'Positive discrimination is not the way to get more women in senior roles'

Alex Tatham explains how Westcoast is interacting with local schoolchildren near its bases to encourage both sexes to consider IT as a career

With all firms employing over 250 people being made to publish their gender pay gap figures this month, the questions thrown up by those stats all centre on how that issue needs to be addressed, and what needs to be done to get more women into senior roles.

According to the BBC, the median pay gap among all companies that have reported so far is 9.7 per cent.

One company that is keen to address the issue at a grassroots level is distribution giant Westcoast Ltd, whose own gap currently stands at eight per cent.

Alex Tatham (pictured), managing director of Westcoast, said: "The gender pay gap has almost created a mood for positive discrimination in some companies. Our gap is not as bad as some, but it highlights the fact that we have some work to do.

"As a business we are growing up and things are changing - 10 years ago we were £100m, now we are a £2.6bn business. Westcoast is pulling itself up by the britches. It is inevitable that more senior women will emerge."

But he stressed: "We are not going to use positive discrimination to do it. The difficulty we face is that there are so few female candidates going for senior roles, and that needs addressing far earlier than interview stage."

For the last three years, Westcoast has run a programme called Bright Sparks - where it works with schools in its two main locations - West Berks and Nottinghamshire - to show pupils in Years Eight to 10 the different roles they could have in the IT sector, and of course the channel.

Westcoast employees of all levels and skills take time out of their working lives to go to the schools and share their experiences of working in the IT sector with the children.

Tatham said: "The UK is no longer a manufacturing country, but one run on IT innovation. IT has defined us for the past 30 years, and it is going to define the next 30 years as well. We have all the technology that drives a modern world, and that is where the jobs of the future are going to be."

He explained that when schoolchildren in Westcoast's programme are asked who is good at maths, 80 per cent of those raising their hands are girls, yet when asked who is going to continue with STEM subjects in later education, all the hands go down.

"We as an industry need to show these children, both girls and boys, why STEM subjects are important and why they should be thinking about IT," Tatham said. "We write about the exciting things we do and show them the different roles they could be doing such as marketing, PR and sales, as well as the more technical roles. We try to show them how much variety is open to them."

He added that the lead on the Bright Sparks programme has been taken by two female employees.

"Obviously this is really important because the girls need role models to aspire to, but it is also about engaging the boys. We just want more young people to consider IT as a career," he said.