This year’s #InclusionMatters findings are especially striking, coming on the back of a period when many tech firms instituted cost-cutting, hiring freezes and headcount reduction measures in response to the challenges of a slowing global economy and aggressive over-hiring during the pandemic. Furthermore, our findings might seem to run counter to research specific to the tech industry, which highlights many prevailing challenges faced by women working in the sector.

So, what are the main drivers behind these results? First, some relevant context. This research is broad, providing a cross-industry lens – and in doing so it presents a positive picture of the experience of women working in tech compared with the female workforce generally. Furthermore, the inclusion scores of both men and women tend to increase in line with the seniority of their role, and the men and women working in the tech industry in our survey had higher representation at senior executive and management levels than our respondents overall. However, while this may have influenced the results to a degree, a closer analysis shows that women in non-management, management, and senior executive levels in tech still achieved higher inclusion scores than the women at the same levels across industries.

Alongside these considerations, there are also a number of industry characteristics and workforce trends within the tech sector that we can justifiably deduce are having a positive impact on women’s experiences at work. For example, the one constant in technology is change – and this provides for a continuous learning environment that’s both natural and required across the industry. Furthermore, tech as an industry provides access to interesting work and highly-paid jobs. And the tech giants have led the way in investing heavily in employee experience. All of these factors have the clear potential to be helping to shape these results.

A further potentially relevant development is that many large companies in the tech sector have invested in extensive and ambitious Inclusion and Diversity programmes. By way of example, take the way in which the tech giants have been in the forefront of setting public goals for gender and broader diversity. They’ve also been transparent about their performance in this area, reporting annually on their representation of women and progress against diversity goals – and being open about instances when that progress is not as fast as they would like.

Other staple items in large technology firms’ diversity programmes include wide-scale unconscious bias training, which is often combined with women’s leadership development programmes both to foster executive-level readiness and prepare women for the next stage at management levels. Some tech companies specifically engage men in their efforts to improve gender diversity, through initiatives such as male-focused allyship programmes and generous parental leave policies open to both mothers and fathers. These are part of tech firms’ drive to establish more inclusive policies generally, while also mitigating for many of the gender stereotypes and challenges that women often face associated with caring-giving breaks and responsibilities.

Many tech firms also make active, early and targeted efforts to bring more women into their workforce, in addition to partnering with not-for-profit organisations to attract more girls to take up technology-related academic disciplines and build early skills development in areas such as coding. Further trends in the sector include women-focused events and conferences geared towards community building and supporting the development of key expertise – in addition to recruitment events specifically targeted at women, and the establishment of Employee Resource Groups focused on women and a far broader range of diversity identities.

What’s clear overall is that there’s a strong and extensive focus on improving Inclusion and Diversity in tech, fuelled by the existing gender (and broader diversity) representation gaps and intensifying talent shortages, particularly around emerging technologies. The effects of these factors are supplemented by the heightened awareness of the impact of unconscious bias in AI and product development, along with an increased understanding of accessibility needs in product design and of the benefits that diversity brings in terms of spurring innovation.

Meanwhile, the sector-wide cost-cutting and headcount reductions that we noted earlier have inevitably had an impact on companies’ headcounts and budgets focused on Inclusion and Diversity. So there’s still a pressing need for the tech industry to accelerate its efforts to close the gender representation gap – and at the same time make sure that the hard-won gains already made are not lost.

Particularly at a time when 31% of women in tech say they’re likely to change employers in the next 12 months, labour market forces are likely a factor here, given tech skills are in demand not just in their own industry but in all sectors. Even with some big players shrinking their workforce, highly skilled tech employees still have more job options right now than workers in other industries. This, combined with the tech industry’s trend towards setting public representation goals, means the fight for female talent with tech skills is very real. As businesses continue to evolve and respond to the impacts of digital disruption, it will be critical that their diversity efforts also include a “women in tech” angle. Indeed, we’re already seeing a growing move across many sectors towards setting up Women in Tech Networks, as has happened here at PwC.