Reflecting on International Women’s Day 2025

Lauren (Casual Software Developer) writes, reflecting on International Women’s Day 2025.

Just 29% of the UK’s tech sector employees identify as women or non-binary, a statistic which falls to 20% when the pool is shrunk to just software engineers. On top of this, over 90% of women in tech have faced gender bias in their day-to-day roles, with more than 1 in 10 facing it on a regular basis. Although these statistics have improved in recent years, there is still a long way to go in terms of equality in the industry and, here at Harker, we are taking the opportunity of International Women’s Day this year to review our hiring and internal processes to see how we can make impact in our small corner of the world.

As of writing, we have one female employee out of nine - whilst this gender split isn’t currently as balanced as we'd like, we are actively changing our recruitment processes to encourage more female candidates to apply for roles at Harker.

One of the key changes we made in late 2024 was removing unnecessary criteria from the essential requirements section of all job roles. This was informed by research that shows women are less likely than men to apply to jobs where they don't meet all essential requirements. This change has helped to ensure we don't inadvertently stop qualified female candidates from applying, helping us to attract a more diverse talent pool.

Another change we made was how we advertise our job roles. As well as advertising them through our normal channels, such as Linkedin and Handshake, we have also started reaching out to female STEM groups to give female candidates a higher likelihood of hearing about our roles.

Both of these steps have had a positive impact on our recruitment, as the number of female applicants for the same role across two different years increased (11% to 16%), and from an initial pool of 56 applicants, 50% of those that made it to the final round of interviews were women. As well as this, in our most recent job opportunity, our Social Media Placement, 64% of applicants were women.

Moreover, we have recently decided to ring-fence one work experience placement for a woman in our summer 2025 offering. This will help kick-start their career in computer science with a practical hands-on programming placement, which you can find more about here.

Beyond recruitment, I am actively working with senior management to introduce changes like gender-based discrimination training, internal signposting for women in STEM mentorship, and a new equality statement on job listings that explicitly encourage women to apply.

There are many challenges women face in the tech industry, we are often patronised and underestimated by male colleagues, as well as putting up with gender based jokes and dismissive behaviour from male colleagues. This is why gender-based discrimination training is crucial so that men know how to best support their female colleagues in an industry they are marginalised in.

Gender diversity is crucial in the workplace as a diversified team introduces a broader range of perspectives and a difference in lived experience that helps to create products that are more inclusive of the diverse needs of their users. This is especially important in the tech industry, as without it there is a real risk of building technology that unintentionally reinforces biases or excludes certain groups.

An example of this is AI, which has been shown to reflect and even amplify gender biases in its training data. As we start to rely on AI technologies more and more, this becomes a significant issue as we're relying on a biased output. For us at Harker, diversity in our team is important to us as we’re building a solution for a societal problem; this means that we need our team to reflect the diversity of the society we are building for.

Although we understand there is a long way to go for gender equality in the tech sector, Harker is proud to be making steps in the right direction to address this. Our hope is that when we reach International Women's Day 2026, we'll continue to improve our efforts and remain a leading tech start-up for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. If you're interested in enhancing gender diversity in your organisation, or if you have any ideas for us at Harker, then please get in touch for a chat.