Just 5% of ARM’s engineers are women, while Google and Microsoft refuse to disclose gender balance

UK shadow cabinet office minister Chi Onwurah has revealed the results of a survey into the gender balance of IT firms in Britain, showing just 5% of engineers and no senior management at mobile processor design giant ARM are women, while Microsoft and Google refused to respond to the survey.

According to ComputerWorld UK, while 5% of ARM’s engineering staff are female, there are no women among the top 1% of the company’s most senior technical staff.

ARM’s designs form the basis of most of the major smartphone and tablet processors, including chips from NVidia, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Apple and Qualcomm.

Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft refused to respond to the survey.

“Google and Microsoft both cited confidentiality as the reason for refusing to share the data. That suggests that either Google and Microsoft do not know how to aggregate and anonymise such information in which case one might be legitimately concerned about their involvement in Big Data, or alternatively that they have so few women employees it is impossible to anonymise the data,” Onwurah says.