Female CIOs expect greater budget increases than men

Report by Gartner finds female CIOs predict budgets to rise by 2.4 per cent in 2015 with men at 0.8 per cent

Female CIOs expect to see their budgets increase more than their male counterparts in 2015, according to the latest research from Gartner.

The report, which surveyed 2,810 CIOs across 84 countries, found the female respondents surveyed anticipate their budgets will increase by 2.4 per cent in 2015 while male CIOs expect budgets to rise by 0.8 per cent over the same period.

Female CIOs are also more likely to be concerned about risk management, with 76 per cent of female respondents saying that risk management practices are behind levels of risk, compared with 67 per cent of males.

Tina Nunno, vice president and Gartner fellow, suggested this focus on risk could be a reason why female budgets are expected to rise more than males.

"For a second year in a row, the women in our survey are expecting greater budget increases than the men. While it's not entirely clear why this difference exists, further survey data indicates that female CIOs are more concerned about underinvestment in risk initiatives than male CIOs," she said.

According to the research, the top priorities in technology, for both male and female CIOs, are largely the same, with both genders highlighting a focus on analytics, infrastructure and datacentre, cloud, enterprise resource planning and mobile technologies.

"For good or bad, women and men view the top priorities virtually identically. Variations in top priorities by gender in past CIO surveys could often be attributed to significant differences in the industries where male and female CIOs worked," Nunno said.

"However, more recent data shows little difference in the gender dispersion of CIOs across industries, which may account for the consistency in prioritisation."

The report also found that female CIOs are a little more inclined to say they need to change their leadership tactics in the next three years, with 79 per cent of females and 74 per cent of males calling for change.