This piece was originally posted on the GSM-IT project website blog during the first week of Feb 2017.
The low, and often falling, participation rates of women in IT has been a matter of international concern for some time. Many countries in the West are seeing a decline in the number of women participating in the tech sector. As the chart below shows, the Western countries such as the UK and the US fall on the lower end of the spectrum of women employed in the tech sector.
BRIC countries have more women working in the IT sector than Western countries such as the US or UK.
According to the Women in Tech: The Facts report from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) the US has witnessed a continual decline in the number of women working in its IT sector. The percentage of women working in the sector dropped from 36% in 1991 to 24% in 2015.
The situation in the UK has not been as drastic. Instead of a continual decline, it has experienced a stagnation in the number of women in sector. In the period 2005-2015 the percentage of women in the sector has fluctuated between 16-18% according to the annual publication Women in IT Scorecard by the British Computing Society – Women.
The trend in India is in contrast to the decline in the US and the stagnation in the UK. According to a 2009 joint NASSCOM-MERCER report entitled Gender Inclusivity in India the number of women in technical roles in the IT-BPM sector has seen continual growth.
The challenge in India has been the paucity of data. We hope to fill some of this gap through our Women in IT Scorecard- India. Look for the more details on this in the forthcoming Women and IT Scorecard – India.
Notes:
a World Bank Enterprise Survey. The chart was compiled using latest data in the survey database. The country and year of the survey are as follows: Brazil 2009, China 2012, India 2014, Mexico 2010, Russian Federation 2012.
b The source for the US data was the 2016 update of the NCWIT report Women in Tech: The Facts.
c The UK data is from the BCS Women in IT Scorecard 2016.
d NASSCOM-MERCER report Gender Inclusivity in India
Gunjan Sondhi 
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