Female CIOs more risk-aware than males – Gartner

A survey from analyst Gartner has revealed that female CIOs are more risk-aware than their male counterparts.

The survey stated that both genders believe that the digital world is creating new risks, but 76 per cent of female CIOs are more likely to express concerns on risk management, compared to 67 per cent of males.

According to the data, reporting structure impacts the budgets of male CIOs more than females, for example when male CIOs report to the CEO they report a budget increase of 2.8 per cent.

However, female CIOs expect to receive budget increases regardless, most notably when reporting to the CFO, with women seeing an increase of 3.2 per cent.

Overall, female CIOs expect to increase their budgets by 2.4 per cent in 2015, while male CIOs report an average increase of 0.8 per cent.

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

“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 research also showed that the top five priorities for both female and male CIOs were analytics, infrastructure and data centre, cloud, enterprise resource planning and mobile technologies.

In addition, 79 per cent of female CIOs stated that they were more likely to say that they needed to change their leadership style in the next three years, compared to 74 per cent of males.

Nunno added: “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 prioritisation."

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