Nordic women in IT jobs

I posted an update yesterday on the percentage of women in IT jobs in the US, using the most recent government data available (2019). Someone from Sweden asked me overnight if I had similar data for the Nordics. As of 8 am this morning I didn't, but it's a sleepy Easter Sunday...and I do now! :)

But first, some disclaimers. I was only able to access the equivalent of the US data for Sweden: primary government labour statistics up to 2018. For Norway and Finland I relied on an excellent secondary source on women in ICT jobs published by Nordwit (Nordic Centre of Excellence on Women in Technology Driven Careers, team picture above.) Thanks to study authors Morten Simonsen & Hilde G. Corneliussen, and to sponsor Nordforsk. Annoyingly, neither I nor the Nordwit team appear to be able to find similar stats for Denmark. The government does publish stats on women who work in the ICT industry, and I have included that: But it is NOT showing the same thing. ICT companies have a lot of IT jobs, but they also employ non-IT workers. And not all IT jobs are in the ICT sector: banks, universities, governments, etc. all have IT workers. Finally, one needs to be cautious in comparing countries -- they all have their own way of classifying workers, so the numbers are likely to be broadly indicative, but not perfectly comparable! Now, on to the results.

The percentage of women in IT jobs in Sweden is broadly static for the 2014-2018 period. It does seem to be growing since 2016 (which is when the general push to get better gender diversity in IT really became a high profile global issue), but fairly slowly: up 0.31 percentage points in 2018, roughly the same as year over year growth in the US for 2019.

The data I have for Sweden is very detailed, so a few more observations:

1. The percentage of women varies widely by IT role. Over 46% of webmasters and web administrators are women, while only 10% of computer network and system technicians are women.
2. The single biggest IT job category in Sweden is software- and system-developers, representing about a third of total IT workers. Women make up only 18.7% of this category in 2018, so it's going to be tough to drive the diversity number up without seeing growth in this critical category. The closest comparable category in the US data (software developers, applications and systems software) is also down at 18.7%, suggesting this is a global issue.
3. In the US, although 24.9% of all IT workers are women, the percentage of IT managers who are women is 28.7%, nearly four percentage points higher. This pattern is not seen in Sweden to the same extent: female IT managers are only 22.1%, or only half a percentage point higher than the overall rate...and up only 0.4 percentage points from the prior year, whereas the US female IT manager rate was up 1.7 percentage points.
4. In encouraging news, there were 10,879 more IT jobs in Sweden in 2018 than in 2017, and the number of women in IT jobs rose by 2,899, so women accounted for 26.6% of all new jobs. In the US, that comparable figure for 2019 was almost 35%, which shows what is possible!

The Norwegian numbers (from the Nordwit report) are a little odd: it seems unlikely that the percentage really jumped from 16% in 2014 to 20% in 2015 and then down to 15% the next year. But assuming that 2015 was a bit of a glitch, the trend is generally pretty good: the percentage of IT jobs filled by women has nearly doubled since 2011, is growing well (four percentage points improvement in each of 2018 and 2019) and is now seems well above the other Nordics and the US (although comparing country to country is always tough.)

The Finnish numbers (from the Nordwit report) resemble Sweden: generally flat over the period for which we have data, a bit lower than the US, but improving nicely in the last year, up 1.7 percentage points.

The good news is the Danish data (from the government statistics site) goes back all the way to 2008. The bad news is that it shows the percentage of ICT industry company employees and not the percentage of IT jobs across all industries, so is not really comparable to the other three. (I know I said this before, but it is REALLY important so I am saying it again.) Without comparing the absolute percentages, the shape of growth in gender diversity is roughly similar to Sweden and Finland, with modest but fairly steady growth in recent years. Danish women in the ICT sector rose 0.28 percentage points in 2019, 0.26 percentage points in 2018, and 0.37 points in 2017. At that rate, there's a good chance they will be at 25% by 2020!

Some closing thoughts:

1. Gold star to Norway!
2. Some signs of progress elsewhere in the Nordics, at a roughly similar pace to the US.
3. Still a long way to go before we reach gender parity.
4. All of this is an update to my Deloitte 2016 TMT Prediction on women in IT jobs. Although I normally note that what I write on a LinkedIn article is my own opinion, and not official Deloitte research, the research and methodology and some of the sources used in this post is basically identical to what I used in 2016. So pretty reliable stuff! But still not official Deloitte research. Please cite me (and not Deloitte) if you use this anywhere.
5. The colours I used for each country's charts were completely random. I hope no irate Danes, etc. write me to complain about being purple!