 At a London conference they're discussing how to attract and retain more women in technology. It's such a waste for the UK economy not to use those diverse talents, not to get the benefits of diversity because we all know that when you've got a diverse team then you know you get real value both financial and innovative and everything else so we should so be doing something about this. But despite all the inspiring words in the UK's tech sector only 11% of IT specialists are women and this has been declining over the past 10 years. A lot of people are concerned about the low numbers of women in tech in the UK. Employers, policymakers, educators are all puzzling over why can we not recruit more women into the sector as a whole. It's time now we took some new approaches and new thinking to this problem. Clem Herman with her colleague Parvati Raghuram is visiting the offices of a big Indian technology firm in Milton Keynes. One way of addressing the problem of gender inequity in the UK IT industry is to compare it with other countries like India where there's a much higher proportion of women in IT. About 30% compared to 11% in the UK. So as compared to England, in India I saw a lot of women who are in the IT field. In fact when I joined the company in India my first three bosses were women. By comparing and understanding the differences between India and the UK this Open University research project will be very different to other studies. We're going to be doing some surveys through our partner IT companies and we're also going to be doing a series of in-depth interviews with individual professionals about their careers and working lives and to try and unpick some of the more subtle cultural factors that are different between the India context and the UK. We're also going to look at the experiences of migrant women who come from India to the UK in order to see how do they feel about being in such a masculinised workplace. In many meetings I find I'm the only woman in the meeting room especially when it goes into senior conversations or if it is technical conversations. It's more difficult in here because in India we've got family and somebody else who take care we have domestic help which is not available here. It's definitely difficult here other than in India. Back at the Open University the two researchers are reflecting on the importance of their research. I think this research is really important for the OU, for the research itself but also because it's related to our bigger strategic mission to support women in stem subjects that science, technology, engineering and maths. With their two-year project Parvati and Clerm are looking forward to catalyzing change for women in IT. We think this research could make a lot of difference to both participating firms but also to the industry in the UK and in India. We do have impact at the heart of it. That's why we're doing this. We want to make a difference. We want to be able to feedback our lessons into the IT industry, into IT education so it's not just about publishing papers, it's very much based in practice as well.