Women in Tech Statistics for 2026: Current Figures, Historical Trends, and What They Don't Cover

Every March, a slide with one tidy percentage for "women in tech" gets copied into decks, newsletters, and International Women's Day posts. The percentage on that slide is often a different measure from the one its caption implies. This piece gives you the figures you can cite for 2026, with the population, year, and source attached to each.

The short answer: the best current figures come from official statistics, and each one describes a different population. In the US, women were 27.5% of people employed in computer and mathematical occupations in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the UK, BCS reports women were 22% of IT specialists in 2025. In the EU, Eurostat reports women were 19.5% of ICT specialists in 2025. You cannot swap one for another, and the sections below say where each one stops applying.

Key women in tech statistics for 2026

• 27.5% of the 6,711,000 people employed in computer and mathematical occupations in the US were women in 2025, against 47.1% of all employed people aged 16 and over. Source: BLS Current Population Survey, Table 11, 2025 annual average. Evidence type: government household survey. The 2025 average covers 11 months and excludes October 2025.

• 22% of UK IT specialists, or 433,000 people, were women in 2025. Source: BCS, Women in Tech Report 2026: Key findings. Evidence type: analysis published by a chartered professional body.

• 19.5% of the 10.45 million ICT specialists in the EU were women in 2025, and ICT specialists were 5.0% of all employed people. Source: Eurostat news release, 27 May 2026. Evidence type: official labour force survey statistics, using a defined list of occupation codes.

• 22% is the average share of women on security teams, as estimated by ISC2 study respondents. The study was fielded in 2024 and published in March 2025. Source: ISC2, Women Comprise 22% of the Cybersecurity Workforce. Evidence type: survey respondents' reports of their own team composition.

• 37.1% of US bachelor's degrees in computer and information sciences went to women in 1983–84, falling to 22.6% in 2021–22, the most recent year in the NCES table. Source: NCES Digest of Education Statistics 2023, Table 325.35. Evidence type: official administrative count of degrees conferred.

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One number cannot describe twelve jobs

"Women in tech" is a category, and its makeup varies more than its average suggests. The BLS table breaks US employment into detailed occupations, and the spread across them is wide.

Metric: women's share of employment. Population: US employed people in each occupation. Period: 2025 annual average. Source: BLS CPS, Table 11. Evidence type: government household survey. BLS also lists computer and information research scientists, but suppresses the share because the base is below its publication threshold, so twelve shares are published, not thirteen.

The range runs from 8.0% for computer network architects to 57.0% for web and digital interface designers. Software developers, the largest group at 2,254,000 people, sit at 20.3%. Your own role is more likely to resemble its row than the average.

Software QA analysts and testers are the row most readers in this field will want. The 2025 share is 50.6%, on an estimated 72,000 employed people. The 2024 table gave 45.7%, on 82,000 people. That is a move of about five points in a single year while the occupation shrank. Among the twelve published shares, QA and interface design sit closest to an even split. The base is small and BLS publishes no standard errors in this view, so don't quote the decimal as precise.

Two conditions apply whenever you compare these years. BLS states that the 2025 annual estimates are 11-month averages excluding October 2025, and that they are not strictly comparable with other years' annual averages. And "computer and mathematical occupations" classifies jobs, not an industry: sales, marketing, and operations staff at technology companies fall outside it.

For QA pay by role rather than by sex, Quash's QA engineer and SDET salary statistics covers the compensation side.

The number that went backwards

The common story is that women's share of computing is rising from a low base. The degree data says otherwise. In the NCES count of bachelor's degrees in computer and information sciences, women's share was 37.1% in 1983–84 and 22.6% in 2021–22. Over the same period, degrees conferred rose from 32,439 to 108,503, and degrees awarded to women rose from 12,023 to 24,542. The field grew about 3.3 times while women's share fell; the 3.3 is our division of the two published totals.

The NCES field is broader than the "computer science" category in Pew Research Center's analysis, which reports women at 25% of US computer occupations in pooled 2017–2019 American Community Survey data, down from 32% in 1990 (Pew Research Center, 2021). The two series use different fields, periods, and instruments. Read them as two historical observations that point the same way, not as one trend line. Neither is comparable with the 2025 BLS workforce figure.

The 2021–22 degree figure is the most recent NCES table located for this piece. It is the latest published year, not a 2026 measure.

Outside the US: the UK and the EU

The UK. BCS reports that 433,000 female IT specialists made up 22% of all UK IT specialists in 2025. It also states a counterfactual: if gender representation in IT matched the workforce norm of 49%, "there would have been an additional 535,000 female IT specialists" in the UK. That describes a state of the world, not a hiring target. Adding women also changes the total, so it is not a count of roles to fill.

Representation varies by job. In 2025, women made up 7% and 8% of the two IT and telecoms engineer categories, but 34% of IT project and programme managers, 29% of web designers and developers, and 32% of IT operations technicians. Women in IT were also three times as likely as men to work part-time, 11% against 4%, and BCS reports they did so most often because they did not want full-time work. That stated reason belongs with the figure; without it the number reads as a constraint rather than a choice.

On qualifications, 78% of female IT specialists held a higher-education qualification in 2025, against 72% of males. Only 7% held an IT degree, against 12% of males. These figures describe people already in the profession, not entry routes, so they cannot alone support a claim that the industry needs more computer science graduates.

The EU. Eurostat's 2025 release puts women at 19.5% of ICT specialists, up 3 percentage points since 2015. The 2025 country range runs from Czechia at 12.9% and Hungary at 15.0% to Romania at 27.8%, with Latvia at 25.9% and Bulgaria at 25.0%. The 14.9-point gap between Czechia and Romania is our subtraction of two published percentages, not a Eurostat statistic. Earlier Eurostat releases ranked countries differently, so don't combine lists from different years.

Eurostat's metadata defines ICT specialists through a list of ISCO-08 occupation codes covering ICT service managers, ICT professionals, database and network professionals, engineers, and several technician and designer groups, with some occupations excluded. It also records a break in 2011, when the classification changed from ISCO-88 to ISCO-08, and methodological changes in 2021. Those breaks matter when you compare across years. They don't affect a single-year snapshot once the definition is stated.

The EU series did not rise steadily. The European Institute for Gender Equality reports that the female share of ICT jobs fell by 4 percentage points since 2010, standing at 18% in 2019 (EIGE, Gender Equality Index 2020). Eurostat's 19.5% for 2025 comes after that trough. The shape is a fall to 2019 and a partial recovery since, drawn from two institutions and two reference years. Quoting "19.5% and rising" without the 2019 low misdescribes it.

The same EIGE analysis gives 2018 pipeline figures: 1% of 15-year-old girls expected to work in an ICT occupation, against 10% of boys, and women were 20% of ICT graduates.

Security: three measures in one band

Cybersecurity offers three US figures that look alike and measure different things. BLS puts women at 15.9% of information security analysts in 2025. ISC2's study respondents put women at 19.2% of the US cybersecurity workforce. In the professional-network data that ISC2 compares against, US women in cybersecurity were 18.3%. The sources are a government household survey, a vendor's survey of its own respondents, and a professional-network profile measure. Their closeness is convergence across different instruments, not confirmation that one is right.

The more useful ISC2 figure is team composition. Respondents estimated that women make up 22% of their security teams on average. Sixteen per cent said their team had no women at all, and only 5% reported parity. Team shares were 20% in organisations of 1–499 employees and 23% in organisations of more than 5,000. By sector, military teams were lowest at 18%, and cloud services and construction highest at 27% each.

ISC2's figures reflect who answered an online survey and how they described their own teams. They are not a workforce count, which is why they can differ from BLS for the same job family.

Three pay gaps, not one

Pay statistics are where populations most often get merged, so each figure below carries its own frame.

• US, all workers, 2025: women's median earnings were 83.9% of men's among full-time, year-round workers, up from 80.6% in 2024 (US Census Bureau, ). Evidence type: official survey report. This covers all occupations, not technology.

• US STEM occupations, 2019: women's median earnings in STEM occupations were about 74% of men's, and STEM median earnings were about $77,400 against $46,900 in non-STEM occupations. The population is full-time, year-round workers aged 25 and older. Source: Pew Research Center, 2021. This is historical and covers STEM as a whole.

• UK IT specialists, 2025: median hourly earnings were £24, and women in IT earned 10% less than men in IT. The population is those working full time as employees. Source: BCS, Women in Tech Report 2026.

Set 83.9% beside 74% and the STEM gap looks wider, but the populations, instruments, and years differ, so the comparison doesn't hold. No current, accessible US pay-by-sex figure for technology occupations specifically was located, and an all-worker ratio is not a substitute.

What these figures do not cover

Five limits apply to nearly every figure above.

First, respondent composition is not workforce share. ISC2's 22% describes what respondents said about their teams.

Second, an occupation group is not an industry. Computer and mathematical occupations include jobs in banks, hospitals, and government, and exclude many people who work at tech companies.

Third, small cells move. The QA, web developer, and designer rows rest on the smallest bases in the BLS group, and their year-on-year changes can be large.

Fourth, snapshots and trends need different care. A single-year EU figure with its definition stated is citable. A comparison across 2011 or 2021 needs the break acknowledged.

Fifth, coverage stops at the US, UK, and EU. No current official figures for other regions are reported here.

Quash, the company publishing this piece, has no first-party data on who works in software testing. It holds no measurement of gender composition across testing teams, and this article does not estimate one. Our search found no public dataset that isolates mobile QA or test-automation roles by gender; that describes the search, not the world. The BLS category "software QA analysts and testers" is also broader than the mobile and automation roles many readers have in mind, and job titles vary across employers.

What would settle it is a role-level count of testing professionals, published with its sample, role definitions, population, date, and limitations. A count drawn from a testing vendor's customer base would describe that customer base, not the workforce, and should be labelled that way.

How these figures were compiled

We went to the data owner rather than any summary of it. The US figures come from the BLS table, the UK figures from the BCS report, the EU figures from the Eurostat release and metadata, and degree counts from the NCES table. Pew and EIGE are analysts working from government microdata and indices, and are cited as such. ISC2's figures are its own survey results.

Each figure is current, historical, or calculated. The 2025 and 2026 figures (BLS, BCS, Eurostat, Census, ISC2's 2025 publication) are current as of their release dates. The 1983–84, 1990, 2017–2019, 2018, and 2019 figures are historical and dated where they appear. The 14.9-point EU range and the 3.3-fold growth in degree counts are our calculations from published figures. We reconstructed no total that a source did not publish. Source pages were checked on 6 November 2026.

Conclusion

Choose the figure by the claim you are making. For the US tech workforce as a whole, use 27.5% with its occupation definition and 2025 date. For one role, use the BLS table and its spread, and quote QA as a movement on a small base rather than as parity. For the UK or EU, use BCS or Eurostat for 2025, and attach the 2019 low if you describe a trend.

If your piece depends on a pay gap, pick the population first and the number second. If it depends on a cybersecurity share, decide whether you are describing the profession or the teams respondents report. Whichever you choose, put the population, period, and source beside the number, so a reader who sees only your sentence still knows what it means.