Where are the women in IT? The percentage in this male-dominated industry was already low, but has fallen from 30% eight years ago to less than 20%.

When Graham Nugent, a European manager with UPS, started his IT career, he was the only man in a team of four. He now works at a Feltham site where there are two women out of 15 IT staff.

At Flytxt, a mobile marketing company, there are no women in a team of 20 technical staff. At Oplayo, a mobile video company backed by Nokia and Siemens, there are two women out of 43 technical staff plus two more managing customer services.

The number of women applying to study computer science in the UK has also dropped - by more than a fifth between 2002 and 2003 - and just 15% of IT managers are female, says a survey by the Chartered Management Institute.

Does it matter? Yes, because if you are only selecting staff from roughly half the population, you are missing out on a wide talent pool.

According to Lars Becker, chairman of Flytxt, the company would like to hire more women because dialogue and decision making would be more balanced and less confrontational.

IT products would also be designed in a way that appeals to women, too. Only recently have PCs moved from being boxy, monochrome and sludge coloured.

But why are so few women in IT? Some in the industry feel its image has got worse in the past five years. Geeks were briefly cool, then came the dotcom crash.

Film and computer superheroes, such as Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, may not help either. Girls may want to go out with Reeves but they don't necessarily want to fight interplanetary wars for a living.

Another factor could be the increasing move towards hiring IT staff with computer science degrees. At one time, people who were interested in computing often taught themselves, sometimes after doing a degree in something completely different.

The trend means that if girls don't develop an interest in IT at school, they may never find a way in. Even if they do, they are more likely than men to leave the profession.

This may - in a kind of reverse Tipping Point - be because there isn't a critical mass of fellow women to encourage them to stay. And having few female colleagues may make it harder to get the flexible working conditions that help when children are young, and which IT makes possible.

But what should be done to attract more women? Special treatment? An end to macho environments?

No. The answer is to hire people with aptitude, not just those who have studied computer science. "You have to teach recent IT graduates everything anyway," says Becker, "because university courses are not always up to date."

I was once the only woman in an IT department. I transferred to another department not because of the constant talk of football and hangovers, but because the IT department was in the basement and I wanted to see daylight. Another reason was that I was afraid I would not be able to move into other roles if I stayed in IT too long.

National Statistics Labour Force Survey 2003
www.statistics.gov.uk
Computer Clubs for Girls
www.cc4g.net
British Computer Society mentoring initiative
http://tinyurl.com/3cnq5