Nature of employment

4.1 Occupation

Further analysis of the gender balance for specific IT roles shows female representation within the IT professions varying from less than one in ten IT/Telecoms Engineers (7% and 8% respectively over the 2021-25 period) - to around one in three IT Project/Programme Managers, Web Designers/ Developers and IT Operations Technicians (34%, 29% and 32% respectively).

GENDER REPRESENTATION BY IT OCCUPATION (2025)

Source: ONS Quarterly Labour Force Survey, analysis commissioned by BCS  

*Five-year average 

4.2 Permanence of employment 

Female IT specialists were marginally more likely to be working on a non-permanent basis than their male counterparts in 2025 (3% vs 2%) though in both cases the proportion working in temporary positions was lower than within the workforce as a whole (with comparison figures of 6% for females and 5% for males).

Though a detailed analysis of the reasons why IT specialists (female/male) were in non-permanent employment during 2025 is not possible (due to limitations of the data source), it can be said that a lower proportion of female IT specialists appeared to have been in temporary positions as they did not want a permanent job (16% stating this to be the case during the 2021-25 period compared with 26% of males in IT positions).

4.3 Gender and unemployment

There were approximately 17,000 female IT specialists in the UK that were unemployed in 2025 i.e. 27% of all unemployed IT specialists in the UK during this period.

At 3.8% the associated unemployment rate2 for female IT specialists was notably higher than for males normally working in the IT field (3.0%) but still well below the overall unemployment rate for women in the UK (4.6%).