Gender & the geek factor: why don't women do IT?

Lang, Catherine

There are flaws in the explanations presented in the 'Women and Computing' literature that the lack of role models and the inhospitable nature of the IT field are an explanation for poor female enrolments. There is a lack of analysis into why over twenty years of intervention programs are not improving the gender balance in this discipline. In this study, an analysis of Australian university enrolment data is used to compare computing and information systems participation to the disciplines of Law and Medicine. Questions are raised about the role that perceived status plays in determining career choices by young people, particularly the influence of the media in forming perceptions.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last twenty-five years there has been a growing concern that women are not embracing the field of computing and information technology (IT) to the same extent as men. A primary concern of IT academics and IT professionals is that the pool of talent being attracted to this discipline is not diverse enough and there is a large segment of potential candidates being overlooked. (1) Attracting a wider variety of students, women and men, will enrich the discipline. An analysis of recent publications produced recurring explanations attributing the under-representation of women to:

* the inhospitable nature of the field in both education and employment areas (2)

* the lack of female role models and mentors (3)

* the perceived isolated nature of programming (4)

* the media-reinforced imagery of computer 'nerds' and 'geeks' (5)

* the different relationship with technology that women have compared to men (6)

* the advantage males have in their use of technology because of their preoccupation with computer games (7)

* teaching methods in the field being more suited to men than women (8)

* differentiation in education experiences in mathematics, science and technology (9)

It needs to be determined if these recurring explanations are more than localised opinions that have grown to be accepted as truisms over time, or if they are based on solid evidence. When comparing the percentage of female participation in the disciplines of Computer Science and Information Systems (IT) in Australian higher education to the disciplines of Law and Legal Studies, and Medicine and Medical Science, all of which are degree courses designed to produce professionals in their respective fields, some obvious gaps in explanations are evident. An analysis of recent literature in this area and statistical comparisons with the two disciplines mentioned will elucidate this stance.

UNDER-THEORISED NATURE OF MANY STUDIES

Many people in education, business and government perceive the gender imbalance in the field of computing as an issue with wide social implications. The lack of women in the field can be interpreted as an issue for all of society, due to reasons of lack of diversity, under-utilised creativity, power concentration and the influence of IT in the wider society. (10)

Since the 1980s a number of programs have been instigated in the USA, UK and Australia to encourage women to enter IT at a greater rate than at present. Some of these programs have had a measure of local success but the overall trend of women not choosing this discipline at tertiary level to the same extent as men remains. There is little evidence of the sustained success of any of these intervention programs and little improvement in the gender imbalance of women in IT Australia wide. This article will address each of the recurring explanations in detail to determine where the reasoning is flawed or gaps are evident in the information presented.

Current Australian statistics presented in Figure 1 show, in graphical form, that the percentage of women enrolled at university in Australia, as a proportion of all enrolments, has increased steadily over the last ten years from fifty-two per cent of the total student body in 1990, to fifty-five per cent in 2000. This is an average annual growth of a quarter of a percentage point. Female participation rates in Medicine and Medical Sciences have increased by thirteen per cent over the same time period, to become more than half of the student body since 1998. Female participation in Law and Legal Studies has surpassed male participation since 1996. The proportion has increased by nine per cent, with an average annual growth of point nine per cent over the last ten years. Female enrolments in Computer Science and Information Systems on the other hand have decreased by four per cent in the same time period. The enrolment peaked at twenty-eight per cent in the early 1990s, slumped to twenty three per cent in 1997 and in the last three years has been increasing slightly each year to reach twenty-four per cent in 2000. This is not even one-quarter of the total enrolments in this field.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Figure 2 offers a closer look at the different classifications within the Information Technology field of study. The Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) classification divided the discipline into four sub-categories of:

* Computer Science and Information Systems--General (not Business Data Processing): CS&IS Gen

* Computer Science: CS

* Information Systems: IS

* Computer Science and Information Systems--Other: CS&IS Other

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The percentage of women participating in higher education IT courses has fluctuated according to the specialisations within the discipline. A marked decline in Information Systems is evident and countered partially by the increase in the 'CS & IS Other' category. Within the discipline the participation of women in computer science has declined by several percentage points. The data is compounded by the inclusion of double-degree statistics since 1997, which may account for the slight upturn in percentages toward the end of the century. In the three years since 1997 there has been a growth in this discipline of an average of half a per cent per year. At this rate it will be another sixty years before women achieve fifty per cent enrolment. These statistics as well as current literature form the basis for the following discussion.

COMMON REASONS PRESENTED

Some of the common reasons given for explaining the lack of female enrolment in IT courses will be discussed in more detail in this section. Some of the explanations are clearly flawed when applied wider than this discipline. Where programs have been instituted and achieved positive results, there is little data to show that any have persisted for longer than five years and there is an absence of ongoing evaluation of programs that may have produced initial growth in numbers but did not gain in momentum to become self-sustaining when the particular program funding ended, or personalities involved in the program initiation moved on. Many of the programs are both labour and capital intensive and dependent. For example, Clayton and Lynch at Central Queensland University have published results of a ten-year intervention program that has produced positive results but is reliant on a funded faculty position of a 'Women in computing' coordinator. (13)

The inhospitable nature of the field in both education & employment areas

It is claimed that the nature of the IT field is not attractive to women due to long working hours to meet deadlines, or latenight stints debugging code, or finishing projects for university credit or employers. (14) This is not an environment that is supportive of women, be they daughters, mothers or wives. The safety issue of walking to cars at night via unlit paths or car parks has been documented as well as the inhospitable laboratory environment that has been likened to a male locker room. (15) This argument is flawed because it can be applied to many professional fields, but in particular Law and Medicine. Both these areas were bastions of male power in the early twentieth century; both had inhospitable work environments and male-dominated offices, courtrooms, university lecture theatres, tutorial rooms and laboratories. Law and Medicine also require long hours of work yet in both these fields women have overcome the barriers of inhospitality and male dominance to the extent that in the last ten years the number of women enrolling has surpassed the number of males (as shown in Figure 1). Of the three work environments of IT, Medicine and Law, IT should allow for more flexible work arrangements through increased telecommunication capabilities, yet this is the area that women are least likely to enter. The flaw in this argument is that IT is no more inhospitable than many other professions. Long hours are a product of many careers, particularly for new entrants into the field. This alone cannot be the reason women are avoiding IT because it did not prevent them entering Law and Medicine. Other factors are involved.

The lack of female role models & mentoring programs

It is claimed that the small number of women in the IT field leads to a lack of role models and perpetuation of the image of the discipline as being 'male'. The lack of validation of seeing similar people to oneself, be it of the same gender or ethnicity, contributes to feelings of isolation. (16) There is also the perception that the current women in computing are somehow 'different' because they are going against society's impression of what a woman should be. (17) There is a similar flaw in this reasoning as in the earlier argument about the inhospitable nature of the field. The lack of role models did not prevent women breaking down barriers in Law and Medicine, where the argument that women do not feel comfortable in an area where they are constantly facing sexism and 'old boy' networks, also applied.

The need to establish mentoring in the field is also mentioned. Several programs have proven successful in encouraging young women to select computing courses, based on little more than personal contact prior to enrolment and the promise of on-going mentor support. (18) It is believed that having a critical mass of women will make a difference to the field, but there is no evidence that this critical mass, once reached, will maintain its own momentum. On the other hand, there is evidence from Britain that more women in the Information Systems business environment did not result in a momentum of positive changes, but led to a shift in skills evaluation. Female skills were marginalised to the extent that women with social, communication and technical skills found that their technical skills were doubted, while men with social, communication and technical skills were touted as wizards. (19) In this research, Woodfield concluded that 'the degree to which social skills are defined, recognised and assessed is highly dependent upon a worker's gender'. (20)

There is a positive and negative side to the female role models. Often in IT they are portrayed as exceptional women, and are therefore disregarded by women who perceive themselves as anything but exceptional. It is when ordinary women succeed in the area of IT that they will be effective role models. This will be discussed further in relation to the media. Once more the fact that women have moved into the fields of Medicine and Law despite these fields being male-dominated gives hope that one day the same will happen in IT, but the lack of role models and mentoring programs cannot be presented as a reason why women are currently avoiding the discipline.

Media portrayals

The image of the lone programmer working long hours in a room lit by the glow of a computer screen is often presented in the media. The image of the law student sweating over law books in a library until closing time is also isolating, but cannot be attributed to turning women from that profession. The difference may be attributed to human interaction in employment. Lawyers and doctors need to interact with people to ply their trade, and this is not the popular image of anyone in the IT industry. There is little understanding that programmers often work in teams or that the discipline also produces systems analysts, network managers and business analysts who need to communicate with many different types of people and solve the problems of stakeholders daily. Common perceptions are difficult to change when the media reinforces them and there is a lack of understanding by the population in general that IT is more than programming.

Perpetuation of the geek image

The influence of the media on the perceptions of women in IT is under-investigated. It is assumed to be powerful but there is little data to support assumptions. There is a need for more detailed analysis of the factors that encourage an interest in the discipline, as well as what parts both educational experiences and the media play in creating misconceptions about the career path. Analyses of computer magazines show that they are predominantly produced by males, for males, and portray the images of males using, designing and spending their leisure time on computers. (21) Non-computer teenage magazines produced for boys have many more advertisements for computers than those published for the teenage girl market. (22) The effect of popular film and television characters portraying female lawyers and doctors with equal status and power to their male counterparts ('Legally Blonde, 'Secret Life of Us') on influencing young girls' career choices needs further investigation. The influence of the media on the perceptions of women in IT is under-investigated. It is assumed it is powerful but there is little data to support this assumption.

Differences in relationship with technology

A debate exists over whether the difference in the relationship to technology between men and women is socially constructed through gendered socialisation of children, or a product of biological determinism, innate because of the sex of a person. Biological determinists argue that biological differences account for males and females being born with different abilities (for example, males with spatial abilities stronger than females), consequently there will never be equality in employment because there will always be certain careers more attractive to each gender. A flaw in the biological determinist argument is that in communist countries women are expected to move into technical fields, which they do successfully. While much is written about the relationship women have with technology, little is written about their use of it. They can drive cars equally as well as men and they use domestic technology exceedingly well, often more capably than men, from washing machines to sewing machines. Is the stanza 'Men design, women use' a biologically determined fact or is it a social construction? (23) Is the widely held belief that it is necessary to have an emotional connection with computers to be successful in the IT field a myth or reality? When women are required to use computers in the work environment they tend to develop a pragmatic attitude to them and become competent users. (24) However women in the tertiary environment are often surrounded by men with an all-consuming passion for computers, or programming, which they do not share. This can lead to them doubting their ability to succeed in this area. There is some evidence that delivering a gender awareness course to academics, parents and students can overcome this widely held assumption. (25)

Game-playing advantages

There is an argument that the lack of equivalence in access to IT is an ethical issue because the computing games market, written for males by males, gives them an unfair technological familiarity with both software and hardware from a very young age. (26) Males are more attracted to playing computer games and when women do play games it is often for different purposes. Women tend to prefer more passive games and game playing is not a major part of their leisure activities. (27) There is a need for more research in this area, but unfortunately, because of the difficulty in monitoring or collecting statistics of computer use, it is hard to determine who is using what. The influence of the communication technologies of electronic mail and chat on the familiarity females develop with IT may counter their lack of equivalence in access and over time negate this assumed lack of equivalence.

Differing education experiences

While there is some data and information existing about poor pedagogical practices in this field of study at tertiary level, (28) there are gaps in the attention to improving pedagogical practices in this field at both secondary and tertiary levels. There is an absence of data investigating the student experience in the IT classroom at primary, secondary and tertiary institutions.

Much has been written about male and female learning styles (29) and differentiation in experiences in education due to gendered self-efficacy beliefs. Boys tend to overestimate their ability in a field, and when things do not go as well as planned tend to blame an external factor, girls on the other hand underestimate their abilities and blame themselves first before any external factor. (30) In a male-dominated profession it can be extrapolated that without gender awareness, male teachers can favour the learning styles of male students. (31) A cross-cultural comparison that compared the gender of maths and IT teachers showed that Asian students were exposed to female IT teachers to a greater degree than Australian students. (32) While no direct link could be proven, this study reported that female enrolment in IT in Singapore at a tertiary level was consistently around forty per cent. (33) The predominance of male teachers in the IT area at secondary schools in Australia could have an influence on the perception of the career path as male.

Current research has brought to light the 'I can, but I don't want to' syndrome and reported no evidence that women were less able than men to achieve in IT; (34) women just choose not to pursue this field. In more recent data presented by Jewell women rated the IT field to be of medium difficulty (Art being the lowest, and Law the highest) and the lowest in people involvement. (35) A survey of over two hundred female secondary students in Australia found that the most common response for why they believed women were not choosing computing as a career path was a lack of interest. (36) Some studies have shown that gender-awareness education improves the experiences of women in the IT discipline, and when applied to secondary school teachers, is carried through to an increased female enrolment in computer science courses at the tertiary level. (37)

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

A number of questions are outstanding in this area. Why is it that women have broken down the male-dominated bastions of Law and Medicine yet are still reluctant to enter IT? Is it due to a lack of perceived status of IT influencing choice of able women? How important are media portrayals of women in professions to decisions about career choices of younger women? Is the lack of self-efficacy of women in maths and technology still evident in 2003 and can it be blamed for turning women away from the field? What is the overt and covert discrimination in educational environments and is it really present in IT more than other fields? In the USA after over twenty-two years of intervention programs that have not delivered the expected results, questions are now being asked about the effect of environment and culture in shaping interest in IT as well as the effect of IT curriculum in primary and secondary schools. An investigation of workplace barriers and obstacles is also being carried out. (38)

The Australian situation is no different, after over twenty years and innumerable programs of various scales; women are still underrepresented in IT in education and business. Where effective programs have been instituted there is little data to show that any have persisted for longer than five years. The absence of ongoing evaluation of programs that may have produced initial growth in numbers, but then did not gain in momentum, is a serious gap in the published data. There are many flaws in the literature where claims are based on the local situation rather than underlying causes, and are clouded by emotive language and ominous warnings.

CONCLUSION

It is a major issue that the perception in young people is that girls do not do IT. While it has been documented that some intervention programs in Australia are producing positive results in attracting more women into courses, they need a continual infusion of labour and capital to continue. Currently there are many disparate groups working to the same end in Australia, but often in isolation. The image of IT needs to be addressed via the media as well as education. It is important that the IT discipline be portrayed as gender neutral with the same status as Law and Medicine. The student experiences with IT need to be closely monitored and evaluated, and a united effort, not a 'scattergun' approach, is needed to improve the image beyond individual institutions. According to current growth rates it will be many years before a semblance of gender equality in IT is achieved, if ever. Sustained research and quality interventions are required at a societal level to ensure that the female voice is heard in this discipline.

ENDNOTES

(1) Brenda Richardson, Keynote Speaker, AusWIT Conference, University of Tasmania, Hobart, February 2003.

(2) Amy Pearl, Martha Pollack, Eve Riskin, Becky Thomas, Elizabeth Wolf & Alice Wu, 'Becoming a computer scientist', Communications of the ACM, vol. 33, no. 11, 1990, 49.

(3) Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995; Deborah Johnston & Keith Miller, 'Is diversity in computing a moral matter?', SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, 9-10.

(4) Alan Durndell, Peter Glissov & Gerda Siann, 'Gender and computing: Persisting differences', Educational Research, vol. 37, no. 3, 1995, 219-27; Catherine Lang, Factors accounting for the Gender Imbalance in Computing Degree Enrolments, Master of Education Thesis, Monash University, 1999.

(5) Melanie Stewart Miller, Cracking the Gender Code: Who Rules the Wired World, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998.

(6) Jane Margolis & Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002.

(7) Stewart Miller; Chuck Huff, 'Gender, software design, and occupational equity', SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, 112-15.

(8) Mary F Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy R Goldberger & Jill M Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing. The Development of Self, Voice and Mind, Basic Books Inc., New York, 1986; Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, WH Freeman & Company, New York, 1997.

(9) Bandura; Catherine Lang, 'Tertiary computing course selection: The impact of maths anxiety on female decision making', Australian Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 18, no. 3, 2002, 341-58.

(10) Anita Borg, 'Computing 2002: Democracy, education, and the future', SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, 13-14.

(11) Department of Education Science and Training (DEST) Statistics, www.dest.gov.au/highered/index1.htm.

(12) Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA), 'Higher education student time series tables 2000: Selected higher education statistics', Commonwealth of Australia, 2001.

(13) Debbie Clayton & Teresa Lynch, 'Ten years of strategies to increase participation of women in computing programs. The Central Queensland University Experience: 1999-2001', SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, 89-93.

(14) Johnson & Miller, 9-10.

(15) Pearl et al, 49.

(16) Valerie Taylor, 'Women of colour in computing', SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, 22-3.

(17) Turkle, 56.

(18) Helen Jewell, 'Student perceptions of tertiary study: issues of technology and gender', Research Symposium, School of Information Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, April 2002.

(19) Ruth Woodfield, 'Women and information systems development: Not just a pretty (inter)face?', Information Technology and People, vol. 15, no. 2, 2002, 119-38.

(20) Woodfield, 133.

(21) Mary C Ware & Mary F Stuck, 'Sex-role messages vis-a-vis microcomputer use: A look at the pictures', Sex Roles, vol. 13, no. 3/4, 1985, 205-214.

(22) Margolis & Fisher, 112.

(23) Eileen M Trauth, 'Odd girl out: An individual differences perspective on women in the IT profession', Information Technology & People, vol. 15, no. 2, 2002, 98-118.

(24) Durndell et al, 220.

(25) Margolis & Fisher.

(26) Huff.

(27) Lang, Gender Imbalance, 88.

(28) Margolis & Fisher, 77.

(29) Belenky et al.

(30) Bandura; Frank Pajares, 'Overview of self-efficacy', www.emory.edu/ EDUCATION/mfp/effpage.html#web, 2002, 1-8.

(31) Denise Gurer & Tracy Camp, 'An ACM-W literature review on women in computing', SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, 121-27.

(32) Lang, Gender Imbalance, 69.

(33) Lang, Gender Imbalance, 107.

(34) Durndell et al, 226.

(35) Jewell.

(36) Lang, Gender Imbalance.

(37) Margolis & Fisher.

(38) Caroline Wardle & Lawrence Burton, 'Programmatic efforts encouraging women to enter the Information Technology workforce', SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, 27-31.

CATHERINE LANG

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY