Little progress is being made in representing women in senior IT leadership roles, according to a global survey of chief information officers (CIOs) released Tuesday. The percentage of female IT leaders (such as CIOs, chief technology officers, or vice presidents of technology) remains at 9 percent, the same last year, according to the 2017 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO survey. This survey of 4,498 CIOs and technology leaders, conducted online across 86 countries between December 2016 and April 2017, found little change in the number of women holding leadership roles, despite one third of organizations having diversity initiatives.

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Of all the companies surveyed, 35 percent said they had diversity initiatives in place to improve representation, and another 21 percent planned to put some in place, but 44 percent said they were happy with their diversity mix. "The proportion of women in IT leadership remains broadly the same this year, suggesting that any progress seen in previous years appears to have stalled," the survey stated. "In smaller organizations, there are fewer women in IT leadership (8 percent), compared with mid-sized organizations (11 per cent)." Meanwhile, the survey also found that salaries for women were rising faster than male colleagues. Forty-two percent of female IT leaders had a pay increase, compared to 32 percent of male leaders.

"In a striking development, female respondents are far more likely to have received a salary increase compared with their male peers: Clear evidence perhaps that traditional gender salary inequalities may be starting to be addressed?," the survey report said. One other suggestion for the pay rise is that many countries are now requiring firms to report on the gender pay gap within their organization. For instance, the U.K. introduced this requirement in April, obligating firms with more than 250 staff to publish the gender pay gap between their male and female employees. The gender pay gap is a hot button issue for many. A recent report from job recruitment website Hired found that in 63 percent of cases, women received a lower salary offer than a man for the same job. The offer was on average 4 percent lower. Jessica Kirkpatrick, a data scientist for Hired, warned that gender bias also influenced access to opportunities. "Fifty-three percent of the time, companies only interviewed male candidates for a given role, whereas the reverse was true just 6 percent of the time," she said in a blog post in April. "Long term, these kinds of biases may explain why U.S. women working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics are 45 percent more likely than their male peers to leave the industry within their first year."

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