EXAMINING THE OBSTACLES TO BROADENING PARTICIPATION IN COMPUTING: EVIDENCE FROM A SURVEY OF PROFESSIONAL WORKERS

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION Insuring that the nation has a sufficient number of trained information technology (IT) professionals and that the composition of this group reflects a diversity of backgrounds, especially in terms of race and gender, has been widely recognized as important issue (Gilbert, 2006). Despite recent growth in the off shoring of some IT work, employment growth has remained strong, yet enrollment in computer science programs has declined, and the number of women and underrepresented minorities in the IT workforce has remained frustratingly low. Encouraging more women and minorities to choose IT careers would help raise both overall numbers in the field and the diversity of the resulting workforce. Expanding the domestic labor supply that is available to U.S. employers is a major reason for encouraging female entry into IT that has been identified in the literature. Bartol and Aspray (2006) found that employers who struggled to find enough qualified IT workers at the height of the IT boom around 1999 could have solved these labor shortage problems had they done a better job of including women and minorities in the IT workforce. Rather than adopting strategies that moved women toward parity in IT, U.S. industry resorted to importing temporary foreign workers to fill the open positions. The current politically controversial trend of offshoring technical jobs is also primarily being driven by efforts to gain access to a labor force that would allow firms to hire adequate numbers of qualified workers. As Bartol and Aspray (2006, p. 408) argued, however, an increase in the domestic IT labor pool by representative participation by women and minorities would go a long way toward meeting that end. In addition to the labor supply issue, diversity in the IT workforce is important since a more gender-balanced workforce is more likely to understand the concerns of increasingly diverse customer base. As Wulf (1999) argued, ... those differences in experience are the 'gene pool' from which creativity springs. In the past few years, a number of pilot efforts have been undertaken to address a variety of perceived obstacles that are believed to discourage these underrepresented groups. These policy initiatives have focused on a variety of avenues through which the problem of under representation might be addressed including labor and workforce issues, immigration policy, and research funding initiatives. Policy solutions designed to increase the diversity of the IT workforce must, however, be informed by a clear understanding of the underlying reasons for the limited numbers of women and minorities in IT careers. With this in mind, we report here a number of results derived from a recently completed study of current IT professionals that help to explain the reasons for the relatively small number of women in IT occupations. Our data suggest two important conclusions. First, our evidence leads us to reject the argument that the demanding nature of IT careers is the primary barrier for increasing the number of women. Weinberger's (2004) survey of college women, for example, found that 30%--40% of the women surveyed believed that IT careers would be incompatible with raising children because of demanding schedules. Our first conclusion suggests that this is not a sufficient explanation. Women do report that family responsibilities conflict with work more than men, but we find that women in IT report no greater conflict than in comparable careers that have much higher proportions of women workers. Thus, while work-family conflicts may discourage some women from pursuing demanding careers, they do not offer a mechanism to explain the relatively small numbers of women in IT careers. Our second conclusion is that the concept of occupational personality can help to account for the relative shortage of women in IT careers. These findings suggest several strategies for increasing gender diversity that we discuss in our conclusion. …