Women and Information Technology review

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 05 Jul 2006

At one time, old-timers will tell you, a lot of programmers were women, who were thought to have more of the necessary patience. Times have changed in a big way. Women's participation in computer science has been dropping steadily since its peak in the 1980s in both the US and the UK. This book is a collection of research papers examining some of the reasons why.

Discovering that women were underrepresented in computer science was a big surprise. If there is one branch of science in which you would have thought women would be competing on equal terms, it's computer science: it requires no great physical strength, and just about all of us now grow up with some access to the basic tools.

You might ask whether it matters. Two reasons: first, attracting more women to computer science and keeping them in the field would solve the expected increasing shortage of qualified high-tech workers; second, if computer systems increasingly mediate all of our transactions -- with government, with private companies and with society in general -- the greater the diversity of the people designing them the better. Getting more women into computing has long been a concern of the (American) Association for Computing Machinery; the British Computer Society also has its BCSWomen Specialist Group.

The editors and authors collected here proceed from a simple assumption: that there is no particular biological reason why women should be less adept at computer science. If there were such a reason, they argue, we wouldn't see the variability in numbers that exists, both across time and across nations. The countries in which women are least underrepresented in computing out of the 21 surveyed in one of the articles here? Turkey, Ireland and Korea. The US comes in fifth; the UK tenth.

The book is organised into three sections: girls, postsecondary education, and careers in IT. Each section begins with a literature review before moving on to papers on increasingly narrow topics. Most of the research was conducted in or covers the US; however, it's clear that this is a pattern that crosses national and cultural boundaries.

The book's findings are interesting, even though many of the themes are familiar. Boys at all ages tend to have greater access to computer equipment. Gender stereotypes persist among teachers and schools. The stereotypical geeky image of computing -- socially dysfunctional, male, lonely -- alienates women. The expectation that, particularly in the dot-com boom, programmers and software engineers will work long hours throughout their careers leads women to think of computer science as a career that will give them insufficient control over their lives. The authors don't, however, draw together all this research into a set of policy recommendations or advice. Readers must do that for themselves.

What's remarkable is how little the situation has changed since the ACM conducted its first survey among its female members in 1998. Most of the themes in this book appeared then, although here they are better documented and more fleshed out. There is even the same omission: sexual harassment, which some of the ACM women entered on their survey forms as a reason why women drop out of computer science, and anecdotal evidence supports the view that it's a factor.

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