FITT's Shaw, who has worked both locally and internationally, agrees women tend to be more inclusive and collaborative by nature. They are often better at multi-tasking, which is extremely useful in running projects, and they are much, much better, she says, at aspiring to a reasonable work-life balance than their male counterparts, who often seem to thrive on working a 70- or 80-hour week. Shaw believes that although women make excellent CIOs if they are self-confident and assertive, the flip side is that women battling low self-esteem can struggle with such a role. She says mentoring can play an important part in overcoming such difficulties.

"My general experience with women project managers is that they are more inclusive and collaborative by nature," Shaw says. "Now, that can be seen as a strength and a weakness when you become more senior in an organization, but I think when it comes to building teams and getting teams to work together, women are more inclined to consult and collaborate and seek other people's opinion. Now people will say these are generalizations, but that is my own personal experience, having worked with project managers in business. And in my last company, where I was in a general management role, interestingly two big software development teams were led by women."

Hannah thinks CIOs make particularly good transformational CIOs because they can do the stakeholder enquiry necessary to discover the state of the environment and talk constantly to lead people through the change.

"I am a big fan of John Cotter's stand on change [Cotter is author of The 20% Solution: Using Rapid Redesign to Create Tomorrow's Organizations Today]. And what he says is that about the same time as you are sick to death of hearing yourself say something, [that] is the time that people will finally start hearing it. So when I've said [something] to them for the 99 millionth time, I suddenly realize that people are going: 'Oh that's what you're on about'. They don't remember what you said before, people only remember the information that they finally get. Otherwise it is just noise.

"I think women have an edge in that communication stage. I also think there are some women out there - not all women - in jobs who are equally arrogant, unaware bullies. Let's not kid ourselves: we've all worked for them somewhere along the line. But this is where self-awareness makes a big difference, because what I've noticed is that women who are self-aware are often quite willing to share praise, and they're not usually as invested in being a hero as the men.

"IT is full of heroes," Hannah says. "You know, the pizza boxes and the cola cans that are testaments to having stayed back at work for a thousand hours to get the thing over the line. I work very hard with my people to say: 'Forget being heroes, we're not heroes, IT is a team sport'. The days of heroic endeavour are over and if they ever were there they were in very specialized areas anyway, and they probably were in academia or intelligence services, not in the general IT.

"Being a good thinker is really important. Being able to think things through very carefully and being able to produce an evidence-based argument and to be able to actually negotiate rather than just argue about things is very important. I think women are more likely to be able to do that successfully, because they're not looking to be recognized as a hero at the end of it," Hannah says.