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
My colleague Idun has writting a nice piece about my new book Reconstructions of Gender and Information Technology – Women Doing IT for Themselves (Palgrave Macmillan 2023)
With a new photo matching the book with the beautiful autumn colours. In Norwegian: https://www.vestforsk.no/nn/2023/hilde-si-nye-fagbok-om-kvinner-i-it-har-alt-vekt-stor-interesse
You can read the book online (Open Access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-5187-1) or use the code below from Palgrave to buy your own version:
To receive 20% of the printed book, enter the following
coupon code at checkout on link.springer.com
2KbHh90AX1PdNT / Valid Oct 11, 2023 – Nov 8, 2023
Yay! My new book is out! Reconstructions of Gender and Information Technology: Women Doing IT for Themselves. About how women find their way into tech careers.
I have only seen it online so far, still waiting for the paper version to arrive. The good news is that it is available as Open Access!
Enjoy: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-5187-1
About the book:This open access book explores what makes women decide to pursue a career in male-dominated fields such as information technology (IT). It reveals how women experience gendered stereotypes but also how they bypass, negotiate, and challenge such stereotypes, reconstructing gender-technology relations in the process. Using the example of Norway to illuminate this challenge in Western countries, the book includes a discussion of the “gender equality paradox”, where gender equality exists in parallel with gender segregation in fields such as IT. The discussion illustrates how the norm of gender equality in some cases hinders rather than promotes efforts to increase women’s participation in technology-related roles.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-5187-1#about-this-book
Here is what one of the reviewers says about the book:
“Hilde G. Corneliussen provides an exploration of gender equality in technology with this definitive and thought-provoking book. With meticulous research, she sheds light on the unsolved issues of the gender imbalance in IT, revealing the complex factors that hinder progress. Through compelling narratives and inspiring insights, the book unveils the resilience of women who challenge stereotypes and reconstruct the gendered space of IT. A must-read for those seeking to create an inclusive digital future.” (Jeria Quesenberry, Associate Dean of Faculty, Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and author of Cracking the Digital Ceiling: Global Views of Women in Computing)
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-5187-1#about-book-reviews
I will be giving some talks locally and an online webinar about the book. Please send me a message if you want to participate or receive news about such events: hgc@vestforsk.no
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:
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 conference paper ICT Changes Everything! But Who Changes ICT? is now released from paywall of Springer and free to download for everybody!
Written together with Clem Herman and Radhika Gajjala in:
13th IFIP TC 9 International Conference on Human Choice and Computers, HCC13 2018, Held at the 24th IFIP World Computer Congress, WCC 2018, Poznan, Poland, September 19–21, 2018, Proceedings
Information and communication technology (ICT) has a changing power and digitalization is gradually changing society in all aspects of life. Across the western world, men are in majority in the ICT industry, thus, the computer programs that change “everything” are most often made by men. Unless questioned, this male dominance can be perceived as a “norm” and becomes invisible. Against this background, this paper will provide three examples of how a feminist gaze can contribute to raise important questions and produce an awareness of how exclusion mechanisms have produce a highly homosocial tendency in design of ICT systems in the western world.
It is here! The book coming out of 5 years of research in the Nordic Centre of Excellence, NORDWIT – on women in tech-driven careers.
(I love the front page!)
The book is edited by Nordwit coordinator Gabriele Griffin and has contributions from Nordwit researchers as well as colleagues from the Nordic countries.
Together with Gilda Seddighi and one with Carol Azungi Dralega, I am involved in three chapters:
Blurb
The Nordic countries are regarded as frontrunners in promoting equality, yet women’s experiences on the ground are in many ways at odds with this rhetoric.
Putting the spotlight on the lived experiences of women working in tech-driven research and innovation areas in the Nordic countries, this volume explores why, despite numerous programmes, women continue to constitute a minority in these sectors.
Contributors flesh out the differences and similarities across different Nordic countries and explore how the shifts in labour market conditions have impacted on women in research and innovation.
This is an invaluable contribution to global debates around the mechanisms that maintain gendered structures in research and innovation, from academia to biotechnology and IT.
Open access: You can download the book from OAPEN https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/55792
Our Poster series from Nordwit is out
Read more about
(Shutterstock: license Vestforsk)
Ny publikasjon ute sammen med Kari Dyb:
Les mer om vår diskusjon av ny teknologi som redskap for innovasjon i omsorg og en teknologireduserende diskurs som redskap for å ‘lirke inn’ teknologien i Tidsskrift for omsorgsforskning
Referanse:
Corneliussen, Hilde G. og Kari Dyb 2021. “Det vanskelige ekteskapet mellom teknologi og omsorg”, Tidsskrift for omsorgsforskning, 7 (3): 1-5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.2387-5984-2021-03-11.
We have yet another publication in Feminist Encounters this month: “The Illusion of Balance: Women in ICT Working Full-Time and Still Having a Feeling of Opting Out”, with my colleague Gilda Seddighi as the lead author
Abstract
Women – mothers in particular – working as ICT experts in research, development, and innovation are under double pressure: they work within both a male-dominated profession, and a greedy, 24/7 work style that continues to produce an image of the ideal worker according to the male norm of less childcare responsibility. This study explores how women working as ICT experts in research, development, and innovation in Norway’s gender egalitarian culture negotiate work alongside family responsibilities. We discuss which factors affect women’s experiences of combining ICT work and family, building our analysis on 22 interviews conducted with women ICT experts in research, development, and innovation in Norway during 2017-2018. Our study illustrates that insufficient public childcare and work-life balance solutions cause women to feel like they are ‘opting out’, even when working full-time. This suggests that some of the main structures of working life continue to work as barriers to women’s career opportunities. Indeed, while some women narrate their encounters with such structures along the lines of traditional gendered patterns of work and family, we also found the same structures being gendered in new ways.
Open access, so you can read the article here: https://www.lectitopublishing.nl/Article/Detail/the-illusion-of-balance-women-in-ict-working-full-time-and-still-having-a-feeling-of-opting-out-11163
Reference: Seddighi, Gilda, and Hilde G. Corneliussen. “The Illusion of Balance: Women in ICT Working Full-Time and Still Having a Feeling of Opting Out”. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2021 5 no. 2 (2021): 26. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/11163
I have two new publications from Nordwit this month, one is “Unpacking the Nordic Gender Equality Paradox in ICT Research and Innovation”, where I discuss the mismatch between seeing the Nordic countries as highly gender egalitarian and the continuous under-representation of women in technology.
Abstract
Most fields of technology-driven research and innovation are highly male-dominated across the Western world. However, in the Nordic countries, recognised as the most gender equal in the world, this gender segregation appears as a paradox. With Norway as an example, the present article explores the paradox that appears to be entangled with the yet unsolved question of why women are still a minority in information and communication technology (ICT) disciplines. The analysis draws examples from five studies of girls and women in contexts of ICT training, education, and work to analyse the fabric of the paradox through the ‘free choice’ argument, ‘affluent nations’ argument, and ‘nation vs. individual women’ argument. The analysis suggests that the paradox, by putting the nation’s gender equality ideal against atomized individuals’ choices, contributes to obscuring the situation regarding the underrepresentation of women in ICT.
It is open access and you can read or download the article here: https://www.lectitopublishing.nl/Article/Detail/unpacking-the-nordic-gender-equality-paradox-in-ict-research-and-innovation-11162
Reference: Corneliussen, Hilde G.. “Unpacking the Nordic Gender Equality Paradox in ICT Research and Innovation”. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2021 5 no. 2 (2021): 25. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/11162
Summer time is also time for conferences and publications it seems. Yet another publication out this week:
A Random Choice, Late Discovery, and Penalty Rounds: Mapping women’s pathways to information technology education
Hilde G. Corneliussen
What leads women to information technology (IT)? Successful recruitment is often perceived as relying on interest in IT. This study, however, identifies the pathways bringing women to IT that only partly rely on interest in IT and also involve other factors. In-depth interviews with 24 women in IT education and early research positions in Norway provide the empirical material for this qualitative study. Feminist technology studies and research on gender and technology provide a framework for the study, and the analysis is guided by the grounded theory method. The findings show that IT is a highly gendered field in Norway and that gender stereotypes affect women’s expectations toward, and choices of, IT. Women enter the fields of IT despite stereotypes. However, for many such women, this follows a coincidence or a late discovery of IT as interesting, and some women have been on a “penalty round” in a different field before finally entering the fields of IT.
Factors Motivating Women to Study Technology: A quantitative survey among young women in Norway
Hilde G. Corneliussen, Gilda Seddighi, Anna Maria Urbaniak-Brekke, and Morten Simonsen
Proceedings for the International Conference ICT, Society, and Human Beings 2021, IADIS Press, 202-206
Abstract
Women’s underrepresentation in fields of information and communication technology (ICT) appears as a paradox in the context of Norway, a country that scores high on international gender equality indicators. Earlier research has argued that women’s underrepresentation in ICT education might be a result of their lack of interest in ICT. In this paper we ask what motivates young women in Norway to enter technology studies. The analysis is based on a quantitative survey with 689 young women responding to questions about what had made them choose technology in high school or at university level. The results show that leading factors motivating the women are job opportunities, high salary and using technology for solving challenges. Interestingly, factors that are associated with boys’ and men’s interest in ICT such as computer games and leisure activities, are marginal as motivation for the women. The study thus confirms that young women are highly interested in fields of technology, however, their interests differ from what is often associated with young men. Based on the findings we suggest that measures recognising a wider image of technology are needed for motivating women to enter fields of technology.
