Happy International Women’s Day!

Until the age of nine, there is no difference between how boys and girls perform in mathematics and science. But something happens between the age of nine and when those girls grow up and choose their studies and profession.

In the 28 EU member states, women make up more than 50% of students in tertiary education, and they also hold more than 50% of all PhDs. Yet, if you look at engineering and computing, female students make up only 20% of graduates.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the US and Canada, the numbers are similar and they’re on the decline. “A smaller fraction of this year’s computer science graduates were women (18.8% vs. 20.8% last year) while a larger fraction of this year’s school graduates were women (40.2% vs. 36.1% last year),” according to the 2011 Taulbee survey, run by the Computing Research Association.

So why do careers in information and communications technology fail to attract women in larger numbers? There are, of course, some women who pursue exciting careers in ICT, such as Dawn Weisman, the IT Director of NEES (the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation), in West Lafayette, Indiana. "In high school I found that I was drawn to Math and languages. For me, Computer Science was a perfect blend of those two areas," she says. "When I took my first programming class in my teens, it was such a natural fit for my way of thinking that I never really considered any other disciplines."

Maria Ramalho, the managing director of PRACE research infrastructure based in Brussels, says she was first attracted to ICT as “[it] could be a nice way to free mankind from doing repetitive tasks, and enable them to concentrate on more rewarding actions for the benefit of their own lives and mankind in general. Later on, with the Internet era, the fact that the world could become a small village and that one could liaise with people from all over the world sounded very powerful to me.”

To see more women in e-science, see our Pinterest board.

Women’s work

Long before anyone had labeled women as technophobes, several of the pioneers in the field were women. Ada Lovelace is widely credited with writing the first computer program in the 1840’s; her notes on Charles Babbage's analytical engine include the first algorithm to be machine processed. While the analytical engine was never built, when the first computer was built women programmed that too.

Before computers were machines, the word described people whose job it was to perform calculations.  In the US, this was considered men’s work until the task was feminized during World War II, as most able-bodied men were required to serve in the armed forces. The calculations required a high level of mathematical skill, which involved solving non-linear differential equations in several variables. “The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they would. This is due in large measure to the feeling among the engineers that their college and industrial experience is being wasted and thwarted by mere repetitive calculation,” wrote museum curator and author Paul Ceruzzi in his 1991 essay “When Computers Were Human”.

In the 1940s, when the first general purpose computer, ENIAC, appeared, the skill of transferring calculations to the machine – what we now call computer programming – was a natural extension of women’s work. “The ENIAC project made a fundamental distinction between hardware and software: designing hardware was a man’s job; programming was a woman’s job,” wrote science historian Jennifer Light in her essay “When Women Were Computers”. However, the low status of the job contradicted what the women themselves reported doing - sophisticated knowledge of the hardware, such as vacuum tubes and circuit board, was required in order to program the computer. Following this time, the role of women was overlooked in the media and in the history of computing, Light argues, because at the completion of the war, when the ENIAC was promoted by the university and the War Department, “the War Department’s selective press releases highlighted certain individuals involved in the ENIAC project while omitting others, specifically the women operators.”

In other parts of the world, however, the gender difference in ICT is not as pronounced. Research suggests that in places such as Malaysia and India the gender ratio in ICT is much closer, approaching an even split. “This reflects an understanding of gender where femininities are constructed by association to office work, commonly recognized as a woman-friendly space because it is seen as more safe and protected than, for example, construction sites and factories,” wrote Vivian Anette Langesen in 2008 in the journal Science Technology Human Values.

Encouraging women to pursue careers in ICT

Arguments for addressing gender biases in the workplace center around equal opportunity for women and because the ICT sector, where demand for workers outstrips supply, is further crippled by a biased labor force. Many measures target the all-important time when girls are in high school – between the age of nine, when they perform the same as boys in math and science, to when they choose college and university courses that omit ICT. In the computing lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in San Francisco, high school girls are being tutored by female staff to develop smart phone apps related to science education. The European Commission has set up a code of conduct for companies to set up a ‘shadowing exercise’ where girls follow a female engineer for a day to see what the work might entail, and there is the US National Science Foundation project SPIRIT, which focuses on informing high school students, teachers, and counselors of interesting Computer Science-related careers. In industry, IBM funds camps to expose girls to technology and promote studies and jobs in ICT.

"I think it is important to inform K-12 in fun ways and at various points about the possible ICT careers. I think it also important to make similar information available to undergrads, especially those who may have not decided on their majors," says Weisman.

Beyond education choices, some companies are actively employing gender-specific actions. Intel, for example, has developed a range of networks for their female staff, from the global Women’s Initiative Portal, which helps launch ideas and projects, to the Women’s Leadership Exchange, which coaches senior women to get to the top.

For Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, these actions are just the start of what needs to be done. “I want to see all CIOs put their money where their mouths and long-term interests are and fill the looming skills gap with the women that can really help them. But let us not forget, companies and governments need to do more than run networks and camps – the effort must range from better childcare to a better balance of subjects in the school system,” she said when she addressed a conference on “Women in Science, Innovation and Technology” in Budapest, Hungary, last year.

Whether these actions will help reverse the trends in women entering ICT is yet to be seen. In the mean time, such gender-specific actions are not always universally supported – not even by women working in ICT. “I have never been in favor of gender specific actions on career selection and job selection policies to get a gender balance, since we can get very quickly into stereotypes that do not fit the overall purpose,” said Ramalho.

“Men and women should be able to choose what it suits and pleases them the most and if in ICT there are less women - that’s life!”