More women than ever are working in IT roles across the UK - 326,000 in total - and now make up a record 20 per cent share of the specialist IT workforce, according to BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

The proportion of women in specialist computing roles increased to its highest ever level this summer, rising to 20 per cent from 17 per cent at the same point in 2019, the professional body for IT found.

Over the past year there has also been a small increase in the percentage of black women working in IT positions, from 0.3 per cent in 2019 to 0.7 per cent in 2020, according to BCS analysis of Office for National Statistics (ONS) employment data.

However, black women are still heavily under-represented in IT and, by comparison, across other occupations their level of representation is 2.5 times higher.

As a whole, there were 31,000 black people working in IT positions across the UK in the second quarter of the year - 1.9 per cent of the total IT specialist workforce.

Julia Adamson, director for education at BCS, said: “The sector is certainly doing better at attracting the range of skilled professionals it needs, supported by long term increases in women taking the subject at A level and applying for computer science degrees.

“But there is still some way to go towards true equality in our field - black women make up less than one percent of IT specialists," she continued, adding: "Professionals from a range of ethnic backgrounds tell us that diversity can still feel like a box-ticking exercise and that managers need to do more to understand the experiences of the people they lead."

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