Abelia had filmmaker Marcus Støren make this beautiful short film featuring my book Reconstructions of Gender and Information Technology – Women Doing IT for Themselves (Palgrave Macmillan 2023) for the International Women’s Day 2024 and the celebration of 50 outstanding Tech Women in Norway

The book is open access and you can read it here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-5187-1

While waiting for my book to be published I made bookmarks! And now you can be the owner of one of these. Simple rules: send a photo of yourself and the paper version of my book to my email or post to Facebook or LinkedIn and tag me. The first 5 will have a frog bookmark in the mail!

Buy or download the book here: Reconstructions of Gender and Information Technology: Women Doing IT for Themselves

Download the discount code – 20% off until November 8th 2023: discount flyer

There are two book launch events planned for November 23rd for my new book Reconstructions of Gender and Information Technology – Women Doing IT for Themselves (Palgrave Macmillan 2023, Open Access at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-5187-1)

BOKSLEPP in Norwegian: At lunch time at the HVL library in Sogndal I will be interviewed about the book (in Norwegian): 23 Nov @ 11.45-12.15
https://www.hvl.no/kalender/bokslepp-hilde-g-corneliussen/

DIGITAL EVENT in English: The second event will be digital, 23 Nov @ 15.00—16.00 CET. Here I will present the book in English and invite you to join in the conversation.
Please sign up here for the online event: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNcfNj2WT68DXUUA58UCh06WWToPHmOz65_LFXwF8SBp7oaw/viewform

In Unconventional Routes into ICT Work: Learning from Women’s
Own Solutions for Working around Gendered Barriers, Gilda Seddighi and myself analyse women’s routes to ICT work in light of their educational choices, way of acquiring ICT competence, and the position and work tasks they currently have at work.

The chapter illustrates that a large group of all the women we interviewed, had not imagined working with technology when finishing upper secondary school and moving on to university.

One of the women who had gradually moved toward technology described doing so as a “natural progression”, from a Master’s degree in chemistry to a PhD in cybernetics. We asked why she had made these choices:

Well, in fact I chose chemistry. When I finished (high school) I didn’t even know what cybernetics was. And I am not sure that I would have chosen it even if I had known […] The most important thing is that you see as you go along, whether you like the subject or not, and then make choices based on that. So, I started with chemistry but then I chose the subjects with less chemistry, more towards control systems. Therefore, it was a natural transition into cybernetics for me. (“Dani”, in Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2022, p. 66-67)

The barriers that many women experience when approaching tech education during their teens, might not appear equally daunting when they move into tech via less conventional routes, such as Dani’s “natural progression”.

The chapter is open access, available to read online or download as pdf: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/book/9781529219494/ch004.xml

Cite this chapter:
Corneliussen, H. G., & Seddighi, G. (2022), Unconventional routes into ICT work: Learning from women’s own solutions for working around gendered barriers. In G. Griffin (Ed.), Gender Inequalities in Tech-Driven Research and innovation: Living the Contradiction (56-75), Bristol: Bristol University Press.

After many years of studying how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is gendered in the Norwegian and Nordic culture, my interest is more in what successfully brings women into ICT, rather than what excludes women from ICT. The chapter on unconventional routes into ICT work that I wrote together with my colleague Gilda Seddighi, explores how women come to tech work, not through the more “conventional” route of choosing the “correct” subjects at school that leads to ICT at university etc. Instead, in this chapter we focus on the unconventional routes that bring many women into ICT work.

The chapter is based on in-dept interviews with women working with ICT where a majority of the women we interviewed had found an alternative route to ICT. This included
a) a delayed entry into ICT education,
b) a natural progression into ICT due to digitalization of non-technological disciplines and occupations, and
c) pursuing opportunities arising as non-technological competences are increasingly needed and valued in digitalization.

These less conventional routes illustrate women’s professional development as motivated by processes of digitalization and the recognition of a wide set of professional fields and competences needed in ongoing digital transformations. Relying on entry points less affected by masculine stereotypes, the women contribute to new ways of co-constructing gender and ICT in the new digitalized workspaces.

The chapter is open access, available to read online or download as pdf. https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/book/9781529219494/ch004.xml

Cite this chapter:
Corneliussen, H. G., & Seddighi, G. (2022), Unconventional routes into ICT work: Learning from women’s own solutions for working around gendered barriers. In G. Griffin (Ed.), Gender Inequalities in Tech-Driven Research and innovation: Living the Contradiction (56-75), Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Our Poster series from Nordwit is out

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read more about

• Gender equality in IT organisations
• Role models for women in IT
• Women finding unconventional routes to ICT work and digitalization
• Women in ICT navigating the work-family entanglements

 

 

(Shutterstock: license Vestforsk)

A continuous under-representation of women in ICT has been the focus of research in Nordic as well as other western countries. A recurring question has been: how can we recruit more women to ICT? Answering this question, however, requires knowledge about what make women enter fields of ICT. Our study of women who have already chosen a career in various fields of ICT and digitalization has shown that many women have not followed a ‘conventional’ route to ICT, that is: making the “right choices” at high school and moving on to ICT at university level. Rather, most of the 28 women we interviewed in a case study in Norway had found other, less conventional routes to ICT:

• Some of the women had already started on a non-tech university degree, before changing direction or returning to university for a second degree in ICT;
• some of the women had gradually moved towards ICT through the increasing digitalization of their original non-tech discipline or field;
• and some of the women had found work opportunities within projects and companies focusing on digitalization and ICT innovation because their non-tech competences were needed.

The routes that the women have followed, and the consequences of their movements and changing directions, are not fully reflected in publicly available statistics. There are gaps, for instance, in identifying ICT as a second degree after a change of educational direction, thus also women’s double education/competence background when entering IT work remains invisible, and the same goes for the pattern of women with a non-tech education entering vital positions in IT and core fields of digitalization. The Nordwit research thus suggests that improvements are needed in statistics about women’s participation in ICT-driven work, and here are some examples:

• We need to develop statistical models that enable accurate capture of new forms of working, circuitous routes into ICT and technologized fields, and movement across jobs;

• Make it a routine to have systematic entry and exit interviews when people start/leave jobs (for instance to identify how women’s career/work paths are gendered);

• Gender equality statistics, as illustrated by the Nordwit research, should be informed by qualitative research findings, suggesting also that national offices of statistics could benefit from collaborating with researchers in the field.

Target groups for the advices are not only the national offices of statistics, but also ministries, EC, trans/national bodies (e.g. OECD, governmental labour surveys), trades unions, employer-employee forums, private research organizations, and NGOs. Read more about these topics from the Nordwit research:

• Simonsen, M., & Corneliussen, H. G. (2020). What Can Statistics Tell About the Gender Divide in ICT? Tracing Men and Women’s Participation in the ICT Sector Through Numbers. In D. Kreps, T. Komukai, G. TV, & K. Ishii (Eds.), Human-Centric Computing in a Data Driven Society (379-397). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
• Corneliussen, H. G. (2021). A Random Choice, Late Discovery, and Penalty Rounds: Mapping women’s pathways to information technology education. In P. Kommers & M. Macedo (Eds.), Proceedings of the IADIS International Conferences ICT, Society and Human Beings; Web Based Communities and Social Media 2021; and e-Health 2021 (37-44): IADIS Press.
• To be published during the spring of 2022: Unconventional routes into ICT work: Learning from women’s own solutions for working around gendered barriers, by Corneliussen & Seddighi, to be published in a book edited by Gabriele Griffin: Gender Inequalities in Tech-Driven Research and innovation: Living the Contradiction.