Women in the IT Sector: Queen Bee and Gender Judo Strategies
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Women in the IT Sector: Queen Bee and Gender Judo Strategies Valérie Harvey 1 & Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Women in IT are a minority and the situation is not improving. Data from Statistics Canada from 1991 to 2011 show the engineering sectors do not count very many women. Thus, it is observed that while Canada has policies on gender equity and women should be considered as having the right to work in any sector, the reality is quite different, as is indicated in Statistics Canada data. We observe a low presence of women in the IT sector, a well-paid sector that should be of interest, and women continue to be employed in traditionally female, often low-paid, occupations. We thus wanted to understand how women in IT deal with their minority status in this sector. What are the main obstacles minority women in the IT sector face in their day-to-day lives? How do they deal with these? Do they use ‘queen bee’ responses to be promoted? What is it in the IT sector that motivates their work? These are all questions that have interested us and the results help us to better understand the causes of women’s low representation in the IT sector. Our research is based on a qualitative approach, with interviews of women in the IT sector in Québec (Canada). Keywords Women . IT . STEM . Segregation . Discrimination . Technology . Work
Contextualization and Introduction Women in IT are a minority and the situation is not improving. It may be surprising today, but historically, before microcomputers, women were often preferred as programmers, because they “naturally” had the qualities required to write an effective programming code: “A good program was concise and elegant and never wasted a word. They were poets of bits” (Thompson 2019). In 1984, in the United States, women accounted for 37% of students enrolled in computer science, while the proportion dropped to 17.6% in 2010 (Thompson 2019). Even if they now represent half of the players in video games (Duggan 2015), young
* Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay [email protected]
1
Teluq University, University of Québec, Québec City, Canada
Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal
boys seem to grow up in a context of computer science-based socialization, unlike girls (Fisher and Margolis 2002). Data from Statistics Canada from 1991 to 2011 show the engineering sectors do not count very many women. Thus, it is observed that while Canada has policies on gender equity and women should be considered as having the right to work in any sector, the presence of women is not observed equally in all sectors, as is indicated in Statistics Canada data, especially for engineering. Only two groups exceeded the 6–7% of women in engineering occupations, with the civil engineering and electrical engineering sectors accounting for 13 and 14%. Also, in the scientific sectors, it is only the IT professions that show a decline in percentage of women, from 30% in 1991 to 25% in 2011 (the decline is especially marked from 200
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