Det vanskelige ekteskapet…

Ny publikasjon ute sammen med Kari Dyb:

Det vanskelige ekteskapet mellom teknologi og omsorg

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.

New publication: The illusion of balance: women’s navigating work-life balance

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

Unpacking the Nordic Gender Equality Paradox in ICT Research and Innovation (new publication)

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

 

 

A Random Choice, Late Discovery, and Penalty Rounds: Mapping women’s pathways to information technology education

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.

New publication: What motivates women to study technology?

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.

 

Women empowering themselves to fit into ICT

I have a new publication out, published in Technology and Women’s Empowerment, edited by Ewa Lechman

It’s open access, so you can download and read all of it online! 🙂

(From the introduction)

The study includes interviews with 24 women in Norway currently studying or holding academic recruitment or research positions at faculties of technology and science. In a previous analysis from this study we have documented that the women did not feel invited or encouraged to choose an ICT education, and their lack of knowledge about ICT in the transition between lower and higher education sends nearly half the group into a “penalty loop” – starting with another degree before “discovering” ICT, and subsequently starting all over again with an ICT degree (Corneliussen, 2020). This chapter analyses how these women, once they have entered ICT, find ways of empowering themselves in a field that they initially experienced as not very welcoming to women, asking how they succeed in establishing their own sense of belonging in the field of ICT. The analysis explores how women negotiate to perceive themselves as fitting into the male-dominated field of ICT. In this process they mainly have to rely on their own efforts – their self-empowerment, employing strategies and practices for making women visible as they strive to identify ICT as a field where women, too, belong.

Reference:
Corneliussen, H. G. (2021). Women empowering themselves to fit in ICT. In E. Lechman (Ed.), Technology and Women’s Empowerment (46-62). London: Routledge.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003045946-3/women-empowering-fit-ict-hilde-corneliussen?context=ubx&refId=5c3bc0c2-e9e1-4a71-a88a-ce71cca9a378

Thank you to Ewa Lechman for editing the book!

 

 

 

 

Speaking for OSCE about women’s empowerment and the digital transformation

Today I had the great pleasure of speaking for OSCE https://www.osce.org/ at a conference in Vienna/Zoom, where I was one of the speakers invited to talk about women’s empowerment and the digital transformation. It was a short talk for many distinguished speakers, ambassadors, and representatives from the OSCE member states, some of which responded and asked questions.

Below you can read my talk for the OSCE on 5 July 2021, at the High-Level Conference Promoting Economic and Environmental Co-operation, Security, and Growth in the OSCE Region: Marking 30 years of the 1990 Bonn Document. In this version I have added references to show the connections to our research.

(And I have finally a new profile photo, as it is many years now since my hair was short and had other colour(s) :D)

Enjoy!

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Three fantastic days with the GWO 2021 conference!

More than 600 researchers together for 3 days for the Gender, Work, and Organization conference, GWO 2021. This was an online and delayed version of the GWO 2020 conference, which should have been in Kent, UK. There were nearly 40 streams of different topics at the conference; on professional careers, entrepreneurship, identities, discrimination, theory and a long list of other topics! Minna Salminen-Karlsson and I organised a stream together with the title “Rural Frontiers In-Between Tradition and Change: GWO in rural contexts”.
This was our first dip into the rural in a GWO perspective, and we really enjoyed the fantastic papers from across the world, including Australia, the Netherlands, Mexico, the UK, Italy, New Zealand, the Solomon Island as well as from Norway and Sweden. After so long time of no travelling, it was wonderful to get those deep dives into these diverse cultures, as a next-best to travelling ourselves! Thank you to everybody who participated in the rural stream! And a big thank you to the organisers of the GWO 2021 conference. It was amazing to share these three days with so many researchers! Although I hope we will have the opportunity to have face-to-face conferences again, we certainly see the potential of digital conferences for including people from every corner of the world.

Pandemien gir et mer utydelig skille mellom arbeid og fritid – i Nationen

Hjemmekontor som problem: Pandemien gir et mer utydelig skille mellom arbeid og fritid. Det kan skade likestillingen.
Pandemien har gjort grensen mellom fritid og arbeidstid enda mer utydelig, og mange lurer på hvordan dette påvirker arbeidslivet. Svaret kan vi kanskje finne i bransjer som IT

Foto fra Nationen, Faglig snakka 5. mai 2021

Les kronikken av Gilda Seddighi og meg selv i Nationen i dag – om utfordringer med å balansere familie og karriere .. utfordringer som ikke har blitt mindre under pandemien

https://www.nationen.no/motkultur/faglig-snakka/hjemmekontor-som-problem/

Nationen 5. mai 2021

 

What motivates girls to choose a career in technology?

(Photo: NHO)
Studies of young people’s motivation to pursue a career in technology have often focused on when and how interest in technology develops. Many teenagers lose interest in science and technology, and because his affects girls more than boys, it leaves a short gap to capture girls’ interest, it has been argued. Many initiatives to increase girls’ interest have been designed based on images of boys’ interest in video gaming and programming. The problem is that this type of interest is also gendered. We are in the process of concluding a survey among girls in Norway with nearly 700 respondents who were studying science and technology at high schools and universities.

What has been the most important motivation for your choice of studying in science and technology?

When we asked the girls this question, the top 9 motivating factors were all related to working life and society:
  • 93% agreed that exciting job opportunities in technology was an important motivation
  • 80% were strongly motivated by the possibility of using technology for solving social issues.
In the opposite end of the scale we found activities associated with boys:
  • less than 5% of the girls have been motivated through after-school/leisure time activities involving technology
  • less than 14% found video games motivating for choosing technology at high school or university.
These findings support our previous empirical research finding that many girls are motivated by other things than technology when they enter tech education. The report (in Norwegian) will be out soon, for those who want to read more! References Corneliussen, H.G. (2020) “Dette har jeg aldri gjort før, så dette er jeg sikkert skikkelig flink på” – Rapport om kvinner i IKT og IKT-sikkerhet, Sogndal: VF-rapport 8/2020. Corneliussen, H.G. (2020) ‘What Brings Women to Cybersecurity? A Qualitative Study of Women’s Pathways to Cybersecurity in Norway’ European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference (Eicc 2020). Talks, I., Edvinsson, I., & Birchall, J. (2019). Programmed Out: The gender gap in technology in Scandinavia. Oslo: Plan International Norway. McKinsey & Company and Pivotal Ventures. (2018). Rebooting representation – using CSR and philanthropy to close the gender gap in tech. https://www.rebootrepresentation.org/report-highlights/: Tech Report 2018 [Accessed March 2021]. Microsoft Corporation. (2017). Why Europe’s Girls Aren’t Studying STEM. – Microsoft Philanthropies.

What Brings Women to Cybersecurity?

This was the question I tried to answer at the European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference two weeks ago. Summing up a case study where we compare women in cybersecurity with women in other IT disciplines, I talked about which similarities and differences we found between the two groups. The study is based on 24 in-depth interviews with women studying or holding PhD, Postdoc or early research recruitment positions in academia, 12 in cybersecurity and 12 in other IT disciplines in STEM faculties.

Women are a minority in cybersecurity as well as IT in general, however, there has been some overall improvement in women’s participation, but not in cybersecurity. The graphs below visualize the massive male dominance in these disciplines.

Women in Cybersecurity and women in other IT disciplines share some features, like a notable lack of knowledge about IT disciplines when they are in transition between upper secondary/high school and university. The unfortunate result is that stereotypical ideas of IT, with images of male «geeks» and «hooded gamers» who had started programming early, dominate women’s expectations of ICT at university, and they don’t see themselves fit within this image: «I had never programmed before in my life“. The interviews document that there is still a strong association of IT with masculine stereotypes, and more, such ideas about IT becomes a barrier for women to choose any IT disciplines, including cybersecurity.

There are also differences between women in cybersecurity and other IT fields, for instance that cybersecurity was described as open for a more varied set of competences. The women could recognize their own strengths and expertise from other disciplines, like arts and social sciences, as relevant in cybersecurity, and this became an important door opener for many of them. We also found that it was easier for women to understand and associate themselves with the goals of cybersecurity rather than with the goals of other IT disciplines. They saw cybersecurity as a field concerning «everybody» and everyday life, thus not only relevant for women but also in need of women.

You can hopefully read more when the paper is published by ACM as:
Corneliussen, H. G. (2020). What Brings Women to Cybersecurity? A Qualitative Study of Women’s Pathways to Cybersecurity in Norway, European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference (EICC 2020).

“Which narratives can statistics tell about men and women’s participation in ICT?”

This is the question we ask in our recent article “What Can Statistics Tell About the Gender Gap in ICT? Tracing Men and Women’s Participation in the ICT Sector Through Numbers“. I have written this together with my colleague Morten Simonsen. The aim of the article was to identify how the gender structure in ICT education and work was represented through statistics. We often associate statistics with “facts” – the pure numbers that can show how things really are. And statistics are indeed important to monitor fields, but statistics are also representations of someone’s choices of which stories to tell.

Read the full article here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-62803-1_30 

Abstract
Which narratives can statistics tell about men and women’s participation in ICT? The question is relevant across the western world showing a pattern of more men than women in ICT work. This chapter presents an analysis of available statistics that contribute to an image of women’s participation in ICT work and education. The scope of the study is European countries with an emphasis on Norway, however, we also present statistics from OECD. The statistics confirm that the gender imbalance in ICT work is significant, suggesting that monitoring this field is important. The analysis also reveals challenges and gaps in the material, for instance the challenge of finding comparable numbers, a reduced use of gender as a variable in later years, difficulties in identifying the gendered structures of ICT due to a mixture of occupational fields for some of the relevant numbers, while other issues found to be relevant in qualitative studies are not represented in the available statistics. The monitoring of gendered structures of ICT work can be improved by developing statistics that better can capture inequalities and hierarchies. The findings also suggest that qualitative research is an important complement and correction to statistical overviews, in particular for identifying factors that alone and together contribute to gender inequalities in ICT.

Cite the article as:
Simonsen M., Corneliussen H.G. (2020) What Can Statistics Tell About the Gender Gap in ICT? Tracing Men and Women’s Participation in the ICT Sector Through Numbers. In: Kreps D., Komukai T., Gopal T.V., Ishii K. (eds) Human-Centric Computing in a Data-Driven Society. HCC 2020. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 590. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62803-1_30

Why is it so difficult to achieve gender balance in IT work?

New publication: Corneliussen, H. G., & Seddighi, G. (2020). Employers’ Mixed Signals to Women in IT: Uncovering how Gender Equality Ideals are Challenged by Organizational Context. In P. Kommers & G. C. Peng (Eds.), Proceedings for the International Conference ICT, Society, and Human Beings 2020 (41-48): ADIS Press.

Why is it so difficult to achieve gender balance in IT work? Our study of attitudes towards women’s under-representation in IT and how IT employers and organizations deal with this imbalance, give some of the answers. These are some of the attitudes that work as barriers to recruit more women to IT work:

  • When many women hold other (non-IT) positions in an organization, recruiting women to IT work does not necessarily appear as important because the organization at large does not experience a gender imbalance.
  • Recruiting women is often seen as a question of work environment rather than who holds IT positions.
  • Gender equality is interpreted as “treating everybody the same”, and since women are welcome (even when they don’t apply to IT jobs), their under-representation is not considered a gender equality challenge.
  • Focus on gender equality in IT has to yield for other types of marginalization in the organization, for instance for immigrants or people with disabilities.
  • Stereotypical ideas about who the best and most interested IT workers are, are still strong in Norway, making employers doubt that it will be possible to recruit women; or, even questioning whether women do have the “right” competence.
  • Gender imbalance in IT is seen as a temporary challenge that will eventually fix itself.

While the many alternative approaches takes the energy out of gender equality work, the national gender equality regime – gender equality as something good and something we all want – is not questioned.

Based on this analysis we have proposed a model that contributes to explaining the Nordic Gender Equality Paradox, illustrating how the gender equality norm can co-exist with the very attitudes that undermine the norm.

Read the full paper

Our paper also received the Outstanding Paper Award at the ICT, Society, and Human Beings 2020 Conference!

“You don’t see it before you believe it” – FixIT in collaboration with Nordwit

fixitended
Last week we ended a project that has been working in close collaboration with Nordwit in Norway: FixIT – a project that has developed and organised activities to increase women’s participation in innovation projects. We developed a “gender balance competence package” for increasing awareness of and knowledge about gendered structures in research and innovation, with a brochure with guidance and tools for organizations to work towards gender balance. A balance competence course offered to innovation actors from private and public sector.

This of course, required knowledge, and this is what Nordwit provided: research-based knowledge about women’s experiences in the field of tech-driven R&I as well as organizations’ and employers’ attitudes and strategies for increasing women’s participation in this field.

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