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Two female tech experts move to LSEG board

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women appointed to the LSEG board, FTSE 100, women's role in the county's economy…as industry increasingly looks to women to meet skills shortages.

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) appointed two leading female tech entrepreneurs to its board last week, which means there are now only two FTSE 100 companies with no women on their boards.

The two are Joanna Shields and Sherry Coutu.

Shields is currently chief executive of Tech City, the government-backed initiative to help new technology companies. She is changing her role there, and will now be chair.

She has over 25 years of experience building global technology businesses, having held senior executive roles at Facebook, AOL and Google.

In 2013, she created the UK government backed ‘Future Fifty’ acceleration programme which is to nurture and support high growth businesses in the UK. She also serves as a non-executive director of TalkTalk Telecom Group Plc and as a member of Mayor Boris Johnson’s London Smart Board.

Shields told the Independent she would continue to champion the UK’s digital industry as chairman of Tech City UK and in her role as business ambassador.

Sherry Coutu is on the board of computer firm Raspberry Pi, Artfinder, Cambridge University’s finance board, Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge University Press, as well as on advisory boards to Linkedin and Care.com and a number of not-for-profit companies in the technology and education sector.

She has more than 20 years of experience leveraging technology to drive companies from their earliest entrepreneurial stages through to global expansion, and has made angel investments in more than 50 companies and holds investments in 3 venture capital firms.

Voted by TechCrunch as the best CEO mentor/advisor in Europe in November 2010, in May 2011, she was voted by Wired magazine as one the top 25 ‘most influential people in the wired world’, and one of the top ten most influential investors and women.

The London Stock Exchange said it was bringing the two in particularly for their IT sector experience, “reflecting the group’s continued focus on delivering innovative technology solutions to its customers around the world”.

And the business world is increasingly looking to women to fill the gap in science and technology expertise and to keep the economic recovery going.

For example, in November Sir John Perkins, chief scientific advisor to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills published A Review of Engineering Skills.

Perkins called for a high profile campaign to reach out to young people, especially girls aged 11-14, with inspirational messages about engineering and diverse role models, to encourage more diversity in apprenticeships and a change to the gendered stereotypes associated with technical sectors.

The review also recommended that the government should continue to support schools to increase progression to A-level physics, especially among female students.

The review also drew attention to the actions being taken regarding engineering skills in the Devolved Administrations.

The Scottish Government, for example, is supporting the Scottish Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) to create sustainable change for women in SET sectors throughout Scotland, and the CareerWISE Scotland campaign to support girls and women to take up and retain jobs in STEM occupations. It has also encouraged Scottish universities to sign up to diversity schemes such as Athena SWAN.

The Welsh Government’s National Science Academy (NSA) and sector work fund activities to engage young people in STEM, e.g. supporting Airbus to run an all girls cohort of Industrial Cadets.

Currently only around one in ten engineers in the UK are women.

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