Brainstorm’s August CIO roundtable, appropriately enough, focused on the issue of women in ICT, and the ongoing discussion about how to address gender diversity in the sector. While local figures are not available, the number of women employed in the tech sector globally is probably a good reflection of the state of affairs:

• Only 20 percent of CIOs at Fortune 500 companies are women.• A recent Gartner research report showed that women only occupy 11.2 percent of leadership roles in EMEA versus 18.1 percent in North America.• Yahoo, which has a female CEO, has a 30 percent female workforce, only 15 percent of which work in the technology sphere. Facebook, Google and LinkedIn have similar ratios.• Gartner’s report notes that only 14 percent of CIOs are women and that this figure has remained static in the ten years that it has been doing gender analysis.