What is the Lovelace report, and why should we care?

On the 15th July I was invited to the House of Commons to hear the launch of the Lovelace Report — a study that examined the barriers preventing women working in tech from advancing into leadership and remaining in the sector long term.

The key findings from this report were as follows:

· In the last year, between 40,000 and 60,000 women left their tech roles.

· This exodus cost the UK tech sector an estimated £2 billion to £3.5 billion annually.

· Women are not leaving because of caregiving responsibilities — their decisions reflect deeper, structural issues relating to how tech careers are designed and supported.

· On average, women wait three to four years for a promotion — longer than the industry norm of around two years.

· Nearly 80% of women surveyed have recently left or are interested in leaving their tech roles.

Sadly the data on this mass exodus of women from tech is not a brand-new topic of research. In 2023 the Tech Talent Charter looked into the specific experiences of women who left or intended to leave a tech job, and found that one in three women were planning to leave their job and that one in four were planning to leave for a non-tech role. In 2022 a DCMS labour force analysis found that women are disproportionately more likely to leave a digital sector role than men, and at a significantly higher rate than in other industries. In 2019 Accenture wrote a report outlining five strategies to keep women in tech and back in 2008 a Harvard Business Review research report titled “The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering and Technology” found that 52% of female scientists, engineers and technologists on the lower rungs of corporate career ladders drop out.

Why does all this research matter? Why do we care if women are leaving tech? Other than the obvious moral obligation, there are many cultural and business benefits to having women in tech, for example:

· Gender diversity allows technology to meet the needs of society as a whole.

· Companies with two-dimensional diversity are 45% more likely to report an increased market share.

· Increased diversity of thought and increased innovation leads to increased revenue.

· Opportunity to fill the current talent shortages in areas like AI engineering, data analytics and cybersecurity.

· Saving an estimated £2 billion to £3.5 billion caused by women’s attrition

On a broader scale, women and girls represent half the world’s potential. Lovelace report findings depicting how employers can support women in tech roles

With all this data in mind, what do we do now? Luckily, the Lovelace report has outlined in detail various ways to retain and grow female tech talent, such as:

· Develop and genuinely sponsor mid-level women

· Grow and promote authentic visibility for senior-level women

· Make career pathways crystal clear at every level

Dunelm has already made a good start by hiring a female CEO — when a CEO is a woman, enterprises are 6.8% more likely to have female senior managers in operations and 12.6% more likely to have female senior general managers, however there is still much room for improvement.

Although businesses cannot tackle society-wide gender bias on their own, they can still challenge it by recognising that it exists, observing how it manifests and by opposing it within their workplace culture. Methods such as mentoring programmes, awareness campaigns and transparent policies, as well as the ideas suggested by the Lovelace report could all be usefully deployed to help stop the perpetual mass exodus of women from the tech industry.