Who Leads the Way? Women CIOs vs Male CIOs

Gartner Says Women CIOs Foresee Bigger Budget Increases Than Their Male Counterparts in 2015

Female CIOs expect to increase their budgets by 2.4 percent in 2015, whereas male CIOs report average increases of just 0.8 percent, according to a survey by Gartner.

The worldwide survey included responses from 2,810 CIOs, representing more than $397 billion in CIO IT budgets in 84 countries. Among the respondents to the 2015 Gartner CIO Agenda survey, 13.6 percent were women.

“For a second year in a row, the women in our survey are expecting greater budget increases than the men,” said Tina Nunno, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “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.”

The top five technology priorities identified by the survey are the same for male and female CIOs — with minor variations in order — reflecting a shared focus on analytics, infrastructure and data center, cloud, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and mobile technologies.

When questioned more closely about technology leadership, the survey data indicates that female CIOs are more in agreement that analytics are increasing in importance for their organisations. Thirty-two percent of women CIOs agree that there is a shift from backward-looking reporting to forward-looking analytics, and this compared to 22 percent for male CIOs. This difference becomes more extreme when the CIO reports to the CEO, when the percentages become 42 per cent and 23 per cent for female and male CIOs, respectively. Predictive data is foundational to strategic outlooks and discussions, and therefore a high priority for many CEOs.

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.