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Department of Information Technology

Gender in IT education and work: What knowledge counts?

I am also interested in the issue of gender in relation to the development and use of ICT and is currently working on a project on gender issues and programming. For more information, please see the project page.

For 2006, I have received a grant from the GLIT network (Gender and Equity in the field of Learning and IT)to conduct a study on gender and IT. The project will explore how men and women (students and IT professionals) construct gender and computing in their daily work/student life. The background for the study is the persistence of the under-representation of women in computer science and IT.
The focus of the project is to investigate the complex processes between gender, computing and the production of legitimate knowledge. The project will examine and analyse the constructions of gender and computing/IT in women´s and men´s daily work practices. More concretely, the study will answer the following questions:

  • How do women and men in IT think and talk about the area, about what CS/IT is, what computing and programming/systems development are?
  • What does "computing" mean to women and men? And what does "programming/systems development" mean according to the informants?
  • Who is a "good" computer scientist, programmer, and/or systems developer? What makes a "good", legitimate scientist, programmer etc in the context of IT/computing? How do these images relate and connect to cultural conceptions of gender?
  • What knowledge "counts" in the systems development process and how is this knowledge represented ?
  • What norms and structures shape and determine the careers of men and women in IT?

For more information about the project, please see the project specification.

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Updated  2006-12-07 17:41:28 by Inger Boivie.