Male based work cultures, lack of clear career progression opportunities and workplace bullying are key challenges faced by at least half of the female ICT workforce in the Asia Pacific area, according to a new survey conducted by the Australian Computer Society (ACS).

The 2012 Women in ICT survey found that these issues are contributing to an overall decline in the number of females in the ICT workforce by at least five per cent in Australia.

ACS Women Board Director Alison Orr said that with a very visible i gender imbalance in Australian ICT, the 2012 ACS Women’s survey results were an overdue wake-up call for regional policy makers.

“Every economy in Asia from Australia to Vietnam has a national policy imperative to move into higher-value ICT service delivery away from the ‘$2 shops’ of raw commodity export and manufacture into value-add high tech services, and yet they are going backwards by pre-digital workplace and public policy decisions and cultures which limit workforce participation and productivity," said Ms Orr.

As it was last year, the ACS survey found that women in the field are highly educated, predominately work full time and were relatively well paid.

“For five years the ACS Women’s survey has shown that it is not women’s skills and expertise that has throttled the digital economy, rather gender attitudes are killing the golden goose," Ms Orr said.

"It’s a complex policy discussion but post-GFC our region is facing enormous pressures with a hyper-agile workforce, a hyper-mobile consumer base and a hyper-cautious investment climate where productivity is made more urgent by unprecedented advances in storage, security, mobile and convergence. In short, this means that HR departments, CIO’s and policy makers need to get up to speed urgently about their human resources. Women are highly qualified and [in the ICT sector] prove to perform and advance in their profession extremely well.