Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation
Joanne Cohoon and William Aspray
Abstract
Computing remains a heavily male-dominated field even after twenty-five years of extensive efforts to promote female participation. The chapters in this book look at reasons for the persistent gender imbalance in computing and explore some strategies intended to reverse the downward trend. The studies included are rigorous social science investigations; they rely on empirical evidence — not rhetoric, hunches, folk wisdom, or off-the-cuff speculation about supposed innate differences between men and women. Taking advantage of the recent surge in research in this area, the book presents the late ... More
Computing remains a heavily male-dominated field even after twenty-five years of extensive efforts to promote female participation. The chapters in this book look at reasons for the persistent gender imbalance in computing and explore some strategies intended to reverse the downward trend. The studies included are rigorous social science investigations; they rely on empirical evidence — not rhetoric, hunches, folk wisdom, or off-the-cuff speculation about supposed innate differences between men and women. Taking advantage of the recent surge in research in this area, the book presents the latest findings of both qualitative and quantitative studies. Each section begins with an overview of the literature on current research in the field, followed by individual studies. The first section investigates the relationship between gender and information technology among preteens and adolescents, with each study considering what could lead girls' interest in computing to diverge from boys'; the second section, on higher education, includes a nationwide study of computing programs and a cross-national comparison of computing education; the final section, on pathways into the IT workforce, considers both traditional and nontraditional paths to computing careers.
Keywords:
computing,
gender imbalance,
information technology,
higher education,
IT workforce,
careers,
male-dominated field,
female participation,
empirical evidence,
adolescents
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262033459 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262033459.001.0001 |
