This year marks the 15th time Computer Weekly has celebrated the Most Influential Women in UK Technology, yet women still make up only around 20% of the tech workforce.
Not only this, but for twomen who do make it into the tech sector, the environment means thousands are leaving their roles each year, some to move out of the sector altogether.
Karen Blake, head of EDIS and this year’s most influential woman in UK tech, says this is because the “programmatic solutions that we’ve worked on so far have been warm jumpers for a cold climate, and now we actually need to do something about that climate”.
Changing the chilly climate
As a co-author of the Lovelace Report, Blake knows more than most how the current climate and culture of the tech sector are not conducive to achieving a diverse workforce.
“One of the biggest challenges still is culture in the tech sector,” she says. “We need to think about how we move the culture dial to improve the overall position.”
Blake confesses that her own route into tech was “squiggly”, having begun her career with roles focused on human capital at EY and Deloitte, before moving into the education space, and then becoming co-CEO of not-for-profit Tech Talent Charter.
She is now a member of the UK government’s Women in Tech Taskforce, and is head of diversity and inclusion collective EDIS.
While “squiggly”, the overarching theme of her career has been the importance of giving all people equal access to opportunities. In the tech sector, Blake sees both “joy and frustration”, in that there is a plethora of “brilliant skill” in the industry, which fuels innovation, but there are also higher barriers to entry for so many people who could make the sector “so much more than it is”.
The current tech culture is not only preventing certain groups from joining, but also making it difficult for those already in the sector to thrive, not only damaging individuals, but also damaging tech development and innovation as a whole.
“One of the top-ranked skills is adaptability. You can’t be adaptable without psychological safety, and in an environment where culture is poor, you often don’t have psychological safety,” says Blake.
“These things are very much the building blocks of us being able to continue to meet the changes that we’re seeing in our technology workforces and what we’re going to need to do to make the best of those technologies.”
Many women in tech experience everything from “microaggressions all the way to sexual assault”, according to Blake, who claims this is “happening at some scale”.
“We can’t just continue to allow a culture of harm to be the one that we send so many colleagues into, day in, day out,” she urges.
“In terms of the expectation of tech culture, we can’t just settle on ‘tech bro’ culture as the way it always has to be. Some of the labelling has allowed us to become permissive with it. It feels impossible to change.”
Power struggle dampens potential
When building initiatives aimed at improving the diversity of the sector, Blake expresses concern there can be the impression of improvement without long-term, sustainable results.
Using leadership schemes as an example, Blake says: “That’s great if you’ve been taught the skills. Brilliant. But actually, how many women then go on to hold those [leadership] roles? Are we just creating different holding pens? So for me, it’s about us being able to ensure that when we develop interventions, we’re thinking about more of a lifecycle. Do they move the dial when it’s hooked up?”
One thing that is fuelling this problem is uneven distribution of power.
She says: “There has been movement in terms of representation, but in terms of power, that’s been rigidly set. And it’s very difficult to change who the decision-makers are.”
The lack of women in decision-making positions in tech is an ongoing concern, with the now-defunct Tech Talent Charter finding that women made up only 21% of senior UK tech leaders among its signatories in 2024, and Frank Recruitment Group finding that women only held a quarter of CIO positions in FTSE 100 companies in the same year.
For tech companies, seeking to alter this power imbalance can mean looking at policies for work allocation, looking at the progression pathways and skills development within their organisations, ensuring all employees are given the opportunity to progress, and supporting employee development – all mentioned in the Lovelace Report.
Women in particular can “stagnate” in a role. “It takes double the time for women to be promoted than men in tech,” says Blake, who encourages organisations to look at their own data to help understand what the current landscape looks like and how to shift it.
“In doing that, you move something in the culture, too,” she adds.
But these are “singular programmatic solutions”, and Blake points out that this is a systemic issue across the sector.
She explains: “It’s not misunderstood what we would need to do to make the change. Actually, what we need is commitment and consistency on those changes. I think there’s fear that change means a different power distribution, and that’s where we get into all of the traditional challenges around power and participation of who gets to lead, who gets to make those decisions.”
The real story around AI
With every technological shift, there’s the potential both to elevate people’s experience and to leave people behind.
Artificial intelligence (AI) development and adoption is moving quickly, and while many in the sector are doing their best to ensure it’s being built in a sustainable way that suits as many users as possible, Blake claims it’s as if they’re “moving through treacle”.
She says: “We’re seeing that homogenised practice means the products, tools, services and approaches are all shaping a society that lots of us have real difficulties being able to participate in. I think more generally speaking, bigger questions are now being asked: Who are the architects of such a big societal shift?”
Blake has noticed a “narrative” surrounding AI that incorrectly suggests women “are adopting it at a slower rate”.
“That tells us nothing of the real story of what’s going on. I think it’s quite telling to see how these narratives are quickly depicted to keep a pecking order of where you should be and what your participation should look like,” she says.
In reality, Blake states, women are just using AI in a different manner than their male counterparts.
“Many women are adopting AI in a more sustainable way. They’re considering their use [of it]. They’re asking, ‘Where is it most applicable in my work? Is it safe? What’s my ethical position on this? Do I know how to apply this in a way that is consistent with my organisational position?’ I think there’s less shadow use of AI, and arguably that means a safer position for organisations.”
There are already issues with AI adoption, with unequal access to the technology widening the opportunity gap for women and lower-paid workers, and young girls are more concerned than boys about what the future looks like with AI.
This caution that women have about AI is an approach more of us should take. Blake argues that, with AI in its infancy and so many organisations adopting the technology out of perceived necessity rather than a business need, more needs to be done to ensure it’s being developed and adopted safely, sustainably and ethically, in a way that’s “meaningful and appropriate”.
With the UK said to be the quickest adopter of AI in the G7, Blake says: “I always think there is a word missing there. Adopter of what? Of productivity, of tools, of harm? What are we the quickest adopter of?
“I think that women are adopting at a speed we will be more grateful for when we look back on it. I often think of this as a time where it’s a kind of AI toddlerdom, where we’ve got all the crayons out of the box and we’re drawing on the walls. At some point we’ll get to a kind of teenage and adult [stage], and we’ll look back and wonder what on earth we were doing.”
Ensuring a diverse workforce can contribute to more sensible development and deployment of AI, but the issue is that while there are women working in AI, as is the case across the wider tech industry, they’re not in decision-making positions where they can make a real difference to how AI is shaped going forward.
Blake says: “One of the things I fear is women are finding themselves in those roles, for example AI ethics, and it’s becoming ‘office housework’, where you can be very busy doing it, but you’ve got no power to actually shape what happens with that product or service.”
This all comes back to the uneven distribution of power in the sector and why we need more diversity at the top of organisations.
“The lack of women in decision-making positions is once again blocking them from participating in meaningful decision-making when it comes to emerging technology,” says Blake.
Giving attention to broken bones
There is no quick fix for shifting towards a more diverse and equitable tech sector, but doing so could reduce mistakes with fast-paced emerging technologies and ensure wider distribution of tech that includes everyone.
The issue, though, according to Blake, is that “we haven’t fixed the bones of the system”, and the longer it takes, the more difficult it becomes.
She challenges senior leaders to spearhead this change, stating: “Your name is the one heard around dinner tables all over the place, where your employees will be telling stories about what’s happening in their days, and you’ve got the choice of whether you are the nightmares of their children or those that set their aspirations free.”
It has already taken a long time to make the smallest of progress towards a diverse and equitable tech workforce, and BCS claimed in a 2024 report that it will take another 283 years for the percentage of women working in the UK tech sector to match the 48% of women there are in the wider workforce if the pace stays the same.
But Blake has hope. “I would much rather think what’s the best that could happen looking at the sky rather than looking at the floor. This is changeable, this is movable. If we had consistency and commitment, we could change it,” she says.
