I've namechanged for this as anyone who knows me would recognise it straight away.
I am a senior IT Manager at a University, but fell into IT by accident. My degree is in Philosophy and I'm also a qualified teacher, but discovered after a couple of years of teaching that I hated children and killing them would be frowned upon. I quit my teaching job and accidently got a job on a helpdesk. The rest, they say, is history.
I spent 4 years doing general helpdesk and then 7 years doing software support, tracking down conflicts and registry errors, building installers and lots of other fun stuff before moving into proper management. Now I do very little technical stuff and my skills in that area are very out of date, but instead I run projects, write policy and strategy and manage a huge budget and a small legion of minions.
I am an ambassador for the regional education business partnership and regularly go into schools to promote working in IT. There are 8 women in the whole of my department. Two senior managers, one middle manager, one programmer, two helpdesk and two admin.
In my experience women in IT tend to gravitate to management. When I started out in the early 90s I came across a lot of sexism in the workplace. I left my first job when I lost out on a new position that went to the managers golfing buddy. The back slapping made me want to puke, so I moved on and up. I also lost count of the times when someone would ask to speak to my manager and was gobsmaked when I said that I was the manager.
I have no idea whether it would be better now, but its still very male dominated and out of 40 applications for a post you can bet that only 5 or 6 will be from women.