Today is International Women’s Day and we’re marking the occasion by celebrating the great work of all the women who help to ensure that our company grows from strength to strength.
International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality, with the main theme for 2020 being #EachforEqual.
A survey in 2019 concluded nearly 1m women must be hired in the technology sector before gender parity is achieved. This figure is from research by the Office of National Statistics, which revealed women account for around 16.8% of workers in the UK’s tech sector.
In the UK especially, there has been a push in recent years for young girls to study STEM topics – science, technology, engineering and maths – to improve the number of young women entering the tech field.
At Merit, we’re proud to have such a strong team of women working across our departments, leading our core teams, and sitting on our board of directors.
Becky Power, Projects Team Leader, said: “I’ve been working here for 11 years now, after starting on the support desk, and there’s been great career progression. The management team are really supportive and it’s great to see so many women in the office. When I was at university there were just two other women on my course, so times are definitely changing for the better.”
Elina Alford, Support Analyst, added: “Merit is a happy place to work and there’s no focus on gender. I’ve always had an interest in technology – my last job was repairing phones – and since starting at Merit I’ve found that there are more and more women working for our customers as well, which is nice. When I go out to meet our clients the ratio of women to men is definitely moving in the right direction.”
Mel John, Office Manager, concluded: “I’m really pleased that the ratio of women in the office has improved so much over the last few years. IT has definitely been a male dominated field so seeing more women moving into the sector is a huge positive. The management here in particular are great and gender has never been an issue.”