Women in the workplace still encounter plenty of glass ceilings, but it would be good to think that the go-ahead world of technology is leading the way in diversity…[However,] the proportion of female IT employees has been dropping for years…A number of technology companies, however, have woken up to the need to recruit and retain women. Some companies are making a point of targeting graduates: Hewlett-Packard, for example, sponsors a computer science course at the University of Furtwangen in Germany aimed specifically at women. At Accenture, recruiting graduates from a variety of backgrounds, not just technology, means that about a third of its graduate intake is now female. Some large companies – HP, Accenture, BT, IBM and Sun, for example – have also introduced flexible working policies to attract and retain women…While individual companies are doing well at bringing women into the profession, many persist with the long hours culture and inflexible working practices that have prevailed for years.