Why Don’t Women Program? Exploring Links between Gender, Technology and Software

Abstract

The main question to be discussed in this article is: Why do women not program? In other words, why, in an activity that appears similar to others where women have gained ground, one cannot find an analogous process of incorporation? We propose a scheme of five related factors in order to analyse the genealogy of women’s exclusion from the world of software. First, we discuss the relation between gender and technologies in general, focusing on the initial stages of socialisation. Second, we fast forward a few years in the lives of boys and girls and we analyse their first interaction with digital technologies. Next, in relation to puberty or adolescence, we inquire into peer-group dynamics which are established by those who dedicate much of their time to computers. Fourth, we take into account the gender gap in college or bachelor degrees related to informatics. Lastly, we analyse the common representations of and beliefs about gender that employers hold in relation to informatics workers. These five parts of the explanation have different foundations. Some rely strongly on our qualitative fieldwork in Buenos Aires; others are based on texts or statistics which belong to other authors.

Gender Digital Divide and Education in Latin America: A Literature Review

“…Yansen y Zukerferld [52] The use of ICT that is linked to access to employment with ICT and the improvement of application skills for software development. It considers GDD and its link to horizontal segregation and employability in the cyber sector and programming industry.…”

Developing women as ICT users: a miniature scoping review of gender and ICTs for development

“…Women's participation in high-status ICT careers in the US and Europe has dropped since the 1990s (Suriya, 2003;Yansen & Zukerfeld, 2014;National Science Foundation, 2017). Meanwhile, in low-income countries women are employed in highstatus, authoritative ICT careers (Mellström, 2009;Suriya, 2003;Yansen & Zukerfeld, 2014).…”

“…Women's participation in high-status ICT careers in the US and Europe has dropped since the 1990s (Suriya, 2003;Yansen & Zukerfeld, 2014;National Science Foundation, 2017). Meanwhile, in low-income countries women are employed in highstatus, authoritative ICT careers (Mellström, 2009;Suriya, 2003;Yansen & Zukerfeld, 2014). In Malaysia for example, Muslim men and women view such high status ICT careers as women's work and predominantly women are employed as such (Mellström, 2009).…”

“…In Malaysia for example, Muslim men and women view such high status ICT careers as women's work and predominantly women are employed as such (Mellström, 2009). Similarly, in Argentina, women are prominent in ICT careers, except for the high-status software development category (Yansen & Zukerfeld, 2014).…”

Influencing the Influencers: The Role of Mothers in IT Career Choices

“…In order to attract more females to the IT profession, there is a need to focus on how to make the study of IT attractive to secondary school students (Wang, Hong, Ravitz, & Ivory, 2015;Yansen, 2014;Zagami et al, 2015). The situation is complex to remedy (Ridley & Young, 2012) and requires intervention to influence perceptions of careers in the IT workforce (Quesenberry & Trauth, 2012).…”