Gender issues and ICT -- there is no one answer to ensure equity for women and men in ICT says Claudia Morrell. Stakeholders must encourage all projects and individuals that attempt to bring about equity as there is no one solution to the challenge.
Jo Sanders is a feminist in the United States who has long fought the battle for women’s equity. Her stories of her work in the 70’s and 80’s would surprise most young people in the US today who are growing up in a very different world than Jo or I experienced. She met and worked with national leaders on issues of social justice for women and minorities and learned a great deal about changing the world. She now talks more about passing the baton to the next generation than taking on new challenges herself, although she still relishes a good fight. She has written numerous journals and articles, many of which can be found at . But perhaps her most important work was the 2005 article, Gender and Technology: A Research Review, which is a “comprehensive presentation of the research on gender and technology in education.” The article itself is well written and thoughtful, but perhaps the most interesting message is the most likely to be overlooked – that there is no such thing as a “best practice.” In fact, Jo’s conclusion to the reader was it matters not what you do to encourage girls and women’s participation in information and communication technology (ICT) and related technologies, just do something. Her review highlights the lack of longitudinal research conducted to measure impact, but what does exist, combined with extensive formative data, highlights the many roads that lead to success in encouraging girls’ participation in ICT and engineering fields. What this should tell the reader is what we have long known, that there are as many differences among girls and women as between men and women, that the world is changing, and that we have within our power the ability to affect that change. But what is needed is not one solution, but many to address the varied cultures, attitudes, belief systems, and perspectives that women embrace. We need to move away from the idea that girls learn in one way and boys in another. Research has shown that given equal access and expectations, equity can be achieved. To that end, young women, once absent and even discouraged from mathematics classrooms, now compose 50% of the undergraduates in mathematics in the US and their numbers and percentages in graduate school are on the rise. How exactly was that achieved? How can it be done for engineering and ICT both nationally and internationally?
Answers or More Questions?
There have been a number of US researchers that have asked the question, how have we been able to achieve parity for women in universities and colleges? How did we get women into science and mathematics fields? In biology, chemistry, mathematics, biochemistry and even informatics, women’s numbers have increased beyond the tipping point of 35% to 40%, 50%, and even 60%, but this has not translated into ICT fields. In fact, from the mid 1980s when labor market participation for women in computer fields was 35% until today, women’s participation has declined. But this may be changing. Two years ago, Harvard University president, Larry Summers, unexpectedly created a national storm by making uninformed remarks about women in the sciences. Since that time, women’s enrollments in technologically oriented colleges have improved significantly. In addition, overall enrollment in technical fields generally seemed to have bottomed out and may be again on the rise. At UMBC, where I work, women’s enrollment in the Information Systems program has risen from 23% to 41% for incoming freshmen in 2007. Like many admissions officers nationally, the Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT) and the Information Systems Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) are working hard to increase overall enrollments. Women seem to be responding well to the outreach efforts, but which ones and why? Perhaps as Jo Sanders mentioned in her research, it really makes no difference – just reach out!
The Rising Tide of Equity: Defining the Issues
We are a long way from achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly as they relate to women. Perhaps one reason we have made so little progress is because we have so little focus on gender across the various goals. Failing to disaggregate data, even as a first step, limits our ability to define actions. In other words, how can we “do something” if we don’t even know what that something should look like? One example of the importance of this focus can be highlighted through the UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) meeting, ICT Africa 2007, which will focus on connectivity in Africa. What we know from the research is that connectivity for women involves some similar but also many different issues than for men. Women experience unique barriers that if left unaddressed will affect their level of national participation and consequently economic development. Is this important? What difference will it really make? Perhaps this is best answered by an illustration.
In 2004, CWIT at UMBC submitted a proposal to fund an entrepreneurship program for women interested in starting technology companies. Once funded by the National Science Foundation, several of the partners on the proposal initially balked at making the program exclusive for women. There were those who doubted we would find the women for the class, doubted women’s interest in running a technology company, and doubted that women could run competitive businesses in the technology marketplace. I am pleased to say the doubters have converted and become our greatest cheerleaders and today, women from this program are effectively increasing the number of new technology start-up companies in Maryland by almost 50%. From new biotech companies to IT consulting, women today are transforming the technology sector in Maryland. Imagine the cost if we had listened to the doubters and “done nothing.” Similarly, what is the cost of failing to understand the gendered elements of international connectivity?
Complexity of Issues
The irony of the work of feminists all those years ago is young women’s declining interest in women’s organizations in the US. This highlights the on-going national and international debate – do we need a special funding stream for women’s efforts? Is “women and ICT” different from other traditional women’s issues? If so, how do they fit together? Does funding women’s programs simply marginalize women from the mainstream efforts? The answers are as diverse as women are themselves. ICTs are in themselves not a solution but a tool that may be used to develop solutions for age old problems like intrenched poverty and illiteracy. But these new tools do not decrease the value of traditional models that address these and other challenges or render them obsolete. An example of the infusion of ICTs into e-government highlights my point. Recently, I attended a meeting to hear about e-governance in the US and its progress to date. I listened as the speaker talked about the complexity of services, the problems with servers, the issues of security, etc. But at the end of the presentation, the question arose, how many people still physically call and/or visit their neighborhood government offices to get services? The answer was more than half. While there are many who use the Internet for government services, many still prefer old fashioned human interaction and there was no plan to eliminate any of those services. E-government was simply another option for access.
In the same way, ICTs provide women (and men) another option for participating in the knowledge society. It makes sense that we would want as many people participating, developing, and designing technology as possible. For some women, women-only networks are the most effective way to encourage and support women’s participation with ICTs. For others, finding solutions for integrating women into mainstream ICT efforts is a critical first step. Do we start at the beginning of the educational process with girls or focus on helping women use ICTs to enable their businesses? Since building workforce capacity is a critical element for economic development, how do we ensure the best and brightest minds are entering the field, including women’s? Surely tapping women’s knowledge, skills, and abilities should be considered in developing strategies to achieve these goals.
So where do we start? Support women’s organizations? Work with mainstream organizations? Help expand current effective efforts? Identify gaps and develop new initiatives? In fact, the International Taskforce for Women and ICTs (ITF) is a multi-stakeholder network that is looking at different methods for increasing women’s participation and leadership in ICTs both in terms of the ICT industry and the development of ICT-enabled opportunities in education, entrepreneurship, and related areas. This diverse group representing developed and developing regions of the world has lots of ideas on how to address the issues, but there is one clear message these women and men all bring to the table; it matters less what we do than that we do something and that something should be global. We all appreciate that the world will change; we want to ensure that the changes also benefit women, their families, and their communities.