Keywords

Introduction: Continuous Gender Disparity in Technology

Why is it important to study women’s relationship to information technology (IT), when apparently everybody is into IT today? The traditional gender gap in the access and uptake of IT still found in many countries globally (Borgonovi et al., 2018) is not the most critical issue for the coming generation in Norway. 100% of young women aged 16 to 24 in Norway use technology to access the internet, and nearly all young people engage in digital media (Schiro, 2022; Statistics Norway, 2022). Yet there is no indication that this has improved the underrepresentation of young women choosing a career as IT experts. Digitalization and digital transformation across sectors, industries, and occupations make IT experts a highly valued resource. The demand for IT specialists grew nine times faster than the total increase in the European labour market between 2011 and 2020 (Eurostat, 2021b). The demand for IT professionals is also expected to grow significantly in the coming years (World Economic Forum, 2020a). IT specialists are, however, a scarce resource. Closing the gender gap in the IT sector and among IT experts is therefore not only necessary for gender equality and women’s empowerment. It is also important for national economies that otherwise risk a substantial economic loss if they fail to bridge the digital skills gap within a few years (European Union, 2021; Palmer, 2021; Quirós et al., 2018).

While the importance of making the IT sector more inclusive by recruiting from a broader selection of people is widely recognized (Chavatzia, 2017), how to achieve such diversity seems to remain not only a mystery, but a challenge that many have given up on: “We have just been through a process of investigating what we can do to attract more women to our department. However, we concluded that there is nothing we can do because it is too late by the time the women apply to university.” A professor in computer science at a European university told me this in a discussion about how to recruit women to IT degrees. His department wanted more female students; however, changing the current gender pattern among students applying for an IT degree appeared to be out of reach for them.

“Do we really need more women in IT?”, one of the male managers in an IT company asked in a meeting about how to get more women into IT jobs (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a). Although he and his colleagues wanted to welcome more women working as IT experts, few women applied for such positions. He assumed this had to do with most women lacking interest in IT, which seemed to justify a passive strategy and rather to accept that few women applied to IT jobs (ibid.).

“You have to remember that girls are not really interested in IT.” The first time I took notice of this claim was in a group of educators who had been challenged to think about ways of getting more girls to join the programming class in 9th and 10th grade. After a full day of discussing how to approach the challenge, the headteacher still hesitated to take on the challenge of making the programming class equally popular among girls as it was among boys, doubting that reaching gender balance in the programming class would be possible. Girls’ apparent lack of interest was not only considered the main problem, but was also regarded as unchangeable. I started to notice how the argument of girls’ and women’s lack of interest reappeared over and over, from educators, policymakers, employers, parents, IT professionals, men as well as women. Some of those who could and should have been first in line to support and motivate girls and young women to learn more about IT seemed to have lost all hope. The quotes above illustrate some of the core challenges for creating a more gender-inclusive and gender-balanced IT workforce: wrapped in good intentions about gender equality, a widespread distrust of girls’ and women’s interest in IT that might result in less efforts to recruit girls to IT.

In 2011 I referred to the “stability argument”, such as the notion that “the underrepresentation of women has still not improved” (Corneliussen, 2011, p. 2), and I called for research on change and improvements, rather than focusing only on stagnation. Internationally, stagnation still seems to dominate the picture, depressingly underlined by the World Economic Forum’s claim that it will take more than 250 years to reach gender parity in IT (Palmer, 2021; World Economic Forum, 2020b). It is time to explore new ways of speeding up the process of change, but also to recognize that the last decade has witnessed some improvements. There were, for instance, nearly twice as many women signing up for a university degree in information technology in Norway in 2022 compared to ten years earlier (The Norwegian Universities and Colleges Admission Service, 2022). But there are still large differences, and, as the following chapters will illustrate, there is still a long way to go before girls in general can approach fields of IT with the same naturalness as boys.

One worrying trend is the overwhelmingly large amount of research documenting continuous gender bias, negative attitudes and distrust of girls’ and women’s interest and skills in IT (Buse, 2018; Kenny & Donnelly, 2020; Yates & Plagnol, 2022). These attitudes make it difficult for women to engage in IT. This book will contribute to this field by examining how women navigate the gendered landscape of IT, not only by looking at barriers challenging their engagement, but also by exploring what makes women enter fields of IT. The context of the research presented here is Norway, one of the Nordic countries that for years have occupied the top positions of international gender equality rankings such as the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (2020b). The score reflects the state as an active agent for introducing gender equality and gender mainstream in a wide set of spheres, from health and welfare, to wage policy, and a focus on representation and participation (Holst et al., 2019). The Nordic gender equality model is recognized as exceptional with its family-friendly working life policies that have provided an important foundation for women’s high participation in paid work (Teigen & Skjeie, 2017).

Although nearly as many women as men are active in working life, there are still many examples of inequality such as more women working part time, women dominating public sector while men dominate in private sector (Statistics Norway, 2018). 60 % of students in higher education and nearly half the population of research personnel are women. There are, however, fewer women higher up in the academic hierarchy. An effort to improve the gender balance among full professors has resulted in an increase from 24 to 36% between 2012 and 2022. This is higher than the EU average (European Commission, 2021c), however, not in technology, which have not only the lowest percentage of women, but also, together with other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, the lowest levels of improvement over the course of the last decade (Olsen & Wendt, 2023). This reflects a more general picture of gender equality as a widely accepted norm and a goal, though with fields of technology lagging behind (Foss, 2020).

While gender equality undoubtedly represents an important value in the Nordic countries, as the numbers above suggest, there is still a notable gender inequality, marked by a vertical gender segregation with few women in top positions, and a horizontal gender segregation between educations and occupations. Although both these patterns appear to be in conflict with the ideal of gender equality (Ellingsæter, 2014; Sund, 2015), the image of the Nordic cultures as gender egalitarian remains strong, feeding a myth about gender equality already existing (Martinsson & Griffin, 2016). Gender equality thus appears here as a description of society, rather than a political goal. In international and global contexts, this works as a “nation branding”, Larsen and colleagues suggest, and “as a political and symbolic value” that reinforces the Nordic countries “moral superpowers” (2021, p. 2). In the following chapters this will become evident in terms of how gender equality as a goal seems to go under the radar in contexts of IT, simultaneously as the highly valued gender-egalitarian norms remain intact, unscathed by the continuous underrepresentation of women in the field. This has often been labelled the Nordic gender equality paradox, accompanied by a finger pointing at women and their (poor) choices of education (Corneliussen, 2021a; Stoet & Geary, 2018). This is certainly a paradox; however, we need to look beyond women’s educational choices to find the necessary answers and solutions to the challenge of gender equality becoming a non-performative policy, which is what Ahmed labels policies that “do not bring about the effects they name” (2012, p. 17).

What makes Women Enter IT?

For decades, it has been taken for granted that early tinkering and playing with computers have been important gateways in leading boys into professional IT careers (Sevin & Decamp, 2016). This has nourished a hypothesis of the low proportion of women in IT as a reflection of girls’ and boys’ different approaches to technology, assuming that boys acquire more hands-on experience than girls (Gerson et al., 2022). Initiatives to increase girls’ and women’s participation in IT have often attempted to mimic boys’ interests, or simply teaching girls what it is assumed that boys already know (Corneliussen, 2011; Margolis & Fisher, 2002; McKinsey & Company and Pivotal Ventures, 2018; Sharma et al., 2021). The research that I will share in this book indicates that such initiatives have not reached all women and that not all schools work as active recruiting grounds for getting more girls to consider IT. An evaluation of national authorities’ campaign to increase Norwegian youths’ interest in science and mathematics also found that schools’ efforts to recruit youth to science had not succeeded. Instead, the numbers had moved in the wrong direction (NIFU, 2021). Furthermore, what has been judged as successful strategies to recruit women to IT degrees at university have not proved to have long-lasting effects (Lagesen et al., 2021). A Norwegian Official Report documents that youth in Norway are still highly affected by gender norms when choosing education (NOU, 2019: 19). Our studies during the last decade have also shown that computing and IT are still coded masculine in Norway (Corneliussen & Prøitz, 2016; Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a), similar to the gender coding of these fields in most other western countries (Arnold et al., 2021; Barbieri et al., 2020; Holtzblatt & Marsden, 2022; Misa, 2010a). While many have asked why there are so few women in IT, it is equally important to ask how women who have pursued a career in IT have navigated the still active gender stereotypes of technology. This is the main topic of this book.

What has led women to IT, and what can we learn from them? These are among the questions guiding the forthcoming chapters. Here I will use the term IT to refer to various fields of IT education associated with faculties and universities of science and technology, and IT work or IT jobs referring to work that involves a similar type of competence.Footnote 1 The main narrative of the book follows women with a background in these fields. The term also captures a widespread pre-understanding among these women; before they enrolled in an IT degree at university, their lack of knowledge about different disciplines made their perceptions of this unspecified IT dominate their expectations, similar to patterns documented in other Nordic countries (Vainionpää et al., 2019).

The women who share their narratives here are engaged in fields of IT as students, early career researchers at universities, or workers in the IT sectors. Chapter 3 explores their experiences of navigating IT as a field new to most of them, from childhood to university. Chapter 4 analyses how the women approach IT mainly as fields dominated by stereotypes about men as well as women and of images of male IT experts, but also how they challenge and revise such gendered images. Women are not alone in navigating the landscape of IT. Chapter 5 changes perspective to consider how representatives for lower and upper secondary schools approach issues of gender disparity in IT and how they interpret their own role as a supportive arena for the young women. Interviews with school representatives provide insight into one of the critical arenas for recruiting young women to IT.

This book offers insights into how young women today outline new ways of understanding core values of IT as well as relevant qualities for working with IT. Some of the solutions tried and tested by the women (Chaps. 3 and 4) are different from what is anticipated by, for instance, schools (Chap. 5). Many young women depend on events and resources outside the traditional educational system, and many find alternative routes leading to IT degrees. The reconfiguration of IT that the women propose includes a highly diverse set of interests, competences, and skills suitable for a diverse set of people. Instead of trying to blend in and become invisible as women, they rather use their “token” identity (Kanter, [1977] 1993) as a tool for claiming visibility for women in IT. Thus, the women’s narratives point towards a more gender-inclusive digital future by illustrating alternative pathways to IT and by reconfiguring images of gender and technology to fit a wide set of competences and interests leading to professional engagement within IT. It is time to explore how women are doing IT for themselves to learn more about how to develop successful strategies for increasing girls’ and women’s participation in IT.

Women’s Underrepresentation—A Multidimensional Challenge

The challenge of the continuous underrepresentation of women in computing involves several overlapping, but not identical, issues. The leaky pipeline is one metaphor often used to illustrate the challenge of keeping women in the field once they have started. This metaphor has also been criticized for picturing a single, standard pathway to technology, which reduces our ability to capture how certain individuals find unconventional routes to IT (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2022; Vitores & Gil-Juárez, 2016). Holtzblatt and Marsden, claiming that retention is the main problem, illustrate it with a “leaky bucket” that is constantly filled with women who then “leak out” of the IT sector to a higher degree than men do. This suggests that the IT sector largely fails to provide women with a work experience “as reliably as to men” (Holtzblatt & Marsden, 2022, p. 10). In this book, however, it is not the leakage, but rather the problem of filling the bucket, that will be explored, including the alternative pathways leading to IT. We will learn more about how girls and women experience that traditional recruitment channels such as schools and educational institutions, largely fail to provide them with what they need for considering IT as an equally natural choice as many young men do.

While we can see notable gender differences in this field, it is important not to exaggerate these (Hyde, 2005), as there are also large differences among boys and among girls—not all boys see IT as a “natural” choice, while some girls do. This book takes as a starting point that men and women experience some of the most gender-divided educational choices differently, reflected in a notable horizontal gender segregation within the Norwegian higher education sector (The Norwegian Universities and Colleges Admission Service, 2022). Here this is explored through, for instance, the women’s narratives describing a rather uniform experience of IT as a field populated mostly by men, and identified through gender stereotypes defining who belongs in IT. However, an equally important part of the book is to explore the differences between the women: their experiences illustrate that they come to IT from different backgrounds, with different types of support and motivation at various points in their chronological narratives. The variations between the women also suggest that there is no singular solution to the challenge of increasing women’s participation in IT. Their experiences can, however, work as guidelines for ways of facilitating girls’ and women’s perception of IT as a relevant and interesting education and career choice. Using Norway as an example provides the opportunity of exploring how a gender-egalitarian culture (Teigen & Skjeie, 2017; World Economic Forum, 2020b) can combine gender equality as a vital value in society with a continuous gender imbalance in education and work, particularly noticeable in fields of technology. The knowledge developed in this book thus holds relevance to a wider set of cultures that also experience a challenge of increasing women’s participation in IT.

The rest of this chapter will present the theoretical and methodological framework within gender and technology studies, then introduce the empirical material and the analytical strategy, before laying out the structure of the book.

Theoretical and Methodological Framework for the Book

The basic understanding of gender guiding the analysis in this book is gender as something we do rather than something we are. West and Zimmerman’s theory of “doing gender” acknowledges that gender identity is constructed in and through social relations and interactions in social contexts (1987). Doing gender is an ongoing accomplishment, and also one in which “members of society ’do difference’ by creating distinctions among themselves” (West & Zimmerman, 2009, p. 114). Although such differences are not natural, once they have been established, they are used to affirm and endorse practices that reproduce the same differences (ibid.).

Technology is also affected by such differences and gender influences criteria for being perceived as an IT expert. Across the western world, IT has been perceived as a field “outside the female domain” (Borgonovi et al., 2018; Trauth & Quesenberry, 2007). Researchers from feminist technology studies have for a long time emphasized that gender and technology are socially constructed and that they need to be understood in terms of how they shape or co-construct each other (Bray, 2007; Cockburn, 1992; Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993; Landström, 2007; Wajcman, 2010). Many studies have explored the challenging relationship between gender identity and IT for women, for instance identifying a narrative of IT as a “world without women” that makes women appear “out of place” (Sørensen, 2011, p. 45), and assumptions of “femininity and technical ability as virtually incompatible” that challenges even the most skilled women (Kenny & Donnelly, 2020, p. 343). Such perceptions have made women moderate their femininity (Wajcman, 2004), trying to blend in with a masculine culture (Turkle, 1988), and adopting a work style associated with men (Watts, 2009). Studies have found that women in technical roles have been perceived as different from other women (Kenny & Donnelly, 2020). Faulkner identifies this as a heterosexist discourse where “women who are really into engineering are not ‘real women’ and conversely ‘real women’ are not ‘real engineers’” as a message that is constantly reproduced in engineering culture, practices, and identities (2014). Some women who are passionate about technology have embraced gender stereotypes, for instance claiming a similarity to boys to explain their “geekiness” (Bury, 2011). A larger body of research documents that many women find it hard to negotiate between the messages of “gender in/authenticity” identified by Faulkner (2014). Gender and technology are, however, not fixed in a static relationship. The relationship varies between women and has changed over time (Trauth & Connolly, 2021), though, not always in a positive direction. While women’s contributions to computer programming and software developing in the post-war decades is a neglected field in modern narratives of computing (Abbate, 2012; Vitores & Gil-Juárez, 2016), recent research has found that women who have worked in IT give accounts of fewer women in such roles recently compared to when they first joined the field (Kenny & Donnelly, 2020). A recent report from one of the Nordic countries found, after years of monitoring how young girls perceive IT, a deteriorating trend in the girls’ knowledge about what it means to work with IT (Insight Intelligence, 2022). The gendering of IT fields is not uniform, but differs across the world (Borgonovi et al., 2018; Castañeda-Navarrete et al., 2023), with a notably larger gender divide in the more gender-equal countries, while more authoritarian countries can identify a larger proportion of women in IT education (Chow & Charles, 2019). This has led some researchers to suggest that this is a paradox resting on women’s preferences for choosing gender-traditional educations and occupations (Stoet & Geary, 2018), a view that will be discussed and nuanced in this book.

Women have different backgrounds and interests that give them different motivations for choosing an education within IT (Dee, 2021). The Norwegian women’s narratives document that their experiences reflect a culture in which gender stereotypes and cultural discourses still define women as outsiders in fields of IT. To understand women’s encounters with the masculine cultures and gender stereotypes of IT, this book engages theoretical perspectives that capture the experiences of navigating discursive spaces while facing the challenge of fitting in.

Doing gender in IT often appears to be quite different for women and men, and the concept of doing gender has contributed to insightful studies of women negotiating gender identity in IT. It has been suggested that women find it challenging to combine “doing gender” with “doing IT” while facing cultural stereotypes that make women and technology appear as a “contradiction in terms” (Nentwich & Kelan, 2014, p. 128). Some women have experienced this as an “in/visibility paradox” (Faulkner, 2009), of being visible as women but invisible as professionals. West and Zimmerman’s concept of the “if-can-test” points to how people use their cultural knowledge to categorize others. If you can identify someone with a specific category, you do so (West & Zimmerman, 1987). The “if-can-test” thus highlights how some identities are perceived to fit, while others do not comply with the basic features of a category. Masculine images of IT, for instance, are more challenging for women to negotiate than they are for men.

Nirmal Puwar’s concept of space invaders elaborates on how certain bodies do not feel welcome in certain spaces (2004). The analysis of how women navigate the gendered spaces of IT is inspired by Puwar’s study of women and racial minorities entering spaces that are rarely occupied by them (2004, p. 141). Puwar shows how previously excluded groups entering spaces that have been historically or conceptually not “reserved for them” capture a moment of change and disturbance of status quo. She develops this into a technique for exploring “how spaces have been formed through what has been constructed out” (Puwar, 2004, p. 1). The concept of “space invader” is borrowed from Doreen Massey (1996), who used this concept to explain her experience of being a woman in male-dominated spaces of football. The paradox in Massey’s reflection, of being there, enjoying it, but not fully belonging (Massey, 1996, p. 185), is at the core of Puwar’s study of women and racial minorities entering historically male and white spaces (2004, p. 2). Space invaders are “bodies out of place”, and the challenge highlighted by Puwar is the visual signs of not belonging within the bodily or “somatic norm”,Footnote 2 highlighting the frictions of “the increasing proximity of the hitherto outside with the inside proper” (ibid., p. 1). The space invader thus captures the double position that, for instance, women in male spaces of IT can have; by not representing the bodily norm “they don’t have an undisputed right to occupy this space. Yet they are still insiders” (Puwar, 2004, p. 8). Male bodies have often been taken to represent “empty, neutral positions that can be filled by any(body)” (Puwar, 2004, p. 32). Bodies that fit the norm can pass through gender boundaries with less resistance, questions, or doubt about their belonging than the bodies that disturb the norm (Ahmed, 2012; Puwar, 2004).

Ahmed further explains how a minority position can make such cultural barriers and norms appear as solid as a brick wall (2012). In her studies of diversity work at universities, she presents the metaphor of the “institutional wall”, reflecting the cultural barriers that make mobility in white and male academic institutions more challenging for identities that do not conform to these characteristics. The institutional wall, however, is mainly visible for those of whom they represent a barrier:

When a category allows us to pass into the world, we might not notice that we inhabit that category. When we are stopped or held up by how we inhabit what we inhabit, then the terms of habitation are revealed to us. (Ahmed, 2012, p. 175)

Coming up against a similar cultural wall, space invaders “endure a burden of doubt, a burden of representation, infantilization and super-surveillance”, Puwar explains (2004, p. 11). While these experiences can have a notable negative effect on their participation, space invaders are not simply passive bystanders. As outsiders entering the inside they disturb the norm and thereby reveal the social construction of the space by bringing into sight “what has been able to pass as the invisible, unmarked and undeclared somatic norm” (Puwar, 2004, p. 8). Entering spaces not intended for us produces particular ways of experiencing the space, and holds a potential for generating new knowledge (Ahmed, 2016, pp. 9–10) about how “marginality and privileges” are entangled in a “web of relations, bodies and space” (Puwar, n.d.). The strength of the space invader metaphor is that it captures the women’s experiences not only of navigating a masculine culture and gender stereotypes, but also how their physical appearance as women affects their sense of belonging. Most of the co-constructions of gender and IT that have been documented through research remain more negative for women than for men (Cheryan et al., 2015; Ensmenger, 2012). It is still less obvious that women will pass the “if-can-test” of being categorized as IT experts (Master et al., 2016; West & Zimmerman, 1987). For some women, this might result in a wish of not drawing attention to themselves, to go under the radar (Ahmed, 2012), which adds to the challenge of, for instance, recognizing female role models in technology.

In the following chapters I will explore how women in the gender-egalitarian culture of Norway also have to deal with the challenge of fitting into masculine spaces of technology. The theories of doing gender and of resistance experienced by identities that do not fully fit the norm highlight how girls and women can experience the journey into IT differently from boys and young men, as some of the barriers are only visible to those who do not fit. The space invader metaphor is useful for understanding how women negotiate their entrance into and belonging in IT through other concepts than the most masculine images of IT. The concept of space invaders highlighting the negotiation between insider and outsider positions raises questions of how inclusion and exclusion are enacted in everyday life. In the analysis this will support our understanding of how the women find ways of establishing their sense of belonging while simultaneously challenging the masculine norm.

While the theories above point to women’s encounters of cultural narratives of IT as gendered, another strand of research into women’s underrepresentation in masculine fields of STEM, has developed a focus on how women make decisions based on their self-perception in the field. These have roots in theories from the 1970s of how women’s self-efficacy in a field affect their study choice (Bandura, 1977). With roots in educational psychology, Eccles and colleagues have developed the expectancy–value theory emphasizing that the individual’s expectation of her own abilities and the value she associates with the tasks are vital factors guiding study choice (Eccles, 2009; Sáinz & Eccles, 2012). Research on the use of technology has suggested that women have less self-efficacy in use of digital technologies than men (Barbieri et al., 2020), also identified in a Nordic context (Rohatgi et al., 2016). Elaborating on this theory, Master and Meltzoff include the layer of stereotypes, which have an effect on how individuals establish a sense of belonging in certain fields (Master & Meltzoff, 2020). The stereotype threat theory predicts that the degree to which a person sees themself as fitting (or not) with stereotypes of a field, can affect their performance in that field (Steele & Aronson, 1997). The categorization of IT as a field “outside the female domain” also challenges young women’s ability to identify female role models in the field (Corneliussen et al., 2019; Trauth & Quesenberry, 2007). Research has, however, identified that role model interventions can have a positive effect on women’s expectations to succeed and aspirations to participate in male-dominated STEM disciplines (González-Pérez et al., 2020). Although the forthcoming analysis is rooted in a framework of social science rather than in psychology, the associations between the individual’s self-efficacy and sense of belonging can support our understanding of women’s experiences. While female role models are important tools for making young women identify themselves in fields of IT, the next chapters will illustrate how the women suggest alternative ways of identifying interest, self-efficacy, and a sense of belonging. The analysis suggests that we need a wider understanding of these concepts in relation to IT to understand women’s strategies for entering fields of IT.

“Change is never easy but having a direction makes it possible”, Holtzblatt and Marsden claim (2022). The theories engaged here will contribute to developing our understanding of how change can be achieved, as we are moving from the co-construction of gender and technology in a masculine image to a reconstruction that includes a wider notion of IT that challenges stereotypes not only of IT experts, but also of motivation and interest leading to a career in IT.

Empirical Material

The main empirical material analysed for this book involves interviews with women who study, or work with, IT. Thus, the empirical data are especially suitable for exploring how women navigate the gendered landscape of IT and for identifying the mechanisms and factors working to support women to choose a career in IT. The data material was collected through three consecutive research projects motivating and building on each other in the period 2018 to 2021.Footnote 3

The first project studied women working in the primary and secondary IT sector in Norway, finding that many of the women had not originally chosen IT as their main career path.Footnote 4 In 2018 and 2019, 28 women aged 24–56 participated in in-depth interviews guided by a professional-life narrative profile with questions about education, work, and family life. Most of the women were from Norway, and they worked with IT and digitalization in public and private sectors and in research institutions. They worked with designing and programming data systems, implementing new technology, and as managers for technology development and digitalization. All had a master’s or PhD degree; however, these were not all in technology, thus illustrating that many women end up working with IT even when they had not chosen IT as their main career path (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2022).

The second project aimed to further investigate some of the main findings of the first project, in particular how women come to study IT via different routes, here by exploring women’s chronological narratives from childhood to an IT degree at university.Footnote 5 The 24 women that participated in in-depth interviews during 2020 provide the main narratives of the analysis in Chaps. 3 and 4. Fourteen of these women were bachelor students, five were master’s students, while five had early research recruitment positions (PhD and Postdoc) at Norwegian universities. Their main fields were in IT disciplines in STEM faculties, including computer science or informatics, computer engineering, data science, programming, bioinformatics, and cybersecurity. The women were aged between 20 and 51 years; 20 of them were born in Norway, one came from another Nordic country and three were born in countries in Asia and the Middle East. The study involved a mixture of methods, including a survey mapping already recognized factors having an impact on women’s participation in IT and a drawing of their chronological story along lines of age and interest for studying IT. This worked as support during the in-depth interview for exploring what and who had affected their decisions with questions like “What happened here?” and “Why did you change direction there?”, referring to the drawing.

The third study evaluated a national initiative for recruiting girls to technology and continued the search for factors and motivations that lead women into fields of technology.Footnote 6 This included in-depth interviews with 26 young women at secondary school and university level, women acting as female role models in the campaign, and teachers and school counsellors at schools participating in the campaign. A quantitative survey with nearly 700 young women in STEM education at secondary and higher education levels further expanded the study of motivational factors leading women to a career in technology. Some of the findings from the survey are presented in Chap. 2 and the interview with women are part of the empirical base for Chap. 4, while the school representatives appear in the analysis of how schools approach the issue of gender disparity in technology in Chap. 5.

Analytical Framework

The main analytical tool for the analysis across the projects has been grounded theory method (Glaser & Strauss, [1999] 2017; Strauss & Corbin, 2008), inspired by Charmaz (2006, 2017). Grounded theory represents a flexible but also systematic scientific method aiming to construct theory which is “grounded” in the empirical data. The grounded theory method comprises and guides a research project from the initial understanding and design to the final scientific publications. The method provides guidelines and support for the data collection phase, the analytical phase of reading and labelling the transcribed interviews, and the process of writing out the analysis and findings. The analytical process can be understood as a dialogue between the researcher and the data material where the researcher is constantly asking questions to the data (Charmaz, 2006). Charmaz describes the method as a strategy where the aim is to “[s]eek data, describe observed events, answer fundamental questions about what is happening, then develop theoretical categories to understand it” (2006, p. 25). The grounded theory techniques push the analysis forward through this constant movement between reading and interpreting data, labelling data and sorting labels into categories, writing memos (notes), and finally developing the scientific text. This gives impetus to “emergent theory” developed through constantly adding information and increasing the richness of the interpretation. This should not be understood as theory that simply emerges from the data, Bryant warns, since “theories of all kind need to be understood to be ‘constructed’ rather than ‘discovered’” (2021, p. 401).

Charmaz has been in the forefront of defining and describing constructivist grounded theory method (Bryant, 2021; Charmaz, 2017). This line of grounded theory focuses on the social constructed quality of knowledge. The constructivist grounded theory approach “places priority on the phenomena of study and sees both data and analysis as created from shared experiences and relationships with participants and other sources of data”, Charmaz explains (2006, p. 130). The explorative approach of grounded theory makes the method particularly useful for studying how people create meaning and why they choose their actions in different situations (Charmaz, 2006). While the method itself encourages an open dialogue to let the data material show its patterns, this process does not happen in an empty space, but rather based on the researcher’s pre-understanding. The method recognizes a theoretical sensitivity reflecting the researcher’s ability to understand and think analytically about the data (Charmaz, 2006). Theoretical sensitivity relies on the researcher’s experience and ability to grasp meanings and nuances of the data material. Among the important sources for theoretical sensitivity are professional experience, research literature and other studies, knowledge about theories and more. This reflects the connection between the three consecutive research projects involved here, where the categories that started to take form in the first project received more input from projects two and three. The three consecutive projects contributed to making the empirical foundation for the category development more solid with in-depth exploration as well as opening for a level of generalization for some of the findings through quantitative empirical data.

The grounded theory analysis for this book involved a careful reading of the material, coding it sentence for sentence with descriptive labels. In the next stage the labels were sorted and developed into analytical notes (memos) and some of them further into categories. The central categories of the analysis presented below were sorted into different topics, while aiming to identify the movements happening in the data, such as the various twists and turns in the women’s chronological narratives. The analysis focused on how this involved people (supporters, family, teachers, friends, role models), reflecting elements starting or distracting the women’s movements (encouragement, interest in something, that sometimes, but not always included IT), environment and infrastructure surrounding their experiences (school, university, working life), and their reflections around values, competences, and gender pointing towards experiences of insider/outsider positions and ways of producing a sense of belonging.

Grounded theory is a highly popular method; however, it is also “widely criticized, often claimed without justification, and seems to arouse particularly high levels of prejudice and misunderstanding”, according to Bryant (2021). Some of the critique reflects misunderstandings such as seeing this as an inductive method, where the research starts with no or few preconceptions, which, Bryant suggests, should rather be seen as “accidents” and misinterpretations of the early period of the method (2021). In this book, grounded theory has worked as a tool for driving the analytical process forward through the analytical steps described above. The topic of gender and technology has been at the core of my research since the late 1990s, thus the analytical process also included a dialogue with previous interviews, analysis, and findings (see, for instance, Corneliussen, 2011) that have contributed to the “theoretical sensitivity” as well as the richness of knowledge (Charmaz, 2006) that contributed to this book.

Structure of the Book

Many studies have explored women’s underrepresentation in fields of IT education and work by studying issues and challenges in one particular context or at one stage. This book, however, provides a different approach by concentrating on the women’s chronological experiences from childhood to university. Furthermore, while many studies have aimed to explore and find solutions for increasing girls and women’s participation in the conventional educational routes, the analysis here provides insights into alternative pathways leading the women to IT, and alternative motivations and interests that signals new ways of developing a more gender-inclusive technology sector. The next five chapters will, based on research literature, empirical data, analysis, and discussions, develop our knowledge about how girls and women find ways of navigating the gendered landscape of IT.

Chapter 2 contextualizes the forthcoming analysis of women’s experiences and pathways to IT, by revisiting relevant research literature, mainly from western countries, about the status for girls’ and women’s low participation in IT. The chapter highlights knowledge about barriers women encounter on their way to a career in technology as well as factors that attract women to technology. Despite many initiatives for recruiting girls and women to fields of technology, the effects are often short-lived. Thus, the chapter engages in a discussion of how assumption of gender equality already in place in the Nordic countries can become a barrier for promoting the very same values.

Chapter 3 presents the analysis of how women have come to IT via different pathways. The chapter focuses on factors that have positively influenced women’s decision of studying IT. The analysis builds on the interviews and drawings made by the 24 women who contributed their narrative of their chronological pathway from childhood until the decision to embark upon a university degree in IT. The analysis illustrates six different pathways that the women describe, each analysed in terms of the positive drivers that have made the women decide to study IT. The six pathways demonstrate that most of the women navigated the landscape of IT in very different ways from the ideas highlighted by the computer science professor, the IT manager, and the educators quoted above.

Gender remains unspoken in the analysis of women’s pathways to IT in Chap. 3. Yet gender was inextricably entangled in their experiences, and Chap. 4 explores how this affected their journey. The women’s narratives confirmed that gender stereotypes were still widespread, challenging their engagement. However, they also found solutions to bypass, negotiate, and challenge such stereotypes, by developing their own rhetoric for justifying their fit with and belonging in IT. In the process, the women suggested new ways of understanding IT and they claimed visibility for women in IT. The women’s narratives illustrate how their perceptions of IT developed from an initial understanding defined by gender stereotypes to a more inclusive understanding that supported revised visions about IT as well as their own sense of belonging there.

Recognizing that women do not operate in isolation when navigating the landscape of IT, Chap. 5 shifts perspective to schools, which can play a significant role in making women familiar with IT. Here we explore how representatives from 12 Norwegian secondary schools consider their role in encouraging girls and women to study IT. Although gender equality represents a vital value in Norwegian schools, the school representatives illustrate diverging views in terms of what gender equality means and how to achieve it. The chapter involves a discussion of how certain attitudes, such as a distrust to women’s interest in IT, affect the schools’ ability to become a supportive arena for recruiting women to IT.

Chapter 6 sums up the lessons learnt from the women’s narratives and their space invader experiences as well as the schools’ mixed and rather vague responses to issues of gender disparity in IT. This involves a discussion of the consequences of the new knowledge for research, potential supporters for women, policymakers, and not the least women, in particular those who had never thought about choosing IT at school. Here this raises questions about the mismatch between a strong gender equality norm and a continuous low participation of women in most fields of technology—the Nordic gender equality paradox. Contrary to the oft-repeated assumption of women’s career preferences holding the explanatory force to this paradox, the evidence here suggests that a myth of gender equality already in place rather makes the gender equality norm “non-performative” (Ahmed, 2012), and thus in some ways it acts as a barrier to the very values that it names.

The women’s experiences of barriers, as well as their solutions to work around them, will over the next chapters be developed into a more thorough and coherent understanding of how young women navigate the increasingly digitalized world. While the concept of co-constructing gender and technology with an emphasis on the mutual shaping of the two has represented an important approach to understanding women’s underrepresentation in IT (Bray, 2007; Cockburn, 1992; Cockburn & Ormrod, 1993; Landström, 2007; Wajcman, 2010), it is time to move further and explore how women’s own strategies for entering fields of IT are contributing to specific ways of reconstructing the relationship between gender and technology. This perspective will be further developed in the final chapter of the book, with potential users of this knowledge in mind, such as scholars and practitioners, educators, employers, policymakers, and anyone else interested in strategies for making IT a more gender-inclusive field.