Female CIOs win bigger budgets than male counterparts
- Summary:
- Female CIOs demonstrate sharper negotiating skills and prioritizing digital risks, suggests Gartner survey.
Female CIOs are grabbing a bigger share of IT budgets than their male colleagues.
That’s one of the surprise findings from the Gartner CIO Agenda 2015: A Gender Perspective survey, which questioned 2,810 CIOs from 84 countries.
Women CIOs expected 2.4% budget rises this year compared with 0.8% for men – the second year in a row this Gartner has seen this trend.
Digging deeper into the data revealed neither the type of organization, size or industry could account for this budget gap, but two variables did stick out: adaptability and attitude to risk.
Male CIOs success at negotiating budget rises varied according to which line manager they reported.
When that person was a CEO, they reported a healthy 2.8% increase, but levels were flat when they reported to other line managers and actually dropped if their boss was the COO.
In contrast, female CIOs anticipated hefty budget rises regardless of reporting line – with highest levels when they reported to the CFO (3.2%) and 4.2% when they reported to managers in the ‘other’ category, such as enterprise CIOs and executive directors.
The reason for these differences, believes Tina Nunno Gartner vice president and fellow, lies in the fact that women are more likely to adapt how they negotiate according to their audience, while men use the same pitch regardless of line manager. She says:
What males and female CIOs say is that women tell the better story and the data interestingly backs that up.
So when they reported to the CEO, women CIOs talked about the effect of IT on cashflow, to COOs they talked in terms of productivity and ROI and when they reported to the CFO they discussed cost savings. Nunno points out:
When we looked at the metrics, female CIOs were significantly adapting their metrics depending on the reporting structure and men were not…male CIOs are saying the same cost saving story regardless of who they are talking to.
The other key difference between the sexes was in their attitude to risk. While both sexes believed that the digital world was throwing up new IT risks, women were 12% more concerned that risk management practices were falling behind these levels of risk. To mitigate these risks required greater investment.
Allied to this, women were more likely to view predictive analytics rather than backward-looking reporting as key. This was particularly stark when the CIO reported to the CEO, with 42% of female CIOs compared with 23% of male CIOs regarding predictive analytics as important. Says Nunno:
I believe women tend to be more risk aware and are managing for these risks. That’s why it shows up that they are into predictive analytics.
Percentages
While women CIOs appear to have the upper hand at grabbing the maximum budget, the actual percentage of female CIOs has shifted little over the last decade. Just 13.6% of respondents were women in this year’s survey, a figure that has remained largely static for the last decade.
But Nunno counters that while this continually low figure is disappointing, “there’s light at the end of the tunnel”. In the past, women CIOs have tended to cluster in industries such as finance and government, but this has changed:Now there seems to be a better distribution and also a better distribution across different countries and across the size of the enterprise.
There have also been improvements in the pay disparity between men and women. Female STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] workers now earn 92 cents in every dollar a male coworker earns, which is higher than in other sectors.
Male CIOs are also actively trying to hire more women as they recognize it’s widely accepted that the best-performing companies have a diverse workforce.
Despite the differences in budget between the sexes, there was agreement in the areas where CIOs most wanted to apply their budget: analytics, infrastructure and data centre, cloud, ERP and mobile technologies.
My take
I’m instinctively wary of anything that looks at gender differences in IT, however, the discrepancies in budget noted by Gartner are intriguing.
We all know that data and statistics are open to interpretation, so you could easily say that the results point to the fact that women are more cautious about risk rather than aware. But the results are same – more budget – which is no bad thing.
More intriguing is the suggestion that the women CIOs, in general, are more aware of the need to adapt their negotiating style, using different metrics and language to appeal to different audiences.
The message seems to be that that male CIOs need to negotiate more aggressively for IT budget, while women (CIO or otherwise) need to negotiate more aggressively for their own pay.