Invisible Women in IT
By Ingrid Maria Christensen and Melissa Høegh Marcher
The lack of IT specialists in Europe is a growing problem, with 63% of European hiring enterprises reporting challenges filling their IT vacancies. Likewise, a Danish report projects a staggering shortage of 22,000 ICT specialists by 2030. At the same time, women are vastly underrepresented in the European IT industry, leaving us to conclude that to meet the increasing demand for IT specialists, an effective solution would be to close the gender gap.
During our studies at the university, this lack of women in the industry was hard to ignore – from the sparse number of female classmates to the complete absence of female educators in our Master’s programme. This sparked a shared interest in the subject, and from our first semester, we have already worked on many initiatives to increase gender diversity at our university. Ranging from teaching young girls computer science at Coding Cafés to co-creating an online education channel with diversity-focused computer science lessons to conducting two extensive studies on the lack of women in IT.
The first study investigates the importance of programming assignments. Building on a psychological theory about vocational choices called People vs. Things, we explored different gender’s preferences for the themes “People” and “Things” in programming assignments. Students were presented with two content-wise identical programming assignments, but the themes differed. One had a “People”-related theme and another a “Things”-related theme. In the first study, we tested it on high school students choosing between hypothetical programming tasks, asking if they had to work on one of these assignments, which would they choose? In the second study, we asked first-year computer science majors at university to choose between “People” and “Things” themed mandatory programming assignments.
In both studies, our results showed a gendered preference, as women had a higher preference for a “People” task over a “Things” task, while men did not show an overall preference. Therefore, we concluded that the themes chosen for classroom examples, assignments, projects, etc. matter. For example, women can exhibit different preferences for building a software system showcasing race car specifications in contrast to a software system used by an employee in a cinema. (Both are real-life examples of projects we were assigned during our time at university).
These two studies were published at the ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER) 2021. Due to Covid-19, the conference was held online, and the pre-recorded presentations are still available to watch.
Another vital factor in engaging more women in computer science is early introduction. Studies have found that introduction as early as primary school is essential in sparking young women’s interest in IT. In Denmark, the earliest formal introduction to IT is through elective classes in high schools. This means many Danish students go through the entire educational system without mandatory computing education.
While it remains a political decision to include more computing education in the public school system, we became interested in the actual teaching content of the first formal introduction to IT – Which teaching materials are used? How do these shape this vital first introduction? Do the materials portray an inclusive industry to everyone?
These questions became the inspiration for our third and latest study. We collected teaching materials from 25% of Danish HHX high schools. HHX is one of four types of Danish high schools and the only one with a mandatory IT subject. Later, we conducted two analyses of the teaching materials. One was a gender representation analysis, counting all occurrences of female and male pronouns and names and women and men in photos and audio/video. The other analysis explored the use of role models in the teaching materials and their gender distribution. It is important to note that these indicators represent perceived gender based on pronouns, names, and faces in videos.
The results showed a consistent underrepresentation of women across all indicators except genders in images. Across all materials containing pronouns, 2/3 had a majority of men’s pronouns. Similarly, nearly 3/4 of the materials contained male names. While images had a roughly even distribution of women and men, we saw primarily men in audio/video materials. Likewise, for our role model analysis, nearly 2/3 of role models were men; even worse, there was no Danish female role model.
Our results in this study indicate that from the earliest possible formal introduction in Denmark, the IT industry has been presented as a “man’s world” more so than a “woman’s world.” This correlates with fewer women pursuing an education and a career in IT. We hypothesize, backed by a vast amount of literature on the importance of early and inclusive introduction, that this needs to be considered to change the gender balance in IT.
One might say that the reason the gender balance in the teaching materials is skewed is because the gender balance in the industry, as it is today, is also skewed. While this is true, we also saw plenty of examples of places where it would have been equally relevant and straightforward to include women, but only men were included. For example, in all IT history chapters of the textbooks we analyzed, Alan Turing was always mentioned, but never Ada Lovelace, one of the founders of computer science.
We were delighted to present our latest study at this year’s ACM ICER conference in Melbourne and to raise awareness of gender representation in teaching materials used in classrooms worldwide. We are equally happy to have been invited to present our studies at a nationwide conference for high school teachers in Denmark next year, hopefully contributing a small part to computing education and ultimately encouraging more women to enter the world of IT.
References
- European Commision, “EU companies face difficulties in hiring ICT experts”, July 2023
- IRIS Group on behalf of IDA, “Mismatch på arbejdsmarkedet for it-uddannede i 2030”, 2021
- European Commision, “Employed ICT specialists by sex”, May 2022
- “Computing Educational Activities Involving People Rather Than Things Appeal More to Women (Recruitment Perspective)”, 2021
- “Computing Educational Activities Involving People Rather Than Things Appeal More to Women (CS1 Appeal Perspective)”, 2021
- https://video.itu.dk/video/70229501/ccer-icer-2021-presentation-video
- https://video.itu.dk/video/70229548/ccer-icer-2021-presentation-video-1
- “Invisible Women in IT: Examining Gender Representation in K-12 ICT Teaching Materials”, 2024