Women CIOs are more risk aware than men

MUMBAI, INDIA: Women CIOs expect to increase their budgets by 2.4 percent in 2015, vis-à-vis their male counterparts who expect an average hike of 0.8 percent.

A new survey by Gartner titled, CIO Agenda 2015: A Gender Perspective underlines the fact that a significant majority of CIOs believe that the digital world is creating new and additional risks in their environment. However, 76 percent female CIOs as against 67 percent male CIOs, are more likely to express concern that investments in risk management and risk management practices are not keeping up with new and higher levels of risk in a digital world.

While the data may indicate that women are more concerned about digital risks, it also points toward a trend that female CIOs are more risk-aware than their male counterparts.

Impact of reporting structure:

According to Gartner, the reporting structure impacts the budgets of male CIOs adversely than female CIOs.

When male CIOs report to the CEO, they report a significant budget increase (2.8 percent), but their budgets remain essentially flat in all other reporting relationships with the exception of the COO, where a slightly negative budget trend appears.

Female CIOs on the other hand, receive budget increases regardless of reporting line, and most significantly when reporting to the CFO at 3.2 percent, 4.2 percent in the other category.

The most common titles included in the other category include CIO/enterprise CIO (denoting that the survey respondent was a business unit CIO reporting to the enterprise CIO), Director/Executive Director, Vice President, General Manager and Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) in that order of frequency.

Tech priorities are identical: The top five technology priorities identified are the same for male and female CIOs—reflecting a shared focus on analytics, infrastructure and data center, cloud, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and mobile technologies.

Tina Nunno, Vice President and Gartner Fellow, said, "Variations in top priorities by gender in past CIO surveys could often be attributed to significant differences in the industries where male and female CIOs worked. However, more recent data shows little difference in the gender dispersion of CIOs across industries, which may account for the consistency in prioritization."

When questioned more closely about technology leadership, the survey data indicates that female CIOs assert that analytics is increasing in importance for their organizations. Thirty-two percent women CIOs admit that there is a shift from backward-looking reporting to forward-looking analytics; compared to 22 percent male CIOs. This difference becomes extreme when the CIO reports to the CEO, 42 percent and 23 percent for female and male CIOs, respectively.

The CEO impact: To a larger extent more than male CIOs, female CIOs also agree strongly that new types of information such as social information and multimedia are increasing in importance (19 percent vs. 13 percent), and again this difference is enhanced when reporting to the CEO (23 percent vs. 14 percent). Such variations in gender responses may relate back to differences in how women and men view enterprise risk and the role of information in managing those risks.

Does reporting structure affect top priorities? Reporting structure had little impact on the top priorities by gender. One exception was digitization/digital marketing—an important priority for many revenue-focused CEOs—which moved up to third priority when female CIOs reported to the CEO, but remained at sixth priority for male CIOs. When female CIOs reported to CFOs, who tend to be more internally cost-focused, the priority dropped to seventh, while it remained the same for male CIOs. This is one of several instances where the survey data demonstrated that female CIOs are more adaptable to their reporting structure than their male counterparts.

The survey also found female CIOs were slightly more likely to say that they needed to change their leadership style in the next three years than were male CIOs (79 percent vs. 74 percent). However, the remaining data shows little notable statistical variation, indicating that male and female CIOs spend their leadership time similarly and see the need for leadership change almost identically.

"For the second year in a row, the women in our survey are expecting greater budget increases than the men," said Nunno. "While it's not entirely clear why this difference exists, further survey data indicates that female CIOs are more concerned about underinvestment in risk initiatives than male CIOs. The risk data, combined with budget numbers, may indicate that female CIOs are more focused on the resource side of the digital equation than their male peers and are, therefore, requesting and accumulating more IT budget money."