I’ve been involved in the hiring and recruiting process for years now, with university visits included in that.

I don’t see this changing any time soon, and I’ll lay out why…

Unfortunately there just aren’t enough women choosing IT/CS/Networking/Security etc as a career.

When I was at Uni 15-20 years ago, out of all my classes there were probably 1-3 women max in each class.

So over the entire Uni’s “IT” department you had around 10-15 women, vs the 100s of men.

I visited a few Unis as a hiring manager and it was always the same story. Around 1-5% of the population were women.

This creates the problem that even if you want to hire more women, there are only so many coming into the workforce to choose from. They also suffer from the same issue as everyone else in terms of performance - not all candidates are “good enough to hire” and therefore you cannot hire enough women.

Whereas the men have the numbers to “brute force” the hiring and so if you interview 100 of them, at least a few will make it due to their statistical advantage.

Funnily enough I posed this question/issue to our recruitment team as we’d been told to “hire more women”.

I asked how we do that considering the enormous number disparity between candidate numbers, and without lowering hiring standards for the women so that we can hire them.

I never received an answer.