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The report, which collected 1,599 responses from its membership, found that overall 84.4 per cent of respondents were male and 15.6 per cent female. The most female friendly work places for women are insurance followed by health, which have 25:75 and 19.7:80.3 gender splits respectively.
Down at the other end of the scale only 11.4 per cent of ICT workers in the defence sector are women, and 12 per cent of quarrying and mining's ICT professionals are female. But in computer software manufacturing the figure plunges to 3.8 per cent.
Maggie Alexander, one of the founding members of Females in Information Technology and Telecommunications (FITT), said that the low number could be as a result of the question asked in the ACS survey. She said that women were in fact making headway in software manufacturing, but were increasingly represented in usability and systems design roles rather than in straight coding.
The question asked however was a very straightforward one - 'in which industry are you mainly engaged' - which is unlikely to have been misinterpreted.
Ms Alexander acknowledged that the fundamental problem was that too few girls were studying science and maths in schools, which might encourage them to then study computer related topics at university.
