Since the mid-1940s the western nations have been pursuing equality in gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, age and religion. Today in the UK we have broad protection from the 2010 Equality Act, which recognises nine protected characteristics:

• age;
• disability;
• gender reassignment;
• marriage and civil partnership;
• pregnancy and maternity;
• race;
• religion or belief;
• sex;
• sexual orientation.

There is legal protection from discrimination for these nine characteristics. Similar rights, or broader rights, are given to those in the USA and across Europe.

This should ensure that most organisations offer equality of opportunity and that anti-discrimination requirements are met by employers and retailers, by public institutions and by academia. In other countries there are more or fewer protected diversity characteristics, but it is becoming the norm to legally uphold the right to equal treatment in the workplace, in education, and for consumers and renters.

Specifically, for technologists, the push for equality has been underway for a long time. The UK Women’s Engineering Society (WES) was formed following the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 and WES members, even then, included electrical, electronics and software engineers. Sadly, we are making progress at a glacial rate and consequently we believe that the subject of women in technology still needs exploration, and a guidebook to help address the inequality.

It would be wonderful to believe that the moral imperative, enshrined in the various local legislations on equality, could be enough to motivate all communities to take up the cause of equality and embed it in their behaviours. For those who need an additional business case to drive (and possibly support to fund) their activities, the first chapter of this book lays out some of the sound business reasons that organisations can use to ensure that their whole workforce, from executives through coders, tech specialists and design engineers, recognises and upholds the benefits of diversity and inclusion.

Chapters 2 and 3 look at the support and encouragement available to girls and young women who want to pursue a technical career. They outline the work that is being done on this in schools, universities and colleges, and at a nationwide level.

The later chapters of the book have a pragmatic focus on the steps required to establish projects to attract and retain women in the technology workforce, and drill down into specific activities for both areas. We look at the biases that have led careers in technology to be discounted for women and how we can counter these. And we offer sound and pragmatic ways to set up a project to increase the numbers of women in technology in workplaces and institutions.

There is a real skills-based need to act now in the industry and the technical professions. We should make it a priority, for the sake of our people and our organisations, to ensure that our teams include and value a sustainable mix of diverse people.

A couple of last things need to be said at the outset of this book. Firstly, many of us started our journey looking at ‘women in tech’, ‘women in ICT’ or ‘women in IT’. I believe that whichever term you want to use to depict ‘working with computers’, we all mean the same technologies, the same constructs, and the same roles and responsibilities. For many different reasons (and good semantic ones), we call them different names. In the spirit of inclusivity, we need to embrace all terms. As we are a set of different writers from academia and business in this book, we may have used different terminology, and we hope that many readers will feel included by this approach. Equally, speaking with a windscreen repair company recently, they were concerned about ‘the lack of female “technicians” to replace windscreens’. Clearly, these people don’t work extensively with computers; however, the techniques, tactics and processes outlined in this book will work just as well to help a windscreen replacement service grow and support their minority groups of employees as they would for a major software producer.

Secondly, we want to focus this book on gender diversity. We know that there is real intersectionality for many women working in the industry (women of different ethnicities, women of many different religions, women of different sexual orientations, women living with disabilities, women of all ages and all of the above). However, we focus on gender in the belief that the adept reader will comfortably be able to translate gender to ethnicity or age or any of the other protected characteristics, being able to extrapolate from one characteristic to another and recognising that diversity in multiple forms is good for business (as argued in Chapter 1). We also believe that that same adept reader will be capable of extending the concepts we discuss here to take on the differing requirements and life experiences relating to disability, race, age, sexual orientation and any other inclusivity dimension that deserves their analysis. To support this, each chapter includes one or more case studies to help the thought process, and the reference lists can be consulted for ideas on further reading. Additionally, some of the chapters offer suggestions for companies and tips for individuals.

Finally, this book, Women in Tech: A practical guide to increasing gender diversity and inclusion is a compilation with several contributors using different terminology to describe gender, some using binary language while others embrace a broader perspective on gender identity. It is important to say that we understand gender is not solely understood or lived as either male or female, and we believe that to achieve the best results, IT leadership should be open to, and inclusive of, all genders and identities as the best way to benefit from the true value that diverse and inclusive teams bring to our profession.