RiskUKAugust2017

All Things Being Equal
recommends that the proportion of females
present on FTSE 350 companies’ Boards of
Directors should reach 33% by 2020.
It’s not just the security industry that has
work to do in this area, either. According to
UCATT, women make up only 11% of the
construction workforce and just 1% of workers
on site, while the Office for National Statistics
has stated that the number of females working
as roofers, bricklayers and glaziers is so low as
to be unmeasurable.
Similarly, the latest figures issued from the
2016 Women in IT Scorecard research –
published by the BCS (The Chartered Institute
for IT) and The Tech Partnership – show that
females account for just 17% of IT
professionals. It’s a figure that has remained
essentially unchanged over the three years the
report has been made available.
Amid the wider
requirement for
gender diversity in the
workplace, the
number of females
resident within the
security industry
remains
disconcertingly low.
Peter Webster
examines why there’s
such a gender
imbalance and
outlines what can be
done to make security
a more attractive
career choice for
women
According to the British Security Industry
Association (BSIA), an estimated 352,000
individuals are presently employed by the
UK’s security industry, yet research conducted
by the Security Industry Authority (SIA) in 2015,
which looked at gender and other protected
characteristics, revealed that only 9% of SIA
licence holders are female. Although there are
indeed a number of women occupying highprofile
roles within the industry, it remains the
case that security is still very much a maledominated
domain.
There’s little doubt that the industry has an
image problem. Just ask a member of the public
to describe a security professional and the
chances are that one of the first words
mentioned will be ‘male’. The national media
has to take its share of the blame here, with
security officers on TV traditionally portrayed
as men who are often lazy, overweight and
‘jobsworth’ when it comes to their attitude.
However, the blame for the current gender
disparity cannot be foisted upon the media
alone. It’s also still a general assumption that
the security sector is misogynistic in nature,
which is something that’s enough to dissuade
many women from joining the ranks.
Achieving greater gender diversity in the
workplace is a massive problem in general,
even at the highest levels of management. The
Cranfield University School of Management
Report found that, in 2016, the number of
women with places on the top Boards of FTSE
100 companies stood at 26%. This report
Business benefits
There’s plenty of research available to suggest
that gender diversity is crucial for innovation
and growth in a given business sector. For
example, the Harvard Business Review reported
that leaders who give diverse voices equal
airtime are nearly twice as likely as others to
unleash value-driving insights, while those
employees working in a ‘speak up’ culture are
over three times as likely to contribute their full
innovative potential to the host business. In
addition, customers can see the benefits of a
more gender-balanced workforce.
Going forward, if the security industry is to
reach its full potential then, put simply, it needs
the skills and mindsets of both men and women
in order to do so.
There’s already a severe skills shortage
across the sector. Failing to attract enough
candidates from the 50% of the UK workforce
who are female can only add to this and will
seriously hamper growth. The problem was
highlighted earlier this year, in fact, when the
Sunderland Echo reported that Peterlee-based
Steadfast Security had been advertising for
female officers for months, but applicants were
proving impossible to find.
Various initiatives have been kick-started to
redress the balance, among them the Women’s
Security Society, which aims to create an
inspirational networking forum for females
operating in the industry. Frankly, anything that
helps to attract women into the security
industry and address the negative perceptions
of it should be welcomed.
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