"There has never been a problem, I have never even thought about that," she says.

Simms currently employs a total of nine staff in New Zealand and the ratio is five males to four females, according to the company's managing director Paul Johnston.

"I take the view that companies must ensure the best candidates are given the jobs, irrespective of gender," he says. "As a father of three girls I want them to have absolute equality but do not want them to be given a job ahead of someone, just because they are a woman. If people have to 'actively think' about attracting women I think there could be some sort of underlying problem with them in the first place."

It might be this sort of workplace environment that makes Campbell say the gender ratio in IT is not an issue. "Is that even really a problem?" she asks. She says more women in IT would improve business but disagrees that the current numbers are an issue. She points out that some professions have bigger representation of one gender rather than the other (citing teaching as an example). Campbell has, however, noticed a lot more media coverage on the subject, particularly following Yahoo's recent CEO appointment, with Marissa Mayer taking on the role while pregnant, a move that some defined as a "landmark" for closing the gender gap in the industry. Prior to joining Yahoo, Mayer was also Google's first female engineer.

Breaking the boundariesDell runs a variety of different programmes, both internally and externally, with the final goal of growing the number of women in the IT industry, across all sectors. Deborah Harrigan's full-time job is overseeing Dell's small and medium business division in the ANZ region but she also finds the time to work in a number of these programmes.