Survey says women in IT are as rare as a speaking dog

Women are shunning cyber security even more than they shun the rest of IT, according to a survey.

Of the 2,500 people who took cyber security training at QA in 2012, just 6.2 per cent were women.

The number of women choosing to take up security courses also declined overall by 19.5 per cent between 2011 and 2012, while the number of men on the courses more than doubled, growing by 118 per cent in the same period. The training firm blames the shortfall on sexism as well as rubbish lessons in school focused on teaching basic office skills rather than hard computer science.