Openreach has reported a positive change in the number of female recruits joining the company in both field and desk roles in Scotland.

The news comes after the broadband network provider decided to begin analysing the language it uses to recruit employees.

Working alongside Linguistic Landscapes and gender bias specialist Dr Chris Begeny from Exeter University, their research found that women were 50% less likely to consider roles that had a coded gender bias.

Since then, significant changes have been made throughout Openreach with regards to the way jobs are advertised, helping to implement improvements in the number of women coming into new roles last year.

Openreach is recruiting some 275 people into roles across Scotland in the current financial year, from the Highlands to the Borders. The company noted that, to date, 17% of staff intake is female – a statistic that in previous years stood in single digits.

The new recruits are mainly to support the roll-out of Ultrafast Full Fibre broadband, which has so far reached nearly half a million homes and businesses across the region.

Commenting on the results, Katie Milligan, Chair of Openreach’s Scotland Board, said: “We’re glad to report that the number of women expressing an interest in a career with Openreach in Scotland is on the rise.

“Research into the language barriers that impact female job applicants has shown that it plays a fundamental role in the recruitment process. We’d like to see more women choose careers in engineering, particularly here at Openreach, so we’ve been trying to address that. I’m delighted to see it’s starting to work.

“Engineering is a varied, stimulating, and valuable career and it’s really important that we present it in ways that encourages as diverse a workforce as possible.”

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Openreach recently published its Diversity and Inclusion Commitments, which include that by 2025, 20% of trainee engineer recruits and 50% of external hires into management will be women.

As levels of ethnic diversity vary across the UK, the company is also setting targets based on regional variations in ethnicity which reflect the local population and, at a minimum, match regional ethnic minority representation.

Milligan continued: “We’ve been amazed to see just how much of a difference subtle changes in language can make. Despite four in five women admitting they wouldn’t consider working in engineering, more than half were interested in an entry-level engineering role once it had been rewritten in a consciously unbiased way.

“Gender imbalance won’t be remedied overnight but we’ve been hugely encouraged to see a significantly higher percentage of women joining our Scottish workforce this year.

“We’ve set ambitious targets and plans to support the journey – long may the progress continue.”

The recent Tech Nation Diversity and inclusion in UK tech companies report found that only 22% of directors in tech are women – this decreasing to 13% in the gaming sector – with only 19% of overall tech roles filled by women.

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