The purpose of this paper is to investigate what may increase the interest of young women in considering studies and careers within game development and creative IT studies in Nordic countries. The study is based on data gathered through a Nordplus project in 2017-2018, in Iceland and Norway, through surveys and group interviews with 16 -19 year old female secondary school students and one of their teachers. The findings reveal that young women appreciate chances to try out some creative IT tools and the participants also expressed generally positive attitude towards creative IT. They regret not having received more information about creative IT as well as insight into creative IT fields, study and job opportunities throughout their schooling, and they appreciate visible female role models within technology.
Keywords:Young women in creative IT, recruitment of women to creative IT, role models 1 A quick clarification of how I refer to "gender" in this paper: The data is limited to the traditional binary division genders; male and female. This is not to say that I am not aware of the complex nature of gender, sex and sexual identity, not necessarily bound to physically assigned sex. The non-exclusionary group of participants who identified as female may have included trans-non-binary students but the act of identifying as female was the only requirement.
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