Gender Structure, Gender Identity, Gender Symbolism and Information Technologies

Abstract

During the past two decades the underrepresentation of women in IT education and employment has become an important issue. Starting in the early 1990s, this concern arose among women computer scientists worried about the shortage of students entering and graduating in computer science, while the number of women in other university courses was increasing gradually (Pearl et. al., 1990; Frenkel, 1990; Camp 1997). Recent data (NCWIT 2009) showed that this percentage is still declining. In 2008 women earned only 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the US and the same phenomenon occurs in IT-related occupations, although women’s presence in ICT study and careers has greatly increased, as has their Internet usage. In Europe, the European Union special interest group on information society technologies, within its Sixth Framework Program, funded the SIGIS (Strategies for Inclusion: Gender and the Information Society) Project, which showed that the situation in Europe is not much different from the US (Sorenson 2002; Sanz 2008).