Comment: breaking the Big Blue bastion

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 26 October 2011 15:43

IT People - People

When IBM was incorporated just over 100 years ago women in the United States did not have the vote; that would take another nine years.  It took 91 more for the company to appoint its first female CEO.

Virginia Rometty has been announced as the next IBM president and chief executive, a role she will take up when Samuel Palmisano steps aside into the chairman's role. The appointment has received widespread approval from analysts and the industry which sees Ms Rometty - a 30 year IBM veteran - as a safe pair of hands for the management baton.

It should also be welcomed by women looking to advance their career in this sector as a signal that it is possible to rise to the very top of the IT pile.

While there are other women leading large technology companies (Meg Whitman was appointed boss at HP just last month) the fact that the once most conservative of technology brands has now appointed a female CEO should help normalise the elevation of women to the ICT industry's most senior ranks.

But women still remain woefully under-represented in ICT both in the user and vendor communities. Statistics indicate that only about 16 per cent of the ICT workforce is female.

At IBM which has long run gender diversity programmes, the situation has been improving and at the end of 2009 29 per cent of the company's workforce were women.

However the higher up in the organisation you go, the thinner the ranks of senior women - only 21 per cent of the 2009 executives were female. At the board level things are even worse as only two of the 12 current IBM directors are female.