THE LAMENTATBLE LACK of women in the UK's IT and telecoms industry has been born out in official statistics published today.

In 2007 the numbers of women working in IT and telecoms professions in the UK increased a mere half a percentage point over2006.

The proportion of women in IT has been languishing around the teen percentiles since the air started escaping from the dotcom bubble. That is, over 80 per cent of the people in tech jobs are men and its been that way for years, according to stats produced exclusively for the INQUIRER by the Office of National Statistics.

The proportions of women in IT are up to 50 per cent less than they were in the 90s, if you discount those filing paper and booking meeting rooms.

The stats illustrate just how ineffective E-Skills, the industry's skills quango, has been in coaxing women into the IT professions.

And the recent dribble of chauvinistic comments to the INQUIRER's recent stories on the gender skills crisis illustrate that work must still be done to educate the Neanderthals who populate some IT departments.

E-Skills own report said last month the the gender imbalance in tech professions had become so dire that a "new approach" was needed to get more women into IT.

But the quango's consultation over its future strategy, which opened this week, gives no indication that it has heeded its own advice. Rather than a new approach, its draft strategic plan gives us only more of the same, along with some hackneyed rhetoric about Britain's place in a "new world order".

This "emerging new world order", said E-Skills, was a globalised world in w hich the UK stood as a leader among nations on the strength of its professional, managerial and user IT&T skills. The quango would make Britain Great again by encouraging firms to improve these skills.

Indeed, its mission was "critically" important for Britain's well-being and the "very survival" of British firms depended on their strategic investment in technology.

But E-Skills has dropped the spiel it was running only last month about more women being "vital" to Britain's IT industry. The reasoning had gone that there weren't enough high quality male IT professionals to shore Britain's IT industry up against ravenous foreign Tigers and Dragons.

E-Skills has vowed to stick to its market approach to tackling the gender skills crisis, which means doing little and certainly not doing anything new.

It's strategic plan recommended only promoting IT as a profession and continuing Computer Clubs for Girls, an after-school programme that has attracted a mere 120,000 pupils in three years.

But E-Skills has opened a public consultation on its strategy, which gives people until 27 June to suggest how it could buck its ideas up, perhaps by making employers commit to gender targets, or by investing in training centres with a proven track record of getting women into the IT industry. µ

Women in IT - the numbers