year is not a trend, but a doubling in a single year is not nothing either.
Employer-level reporting tells a similar story from a different angle. Every UK employer with 250 or more staff publishes six gender pay gap figures a year under the Gender Pay Gap Information Regulations 2017. We analysed the 2025 to 2026 filings on the government’s Gender pay gap service for employers registered under computer programming, consultancy, information services and software publishing. Across those 448 employers:
- The median gap was 14.5%, against 8.0% across all 11,183 reporting employers.
- Women were a median 22.4% of the top pay quartile and 41.8% of the lowest.
For national context, the Office for National Statistics put the UK gender pay gap at 6.9% for full-time employees and 12.8% across all employees in April 2025.
Tech pays well and pays women less than it pays men, and the second fact is mostly a consequence of the first two quartiles. Our sector breakdown in is the UK technology industry good for women goes employer by employer.
Where the gap opens, and where it widens
It does not start at the CV
The BCS data contains a genuinely surprising finding. Female IT specialists are better qualified in general and less qualified in IT specifically: 82% of women in IT roles held a higher education qualification compared with 71% of men, but only 5% of women held an IT degree against 10% of men.
Women are arriving in technology through conversion, adjacent disciplines and self-teaching more often than through a computer science degree. Any hiring process that treats a CS degree as a proxy for capability filters women out at the first pass, and it does so before a human has read anything. If you are hiring, reducing bias in your hiring process is where to start.
It widens through flexibility, not ambition
BCS found female IT specialists were more than four times as likely as men to work part time (13% against 3%). Put that next to the sector norm: just 6% of IT specialists work part time, compared with 23% of the workforce as a whole.
Technology is one of the least part-time-friendly industries in the country. That is a design choice, not a technical constraint, and it lands hardest on women in the years when caring responsibilities peak. It is also the single clearest explanation for why women who enter tech in balanced numbers at graduate level are not in the top quartile fifteen years later. If you need to change your hours, our guide on asking about flexible working in an interview covers your day-one rights.
It is not a lack of appetite for responsibility
Worth naming, because the assumption runs the other way. BCS found female IT specialists who were employees were slightly more likely than men to be in positions with responsibility, 44% against 42%. And their unemployment rate, at 2.4%, was well below the 4.2% rate for women in the UK overall.
Women in tech are employed, qualified and holding responsibility. What they are not doing, in proportion, is reaching the highest-paid quartile.
The useful way to hold all of this together is that the UK does not have a women in technology recruitment problem so much as a promotion and retention problem. Balanced graduate intakes are common. Balanced technical leadership is rare. Every intervention that only touches the front of the funnel is working on the part that is already closest to fixed.
What is actually working
Four things with evidence behind them, rather than good intentions.
Structured, skills-based hiring. GOV.UK publishes practical guidance on fair and structured interview techniques and on reducing unconscious bias in CV screening. Scoring the same criteria for every candidate, agreed before applications are read, does more than any training day.
Conversion routes taken seriously. Given that only 5% of female IT specialists hold an IT degree, apprenticeships, bootcamps and internal moves from operations, analysis or support are not a side door. They are the main door. Employers that hire deliberately from them get a materially different candidate pool.
Genuine part-time and compressed senior roles. Not a policy in a handbook. An actual named person doing a senior technical job four days a week, on the same band as the five-day version of it. Given that only 6% of UK IT specialists work part time at all, an employer that has made this work at principal or staff level has solved something most of the industry has not attempted.
Published, dated targets. Publishing six pay gap figures is compulsory. Publishing an action plan with named owners and deadlines is not, which is precisely why it is a signal. The test is whether last year’s plan can be checked against this year’s numbers.
Routes into tech in the UK
There is no single path, and the ones that work are less glamorous than the ones that get written about.
- Apprenticeships, including degree apprenticeships, which pay you while you qualify and are searchable on GOV.UK’s find an apprenticeship service.
- Internal moves, from operations, customer support, finance, marketing or analysis into product, data or delivery. This is the most common route and the least discussed.
- Conversion courses and postgraduate diplomas, for people with a strong first degree in something else.
- Bootcamps, which vary enormously in quality. Ask for employment outcomes at six and twelve months, and treat any provider that will not give you them as an answer in itself.
- The roles where women are already well represented: project and programme management, web development, product, data analysis, IT operations. Starting where the door is already open is a strategy, not a compromise.
Our guide to careers for women in technology covers roles and starting salaries in detail, and tech jobs in the UK covers where the vacancies actually are.
How to judge a tech employer before you join
Five checks, in order of how much they tell you.
- The top pay quartile figure. Not the headline gap. The proportion of women in the best-paid quarter of the workforce is the number that reflects promotion rather than recruitment. How to read a company’s gender pay gap figures walks through it.
- The direction of travel across four years. The government’s service holds every past filing. One year is noise.
- Who is senior and technical. Look at the engineering leadership specifically, not the whole executive team. A female chief people officer tells you nothing about the engineering ladder.
- Whether anyone senior works flexibly. Ask for an example. If nobody does, the policy is theoretical.
- How they interview. Structured, scored, consistent questions with a written brief in advance is a good sign about the whole organisation, not just the process.
For a starting shortlist, see best UK technology companies for women in 2026.
Community, recognition and finding your people
Isolation is the quiet reason women leave technical roles, and it is the easiest of these problems to do something about this week. We keep two running lists: women in tech communities worth joining in the UK and women in tech awards in the UK, which are useful for visibility as well as for nominating someone else.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of tech workers in the UK are women?
Women made up 22% of UK IT specialists in 2024, around 441,000 people, according to BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. That is up one percentage point on 2023. Representation varies widely by role, from roughly 6% of IT engineers to about 34% of IT project and programme managers.
Is there a gender pay gap in UK tech?
Yes, and it is wider than the national picture. BCS found female IT specialists earned a median £23 an hour in 2024, 12% below men in IT roles. Across UK technology employers reporting for 2025 to 2026, the median gender pay gap was 14.5%, compared with 8.0% across all reporting employers.
Do I need a computer science degree to work in tech?
No, and most women in UK technology roles do not have one. BCS found just 5% of female IT specialists held an IT degree, against 10% of men, while 82% held a higher education qualification of some kind. Apprenticeships, conversion courses and internal moves are the routes most women actually take.
Which tech roles have the most women in the UK?
IT project and programme management and web design and development, both at around 34% women across the 2020 to 2024 period, followed by IT operations technicians at about 30%. IT engineering roles are the least balanced, at around 6%.
How can employers attract more women into technology roles?
Start with the criteria rather than the campaign. Drop degree requirements that are not genuinely necessary, since only 5% of female IT specialists hold an IT degree. Score applications against a written checklist agreed before you read them, as GOV.UK’s structured interview guidance sets out. Advertise the role at the hours it can actually be done in, including part-time and compressed options. Then publish your top pay quartile figure and what you intend to do about it.
Join RecruitHer, a community of women hiring and backing women.
Sources: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, Gender Diversity in the Tech Sector Report 2025 (Labour Force Survey data for 2024). Gender pay gap service, 2025 to 2026 reporting year, analysed by RecruitHer in August 2026. Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, April 2025.
Last reviewed: August 2026