Career Watch: What to do about women's under-respresentation in IT

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October 8, 2007 (Computerworld) --

Q&A: Eileen Trauth

The interim associate dean for diversity, outreach and international engagement at Penn States College of Information Sciences and Technology discusses womens under-representation in the IT workforce.

Why is it important to pull women into the IT workforce?There are two reasons. One is social inclusion. The societal barriers that women experience should be addressed for the same reason that we address barriers to race or disability. The second reason is pure economics. Women represent half of the population of the American workforce, and any society that disenfranchises half of its working population puts itself at a distinct disadvantage in the competition for brain power in a knowledge society.

Eileen Trauth

• Cultural definitions of femininity that place IT outside the boundary of feminine. As girls who are influenced by these cultural norms begin to develop their gender identities in the tween and early teen years, they also begin to view a technological profession as nonfeminine.


• Historical associations of technology with power and men with power. This exerts pressure to keep control of technology in the hands of men. Those who have written about gender and technology have made this argument.


• Gender stereotypes. IT professionals portrayed in the media are typically men. This reinforces the assumption that IT is for men only. In the 200-plus interviews that I have conducted with women in IT in several countries, one theme that appears over and over again is that women have to prove themselves to a much larger extent than men.


• Expectations. Some people take the low number of women in IT to mean that women do not want to be in this field or are not able to work in it. People who hold that view might communicate it to their children, students or employees.


• Women have more options these days. Hence, they dont need to put up with hostile workplaces, unequal pay, harassment  all of the kinds of things women in my interviews have related to me.


• The critical mass conundrum. This is a chicken and egg explanation. The fewer women in IT, the more it is a men-only club. And the more it is a male club, the more women might feel uncomfortable in it. It is generally thought that a critical mass would exist when there are 25% to 30% women.

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