ICT and Gender: Impressions from the Field

I was new to technology. In fact that is an understatement. Technology had no even been on my radar. But there I was, interviewing coder after coder about how they experienced gender in the work place. This was the real motive behind my original plan for field work, find out about gender in the work place.

It was timely, it was relevant, and I was pretty certain I wanted to corner female coders as a 'group'.

And when I got to the interviews and to asking the questions about gender, I found many people who has not really thought about it.

Perhaps in my then strange academic and removed world, thinking about gender was second nature. I met only one other like minded individual who happened to have also studied humanities and has retrained to be a computer programmer (inspiring me that it was indeed possible).

 I even got one belated email from a employee of a company I had tried to contact about the possibility of field work whom told me flat out, forget gender, and just find ABA company and a product you are interested in and tell them how amazing they are. I ignored the email.

Gender was an important issue in the ICT industry, I wasn't giving up.

No I did not uncover examples of extreme sexism, and sexism and ICT is a subject of another blog post.

What I did find was the sense that gender was somehow suspended in the technical teams, as mentioned in the previous blog post. Gender for some of these coders was something that existed more in the realms of industry's or positions which required interpersonal skills.

When I asked individuals if they experienced their gender in the workplace, and by gender I am referring to the cultural construct, rather than sex which is biologically based (and very often confused), the overwhelming majority said they felt themselves. I considered this answer for a long period, in fact it puzzled me. Though a few women discussed perhaps issues around confidence and needing to appease as though they knew what they were talking about, I did not encounter women constructing masculine persona.

I placed the credit for these women's apparent freedom from feeling obliged to 'perform their gender' (in the Judith Butler sense) to a strong organisational cultures which allowed for diversity, and did not, perpetuate a strong discourse on gender roles.

Perhaps potentially because programming itself does not require 'gender roles' in order to be executed, but even that statement is problematic. As one female programmer related to me, there were female sides to the job, normally communication and find actually just asking people what their issues are, and there were more masculine sides to the job, generally more technical and involved 'big beefy machines'.

And there we hit gender within how she conceptualised her work. Though she did not place either gendered skill above the other, in a hierarchy, there was a sense of separation of labour. This separation is present in many societies, the separation of work that is for men and work that is for women.

It was difficult to escape this perception that to be masculine as to be hard, and to be feminine was to be soft. Almost all of my informants described gender in this way, when I asked them to define masculine and feminine. Only one person, the participant who had studied humanities and queer theory, defined gender as fluid. The gender binary seemed to haunt almost all our interactions. My tutor suggested how gender seems to 'get' everywhere, and I began to wonder if coding and logic truly beyond culture and pure and genderless.

Donna Haraway envisions in the Cyborg Manifesto a future where humanity has transcended the boundaries between animal/machine/humanity. Gender would not necessarily be eliminated but would not be one of the most defining feature of an individual's identity.

And in this vision, would it be desirable to transcend the physical differences of gender? Is that necessary to eliminate sexism and end the subordination of women, and does technology alone hold the key to this? These were questions I contemplated in the field and whilst writing up my dissertation. Questions I will continue to address in this blog.

Is ICT Meritocratic? Impressions from Field

This was the question if my field work. Is ICT meritocratic? There are several arguments for and against meritocracy in the technology industry.

 The question also highlights the definition of meritocracy and its validity as an argument or justification for current social system, but this something which will be explored in later posts.

According to several women I met and interviewed during the course of my field work, the female gender are missing out on the opportunities present in technology because they are not perceiving technology beyond the common cultural perceptions of a lone male 'geek.' A woman proudly proclaimed to me that she had never experienced being held back in her career because she was a woman. No opportunity ever was denied to her by employers because of her gender hard work; blood, sweat and tears were everything.

From my field work in ICT and interviewing many coders and developers on their experiences of gender in the workplace, a common refrain was that the technology industry can be meritocratic, at least in so far as coding itself is a mental activity which is beyond gender.

This was broken down for me by a software developer who told me that jobs in the west have progressed beyond the physical where gender differences are more pronounced, to the mental, where men and women (though this is still debated) are on an equal playing field.

Though evolutionary scientists still argue that men are more technologically minded than women, and even recent research into autism confirms a strong link between autism technology and male brains, there is evidence which points to more culturally based factors which keep women out of technology.

For instance, according to Arisidis and Jordaki, who studied students in tertiary education in Greece, women achieve equal grades to men in computer science degrees, but are far less likely to continue in a technology career (Georgiadou 2009:280).

So this question of meritocracy in ICT struck me as fascinating, because it subverted my expectations entirely. ICT is famous for sexism in the media, and to encounter perspectives that in fact ICT did have a more level playing field, in at least the

But not all my informants felt the same way, and one female coder told me that it was who could about the loudest which made it in the work place.

How far is it true that female and male work is indeed given equal worth, and how much 'culture' creeps in to an seemingly culture less logical  product?



Bibliography

Georgiadou (2009)

Women's ICT career choices: four cross‐cultural case studies, Multicultural Education and Technology Journal.Pages. 279-289