Women’s Chronological Pathways to IT Education

Abstract

What are the key factors and driving forces that make women enter the fields of information technology (IT), despite the many gendered barriers revisited in Chap. 2? This chapter analyses the narratives of 24 women’s chronological pathways from childhood to entering a university degree in IT. The chapter illustrates six different pathways that led the women to pursue a degree in IT, each analysed in terms of the positive drivers, including interest in IT, recruitment measures, an accidental choice, finding a safe platform in other disciplines, and a detour before discovering IT. Only one pathway identified the image of IT as suitable for women as a driving force. This, however, was shared by women from other countries, highlighting the specific cultural construction of the Norwegian women’s narratives.

Introduction: Looking for Positive Drivers and Turning Points

What makes women enter information technology (IT), a field where there is still a notable gender gap across the western world (Eurostat, 2021a)? Chapter 2 revisited research documenting a wide set of gendered barriers which challenged women’s entries into IT (Master et al., 2016; Master & Meltzoff, 2020; Yates & Plagnol, 2022). These included gender structures and stereotypes picturing IT as a domain where men excel, making women question their abilities (Frieze & Quesenberry, 2019; Lewis et al., 2016; Margolis & Fisher, 2002). While boys’ gateway through gaming is assumed to give an advantage also at university (Sevin & Decamp, 2016), dominating narratives question women’s interest and belonging in IT (Faulkner, 2009; Sørensen, 2011) and women in male-dominated IT struggle to be recognized as professional (Faulkner, 2009; Watts, 2009). Research into study motivation has emphasized the close connection between students’ expectations of mastering a subject, self-efficacy, and the value they ascribe to the field (González-Pérez et al., 2020; Sáinz & Eccles, 2012). The cultural association of IT with boys and men has been found to challenge both girls’ and young women’s ability belief and self-efficacy in this field (Barbieri et al., 2020; Chavatzia, 2017; Rohatgi et al., 2016). This effect is reinforced by women’s lack of familiarity with IT, which gives them a poor foundation for assessing their own future performance in IT-related disciplines compared to men (Czopp et al., 2015; Spieler et al., 2019). Despite these and other barriers, women do find their way to IT, some through less conventional paths (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2022; Lyon & Green, 2020). This chapter explores the pathways leading women to pursue a university education in IT while asking: what enabled them to get there, where did they find support, and what were the turning points that made them choose IT?

The chapter builds on in-depth interviews with and drawings made by 24 women who had set out on a career in technology (see the section on “Empirical Material” in Chap. 1). The analysis explores the narrative of the women’s chronological pathway from childhood until the decision of entering a university degree in IT. The interviews involved explorative questions about the women’s family background, experience with and interest in computers and IT since childhood, how they met IT in school and out of school, and experiences from IT at university. In this chapter, the analysis illustrates the different pathways that had led the women towards IT, guided by questions of where and when the women had become familiar with and interested in IT, and what made them start thinking about IT as a relevant career path. The interview guide also included more direct questions about gender in relation to IT; however, this topic did not surface in the analysis of what had led the women to IT, and I will return to this topic in Chap. 4.

The analysis below is rooted in a gender perspective of identity as constructed in and through social relations and interactions in social contexts (West & Zimmerman, 1987), combined with feminist technology studies emphasizing that this also involves technology and gender criteria for being recognized as IT experts (Nentwich & Kelan, 2014; Trauth & Quesenberry, 2007; see Chap. 1). Although gender is not particularly visible in the women’s descriptions of positive factors and turning points that made them enter fields of IT, the gender perspective supports the understanding of how concepts such as self-efficacy, ability belief and value identified with disciplines of IT (González-Pérez et al., 2020; Master & Meltzoff, 2020, cf. Chap. 1) are both challenging for and challenged by the women.

A Chronological Drawing of the Pathways to IT

To answer the questions about what the women identified as decisive for their decision to study IT, we start with the drawing of the chronological pathways towards IT. This drawing was made on a predefined chart with two axes of age and school level and stages on the route to studying IT at university, as shown in Fig. 3.1. The chart thus identified four theoretical stages, from being unfamiliar with IT to becoming familiar and interested in IT, and finally making the decision to apply for a university-level IT degree. The drawing was used as a map during the interview for asking questions about what had caused the line to take on a specific direction.

Fig. 3.1

Illustration of the drawings that the 24 women made of their chronological pathways to IT

Figure 3.1 summarizes the women’s chronological drawings into three main types, showing that none of the women recalled having any insight or interest in IT during the early years of primary school. From that point onwards, the women’s narratives split into three main lines. Some of the women had developed an interest in IT during lower secondary school (line 1), while the majority developed insight and interest in IT gradually during the later stages (line 2). Some of the women, however, challenged the basic assumptions of the chart altogether; that the pathway to a university degree in IT involved certain levels of insight and interest. The third line represents a rather large group of women whose chronological pathways bypassed these stages while still ending up with a university degree in IT.

Hidden behind the lines in the figure there are many different experiences and variations that had led the women to study technology. In the next section, these variations will be elaborated and illustrated through six different pathways to IT education. These are a theoretical construction based on an analysis of the factors that led women to pursue careers in IT from around 2000 to 2020. They are not the only routes for women into fields of IT, and they can overlap, as illustrated by the narratives of six of the women who described experiences involving different pathways. Analysing the pathways will, however, help identify the factors that influenced the women’s decisions to study IT, with each pathway illustrating certain factors that the women identified as vital for their decision. The first is characterized by an early interest in IT, while the second is shaped by recruitment efforts. The third pathway shows IT as an accidental choice, the fourth involves using an alternative discipline or interest as a stepping-stone into IT, and the fifth is characterized by women discovering IT as a relevant career path only after detouring through another career path. The final pathway involves women being encouraged to study IT because they were women; however, none of these grew up in Norway, thus highlighting the cultural construction of the Norwegian women’s narratives. Figure 3.2 shows the approximate distribution of women claiming one or more pathways.

Fig. 3.2

The six pathways distributed around 30 stories of pursuing one of these routes. This includes all 24 women, six of whom claimed experiences involving two different pathways

The next section will present each of the pathways with a focus on experiences and factors shaping and stimulating movements leading towards the women’s enrolment in an IT course.

Pathway 1: Interest in IT as a Driving Factor

The first pathway is shaped by women’s early interest in IT, developed through encounters with technology. Reflecting a pattern of boys, on average, developing an interest in IT at an earlier stage than girls (Barker & Aspray, 2006), only four women recognized such an early interest. The typical scenario of the women’s early encounters with technology involved computers, smartphones, or video games in their early teens, feeding a growing interest that gradually developed into a decision to study IT. Liv was one of those who followed such a path, and she recognized social activities, from online chat channels to gaming and programming, as the core of her interest in IT:

My best friends were very interested in programming, and this affected me. I remember that when I was younger, before the smartphones, a lot of the social stuff happened through a computer. (Liv)

She had used early chat platforms as well as Facebook and doubted that she would have become interested in IT at all if it had not started as a social activity. A supportive network of peers motivated her engagement with computers. Gaming and her friends’ interest in programming triggered her own interest in programming:

It started at upper secondary school, some friends had started making games on their own, and then I was inspired and wanted to learn a little too. Since I saw that they were doing it and I was playing video games myself, I was inspired to try it. That, in turn, made me want to take it to a professional level, and I searched online and found that this university had a degree in programming. (Liv)

A social environment of friends with similar interests played a vital role in shaping her pathway, where the most important activity was programming. Before signing up for university, she had taught herself to program in high-level programming languages such as Python and C++. It was difficult but fun, and it had given her an advantage when she started at university:

I felt that I was in front of the others, especially in the first semester, because there were many who did not know what [programming] was, really. It was great to have some prior knowledge and recognizing things, to avoid some of the pressure and the stress during the first months. (Liv)

Liv described her early encounters with IT through her social network as being vital for her choice of IT, including certain similarities with images of boys developing their IT skills through gaming and programming outside school. Thus, she seems to confirm the assumption that gaming can support youth in developing knowledge about professional aspects of IT (Sevin & Decamp, 2016). She also found that her early experience had made her excel in the programming class, where all of her fellow students were men.

The next three women also had an early interest in IT. Although only one of them had learnt to program before university, all three defined their interest in IT mainly through programming. They saw IT as creative and a valuable skill for future work. Their narratives did not involve gaming, friends, or a supportive network, but described how they developed their interest in IT independently. One woman pointed to the increased importance of IT in society and its visibility through media as her main trigger:

I thought it was cool. It seemed appealing based on what I had seen about IT on films and through entertainment. I knew it was difficult and demanding [to program]. […] If you are good at it, however, it is actually a valuable thing to know. And I would have wanted to learn it anyway, because I’m a bit sceptical to how everyone wants to have smart homes and smart cars. How will that end, I wonder, since it can be hacked? (Marte)

Like several of the other women, she wanted to learn how to control technology, and this made programming a top priority. Since technology had entered the private sphere, it should be everybody’s responsibility to take control: “If you bring a computer into your home, you must know how to use it one hundred percent and not just two percent” (Marte). The creative side of IT triggered these three women’s interest in IT, and one of them saw IT as an alternative to becoming a writer:

I like to create things. I was very fond of writing my own texts earlier. But being an artist can be very exhausting because it is not economically secure. Programming, however, ticks all the boxes I made for myself. (Marte)

Seeing programming as a combination of writing and creativity made this a perfect choice. However, when the women searched for a future direction in education, they found little support or guidance. None of them had received adequate information about this at school, which made other sources, such as internet searches, important. Lacking support, two of the women who wanted to work with web design ended up entering the wrong study program. They had been eager to learn about IT at an early stage, but in the absence of any available IT classes at school, they had to take care of this on their own. One of them signed up for a private IT class:

It was just something I decided to do, it was not offered by the school. It was very challenging, because there are no one in my near vicinity or family that had studied IT. It was not very easy to get any help. And during the exam, I remember misunderstanding the assignment and therefore I didn’t get a very good grade either. (Kristin)

Without support it was difficult. Although she was disappointed, she still dreamt of working with IT in a creative way:

The reason I started at computer engineering, was that I wanted to become a web designer […] I misunderstood the name “network architecture” and thought that it would be architecture and design. […] I lost interest in computer engineering when I found out that I could not become a web designer with that education. (Kristin)

Choosing computer engineering by mistake, her motivation dropped when she realized this would not lead to web design. Her interest in IT, however, remained strong. She completed the bachelor’s degree before changing to another IT degree in which she had a greater interest, where she was about to finish a PhD at the time of the interview.

The other woman who was interested in web design had started coding in HTML and was making webpages at age 12–13. She was dedicated to studying web design, but, without any guidance, she ended up pursuing a degree in graphic design instead: “I thought that I would become a web designer, because I thought that ‘graphic design’ would be more directed towards that, but then I realized that it was something completely different” (Elise). She completed her first bachelor’s degree before changing to computer engineering, by which time she had lost interest in web design:

If you are a web designer then perhaps you will make a logo or something, but what you do is not very important, in a way. However, if you become a computer engineer, then you can do a lot of important things, and that is more motivating. It gives endless possibilities. (Elise)

The women’s narratives illustrate that they each faced challenges in finding and pursuing IT education due to a lack of support and guidance. They had received little information about IT education and career options through school. “I wish we had had visitors from the university, to learn about the different study programs”, Elise said. She wished that they had learnt more about the requirements for applying because “that could have been something to work towards. But I was not motivated to work towards that, because I did not even know that it was a possibility” (Elise). Only after learning about computer engineering had she recognized a positive value of the field.

While the four women started with an early interest in IT, their experiences in pursuing an IT education differed, particularly in terms of access to a supportive network. Most activities identified as important happened outside the ordinary school system, making the schools rather irrelevant. In the case of one of the women, a family member working in IT was important for personifying IT as a career choice. The other three women did not have the same level of network or support and they had been left to navigate the educational landscape on their own. Their story is a reminder that critical challenges to women’s participation in IT might not only be manifested in negative barriers, but can also be hidden by the absence of support.

Pathway 2: Recruited into IT Education

The first pathway included interest in IT, but no support from the educational system. The second pathway illustrates a reverse pattern: it involved no particular interest in IT; however, recruitment initiatives had a crucial role for their decision to study IT. Only two women emphasized such initiatives, both of which took place during their final year at upper secondary.

Solveig had already made up her mind to study either economy or law at university. Visiting an “information day” inviting all new applicants to university, made her change her mind:

I had not thought about IT as an option before we were about to apply for higher education. At that time, I already knew what I was going to study, but then I followed a friend who was going to study engineering, to the lectures about that. That was when I realized this was a possibility too. I had put engineering far down on my list when we applied for university. Then we went on holiday and there I talked with someone who worked with IT. After that I changed the order on my list, moving engineering to the top the day before the deadline for applying to university. (Solveig)

Although she had informatics as an elective at upper secondary and had enjoyed the class, she had still not considered a career in IT: “I thought it was fun at school, but it never occurred to me that you can in fact study IT” (Solveig). Thus, even with IT at school, her narrative was characterized by the absence of schools providing insights that had made IT appear as a relevant course of study for her. Following the information meeting about computer engineering—a meeting that she accidentally joined, IT changed status from being irrelevant to becoming a possibility. Several successive events then made her gradually change her mind, until at the very last minute she made the final decision to make computer engineering her preferred choice when applying for university.

This narrative explained the line of her chronological drawing, which started out flat before moving directly from no interest and knowledge to a simultaneous point of interest and applying to university when she was 19 years old (see Fig. 3.1). While school had not had any impact on her aspiration to study IT, the turning point was the meeting, since this made her aware of IT as a study and career. The accidental character of participating in the information meeting is not a trivial detail of the narrative. Since the meeting was targeting those who already were interested in IT education, it was less likely to capture the interest of potential students such as her, who had not considered it relevant before. The next stage is also of interest as it reflects how young women might require several sources to develop their decision to study IT, as illustrated by the evaluation of a national recruitment campaign (Corneliussen, Seddighi, Simonsen, et al., 2021): once Solveig had become aware of IT as a potential study choice, she continued to investigate on her own until she gradually developed her knowledge about IT, which led to her ultimate decision to study IT engineering.

The other woman had participated in a recruitment initiative targeting women, and which was limited to those who had science as a major at upper secondary school:

We participated at the “Girls’ Day”, which was a conference that we were invited to attend because we belonged to the science class. We were invited to [the university] to have a tour around campus and listening to several talks by people who worked in IT as well as students. […] Then I thought “Hmm, maybe IT development is something I would want to work with.” And that is when I got interested and decided that I wanted to apply for IT. (Ingrid)

Before attending the conference, Ingrid had considered medicine or nursing. She had not chosen IT as an elective at upper secondary because it was not a required subject and thus did not represent a strategic choice for keeping the door open to, for instance, medicine. When Ingrid participated in the Girls’ Day, she started seeing IT in a new way that made it become a rival to medicine:

At the Girls’ Day, what caught my interest was that you can work with society, but also with technology at the same time; that you can develop systems, for instance for hospitals, schools, NAV [the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration]. That you can use your technology education for something that is useful for society. And I realized that in medicine, you will have a job where you will be close to people and there will be a lot of blood and gore, and you need to know a lot about the body. I realized that I am not very good at that. I have more to offer, I am very good at math, and very good at logical thinking. (Ingrid)

Ingrid’s experience highlights two important factors that can influence women’s interest in a career in technology. Firstly, the realization that working with technology is applicable to many fields, and secondly that once she became familiar with IT, it emerged as a strong alternative to traditional health care careers, a realization that was shared by many of the other women.

Ingrid illustrates the challenge of acquiring a comprehensive overview of potential study choices, leading many young women to trust the most “obvious” choice, she believes: “either you become an economist, or you become a nurse” (Ingrid). For IT to become a visible and relevant study option for her, it required an invitation to learn about and experience IT. Once IT appeared relevant, she also recognized how her current competences in math and logical thinking might make IT a better choice for her. As an additional support, she recognized how meeting a female role model in the field had made her think differently about the relationship between girls and technology:

She made me see technology in a completely new way, with all the possibilities in it. […] She made us think like; “yes, it is possible to study technology; it is totally fine to combine it with being a girl and not really having an interest in it.” Or rather, you do have an interest in it, but it is possible because it is not only technology that defines you. (Ingrid)

She was struggling with the concept of working with technology that was not only about technology, and of being and not being interested in technology, complicated by expectations to girls’ relationship to technology. Cracking the code for establishing a relationship with technology as a girl happened when she realized that technology could be interpreted in a much wider context and could be combined with nearly anything. Ingrid claimed that missing this information earlier was the main reason that she had not chosen IT before.

There are several lessons to learn from the narratives outlining the pathway that includes recruitment initiatives. Making IT visible as a relevant study choice is vital for putting it on the women’s wish list, and it is not obvious that this happens through their everyday school experience. This makes recruitment initiatives important (Corneliussen, Seddighi, Simonsen, et al., 2021). Furthermore, motivating women to study IT can be effective up until the very last minute before they apply for university. Finally, Ingrid illustrates that interest in technology is closely associated with an image of a masculine technology relation that makes interest alone a fragile motivator for young women to navigate by. She also illustrates the importance of female role models as someone representing a different gendered version of technology interest (González-Pérez et al., 2020; Lang et al., 2020; Stout et al., 2011).

Pathway 3: An Unintended and Accidental Study Choice

While one of the women above illustrated elements of accidentally being at the right place at the right time, pathway 3 is shaped entirely by IT as an unintended and accidental study choice. Six women describe their pathway to IT as having starting without them having any intention of studying IT. This is visualized by the third line in Fig. 3.1, bypassing insight and interest, moving straight up to enrolling at university. One of these women decided to apply for a university degree; however, she had not decided what to study:

I sat down with a list of university degrees in front of me, and then I just let my finger slide down the list. It stopped at an IT degree. I showed up in the first class. I was told to bring my own laptop, though I had minimal knowledge of that and went to [a chain for electronics] and bought a laptop and showed up at university. The first thing the teacher said was “Today we will program in Visual Basic”. I had absolutely no idea what programming or Visual Basic was, so I hurried to google it while sitting there in the lecture, and I didn’t understand anything. After class I visited my brother-in-law, who helped me get started with Visual Basic. And then I was really hooked, after only one class. Therefore, the study choice was completely random. (Gro)

A study choice can hardly become much more accidental than letting the index finger land blindly on IT in a list of university degrees. However, Gro was not alone in finding her way to IT by accident. When applying to university it is possible to select several degrees, placing the first priority at the top. Tove, one of the other women, had put an IT degree further down on her list and then forgot about it, until she was admitted to the IT degree:

I knew nothing about the subject before I started. I did not even know that I had applied for it, I had just applied for many different degrees at [university]. I just wanted to get into that university. (Tove)

It was not interest in IT that made her put it on the list when applying to university but rather other priorities such as getting admission to a specific campus. This narrative was gradually uncovered during the interview:Verse

Verse Interviewer: So, you are not really interested in IT? Tove: No! Interviewer: What made you apply? Why did you not apply for a different subject? Tove: I did. I did not have it as a top priority at all. I had put in computer technology further up, and then I put a lot of weird subjects on the list. Because I really wanted to study math and physics, but I’m glad now that I did not end up there, because that would have turned out badly. I really just wanted to go to that campus. And then I wanted to become a civil engineer. I had no idea, I just wanted to start at a degree and then see. And then I started at computer engineering, which I enjoyed and did quite well the first year. Then I thought that I can finish this degree and that’s the plan now. I’m good at it, sort of, so it’s okay. But I do not know if I’m going to do it for the rest of my life, because it’s not what I enjoy the most.

She identified her background in sciences and mathematics as a good background for mastering the computer engineering classes; however, as distinct from the account of Gro above, who was “hooked” from the first class of programming, Tove was unsure that she wanted to continue with computing. For her, being good at it was not the same as having an interest in it or enjoying it.

Several other women describe their entry into IT as either unintended or accidental, but who, once having started studying it, found that they enjoyed it and decided to continue. This suggests that educational choices are not always driven by an interest in a specific discipline or occupation but can be influenced by other priorities or accidental events. Ending up in an IT degree due to accidental events can lead to different outcomes, and while most of these women were satisfied with their choice, one of them remained uncertain whether or not she would stay on.

Pathway 4: An Alternative Platform

The next pathway into IT is shaped not by a focus on IT, but rather reflects an investment within another discipline or topic of interests. The alternative field worked as a platform for claiming and establishing familiarity and a sense of mastery and belonging when enrolling in IT. The narratives of the nine women defining this pathway involved little interest in and knowledge about IT. Few of the women had learnt about IT at school and not many identified with a leisurely interest in computers. When describing why they chose an IT degree, they explained and justified their choice mainly with reference to another discipline:

Mathematics was probably the strongest subject I had ever since I was a child. Therefore, my idea was that I had something that I could feel confident in, simultaneously as I would be able to learn something new. (Tonje)

The alternative disciplines were within fields that the women had already mastered, most often because they had the subject at school. The alternative subject thus already represented a platform for their self-efficacy, most often within a discipline not equally associated with men as most fields of IT. Thus, with the alternative platform boosting their confidence, the women could approach IT as a new and unfamiliar field while simultaneously keeping a link to their academic strength.

For some of the women it was the combination of their safe platform-discipline and IT that had caught their interest. “Since I was looking both at biology studies and computer science, it was the mixture that seemed interesting”, Berit explained. She had considered either biology or computer science before deciding on bioinformatics as a combination of the two. Other women raised the same argument. Science alone was not tempting; however, when science subjects could be combined with IT, it became more attractive:

I was at the info day for chemistry, and then I was like, “no, this is a bit old-fashioned, maybe a bit boring”. But then I found the degree in bioinformatics on the internet. These are two things I’m interested in, the bio part and the chemical part, and you can connect it with some IT. This was towards the end of upper secondary, so I was thinking that, OK, maybe I should start studying IT, because everyone has smartphones, everyone uses apps. Today, everything is digitalized. (Gunn)

For Gunn, it was not her interest in technology, but rather her doubt about sciences that had made her look for something else. She shared this doubt with some of the other women, such as Ida, who had chosen science and mathematics at upper secondary, but she struggled with these disciplines: “I did not really want to study math, because I felt that it might be a little too hard. Not really biology either, so I just decided to study computer science” (Ida). Ida’s choice however, was also influenced by her father: “If it hadn’t been for my father, who works in IT, I wouldn’t have thought about it as a potential choice” (Ida). A father working in IT had made it visible as a potential study and career choice.

The turning point for many of these women, as Gunn illustrates, was the moment they realized that they could combine their already established skills with the new field of IT. For Gunn, like several of the other women, their background in sciences and mathematics was what had made them look towards technology. Lacking a background in technology, these other disciplines worked as a platform where they already had some skills:

I didn’t have technology as a subject at school. In upper secondary I had science and I liked it then, but I did not like it so much that I wanted to take a bachelor’s degree in only math or chemistry. […] Then I realized that technology was a bit like a middle ground where you could both be creative and use science. (Ellen)

The women identified a wide set of disciplines, not only sciences and mathematics, but also social sciences, humanities, and arts as a platform for entering IT. The women’s narratives thus illustrate how IT can be perceived as a good fit together with many different disciplines, topics of interest, skills, and values.

Many of the women were motivated to study IT because they saw it as necessary in today’s society and believed that digitalization was increasingly important. One woman had already a professional experience and had come back to university because she felt that she needed to understand computing to continue doing her work: “We need to understand technology to understand [her professional field]. For me this is about being prepared for the new digital society” (Maja). Another woman wanted to learn how to control technology and “how we decide to design limits for technology”, because this “will determine what society will look like in the future, which values we promote, which rights people will have” (Kari). Several of the women argue in a similar vein, claiming that their decisions to study IT were not solely driven by an interest in technology, but rather by the transformations in a society where digitalization took on an increasingly important role.

The women’s narratives reveal that an interest in technology is not always the main factor in deciding to study IT. Many of them had limited knowledge and interest in IT before enrolling in university, and rather used their background in other disciplines as a safe platform to enter the less familiar field of IT. For some it was the combination of IT with another discipline with which they were already familiar, while, for others, IT appeared as a modern and relevant choice given its importance for work and education, for individuals, in private homes, and in today’s society. The wide spectre of alternative disciplines and competences in which IT was considered important opened for a similarly wide set of competences that could provide a sense of mastery and belonging that could be transferred to IT. However, within the same narratives, IT often appeared as a fragile choice. Since few of the women had any experience from IT at school, they had no way of fully judging whether they would master or enjoy IT at university. The alternative platform supported the issue of mastery; however, whether they would enjoy IT was still an open question when they started at university.

Pathway 5: A Detour before “Discovering” IT

The next pathway was shaped by the women making a detour, most often in a different degree at university, before they discovered IT as interesting and fascinating. Realizing this, they changed direction and started over with a degree in IT. Five women contribute to our understanding of this pathway. While these women had not imagined studying IT when they were at school, the key shaping factor for this pathway was the input that made them change direction: something they saw, heard, or experienced that involved IT and made them start thinking of IT as a relevant study choice. Failing to receive (or pick up) this input during their school days, the detour was instrumental. For some women, it appeared as a penalty round; penalizing them for being unaware of IT when they made their first study choice as teenagers. For others, the detour rather allowed them to mature and grow out of a girls’ culture with an effect of making IT appear as a less relevant study choice.

We met one of them above, as one of the women who had identified an early interest in IT; however, aiming for web design she had made a wrong choice and ended up in a non-tech design degree. While she was a student here, she had realized that she could attend a preliminary course which would qualify her to study computer engineering:

I finished the bachelor’s degree [in graphic design] and then I found out that you could take a preliminary course to get into computer engineering. And when I found out what computer engineering was, I thought that would be the right thing for me. Although I took a small detour, I ended up here in the end. (Elise)

Computer engineering had not been on her career radar before, again suggesting that the insight into IT disciplines is vital for how youth consider relevant study choices. Computer engineering had turned out to be “the education of her dreams”. However, the detour via another bachelor’s degree had consequences: “I will not do the full five-year degree of computer science, mostly because it will not pay off, considering the size of my loan compared to salary and income” (Elise). Leaving web design behind, her sense of computer engineering leading to more important work had left her satisfied about her new choice of education.

Different from her experience, the other four women in this group did not identify any previous interest in studying IT. All four completed secondary and upper secondary education without picking up any kind of input that triggered their interest in studying IT. It was not until they met concepts of computing at a much later stage that their interest was triggered. One of the women had first enrolled in a different engineering degree, where she had an introductory class to programming:

I remember in the beginning when we had programming, I did not understand the way of thinking, but because I was forced to take that subject, I understood more and more that way of thinking. In the end I had a lot of fun and it turned out to be my best subject. Then I decided that I did not want to continue with [the first degree] but instead wanted to start at computer science. (Sofie)

This unplanned meeting with programming, struggling at first, but then realizing that she was good at it, made her decide to change into IT. Her chronological drawing had not moved above the first stage of ignorance and lack of interest in IT, until it made an abrupt turn upwards, motivated by discovering her abilities and pleasure in programming. And she was not alone in being recruited through an unexpected meeting with programming, as the next woman shows:

I cannot explain the joy I got from having an introduction to programming. […] For me, it has been one of the coolest things. It’s not like any other subject I’ve had. It was the absolute coolest thing about joining that study. (Anna)

Programming has often been described as one of the things putting women off IT education (Denning & McGettrick, 2005; Jethwani et al., 2016). Quite the opposite was true for these women: the fascination and pleasure of this experience played a key role in their narratives, giving a new value to computing and explaining the change of direction:

We had the introductory subject to IT […] and I thought it was the most fun subject. It was more fun than the subject of chemistry because I had never had IT before. Therefore, after a year I chose to switch to an IT degree. (Tonje)

The women’s emphasis on programming as a completely new and unknown subject reflects just how little insight they had received through school. The detour was instrumental in establishing such an insight, representing an extra round of studying where they discovered IT. One of the women even suggested that this was typical for her fellow female students; that choosing IT was not something they had been prepared for at school:

I think almost all the girls in the class chose this degree at random. And it’s a bit of a shame that it’s like that, because seeing that I found IT so much fun when I started here, I would probably have been hooked the same way when I went to upper secondary. And then I could have been saved for an extra year of study loan. (Lene)

For her the detour had worked as a penalty round; an extra round adding an extra cost to her career development. She could have been recruited earlier, she thinks, but nobody had invited her to explore IT at school: “At lower and upper secondary school we did not have any IT class. There was nothing, so it is not at all strange that I did not become interested in it” (Lene).

IT was not on these women’s horizon when they were making plans for their future career. On the one side, the weak importance of school in these narratives—a characteristic that these women share with many of the other women—suggest that many women are not successfully recruited through activities at school. The women’s change of direction, on the other side, documents that it is never too late to be recruited to IT. The various encounters with IT, in particular hands-on experiences with programming, had made the women change their perception about IT completely. The combination of little input at school with the much later unexpected encounters that brought new meaning to IT shapes this pathway involving a detour and late entry into IT.

Pathway 6: Encouraged because IT is Suitable for Girls

There is something cultural about it. It was one of the most appropriate studies. Perhaps not the most appropriate, but one of the most appropriate studies for girls in [her country]. I knew this because of my sister. She encouraged me. I think she chose IT because she had a teacher who encouraged her.

Three women expressed similar experiences; IT was a subject they had been recommended and encouraged to study. The three women had grown up in countries further south and east at the fringe of Europe. They had come to Norway for study at master’s and PhD level, thus, they saw themselves as visitors in Norway. Including them in the study gave an opportunity to see not only how cultural aspects are shaping the foreign women’s pathways, but also how the Norwegian women’s experiences were also culturally shaped.

A vital element of the foreign women’s chronological narratives was the experience of being encouraged to study IT; by family, at school, and in general by a cultural discourse about IT as an appropriate study choice for girls and women in their home countries. Another reason for being recommended and encouraged to study IT in their experience, had been skills in mathematics, which they identified as their strongest subject at school:Verse

Verse Aisha: We have a lot of math in [my home country] and they suggest that if you are strong in mathematics, you can be a strong candidate for IT studies. Interviewer: Yes, so if you are good at math, you will be guided towards that subject? Aisha: Yes.

One of the women emphasized that IT studies attract the very best students in her home country. Being one of the best students in her class had therefore motivated her to choose IT:

I was motivated because it is a trend and technology is everywhere. And what is happening with the universities now, is that IT departments are accepting students with the best results from [lower education], thus it is the best students who study IT. These are also the reasons why I chose IT. I had the best results at school, and that’s how I chose direction. (Dafina)

The narratives from the three foreign women are very different from those of the Norwegian women. They reflected on this difference themselves, describing a huge surprise when they arrived in Norway and found the proportion of women in IT to be very low. Their surprise was not related to Norway as a country recognized as gender equal, but rather as a strange situation across Europe in general compared to the much better gender balance in their home countries:

It was really strange for me when I came to Norway, since some fields of engineering in [country] are very male dominated, however, computer science was more 50–50 with men and women. I think it’s a cultural thing. And I understand that it is the same across Europe; girls are not interested in computer science. […] It was a shock to me: “Really, am I the only girl in this class?” (Aisha)

Coming to Norway for a university degree and finding themselves to be one of the few women in IT appeared different from their experience in their home country; however, it also affected them:

Even the professors who come to teach the courses [are men]; every day you only see men. This means that you also give the impression to the students, that this field is dominated by men and therefore it is only for men. (Dafina)

Even those women who had grown up in a culture where at least certain fields of IT were thought of as gender-equal fields, were affected by mainly seeing men at the IT department at the Norwegian universities. They started to question their own participation, and their former feeling of belonging was threatened by a sense of being an outsider in what they experienced as a mainly male-populated IT department at university.

While the aim of this study was not to explore the co-construction of gender and technology in a cross-cultural perspective, the foreign participants challenged this by highlighting the cultural construction of the Norwegian women’s narratives. Their experiences emphasize that the cultural construction of IT as a masculine field is a result neither of inherent qualities of technology nor of innate skills in men. They also illustrate the negative experience of only seeing men operating in a field and the immediate effect this had in making them start questioning their belonging in IT.

Looking back at the Norwegian women’s narratives with lenses sharpened by the foreign women’s stories highlights the cultural aspects of Norwegian women’s experiences, and in particular that none of them had been encouraged to think of IT because they were women. The foreign women thus put the Norwegian women’s narrative into a perspective that suggests that it could have been different.

Lessons from the Pathways

The main goal of the analysis above was to explore the factors that the women identified as vital in shaping their pathways to IT, from childhood to a university degree in IT. The six pathways illustrate that background and motivation for studying IT can differ considerably from woman to woman, reminding us that women are not a single homogenous group (Trauth & Quesenberry, 2007). While few women had identified interest in IT in their teenage years, many of their narratives showed that interest in IT had not been necessary for their choice of studying IT. Instead, interest in a wide spectre of topics and disciplines, or an interest in society’s transformation due to digitalization, had led to an interest in studying IT. These other fields and disciplines had also supported their self-efficacy and trust in mastering IT, illustrating that not only IT or other STEM disciplines support ability belief in IT. The women’s narratives thus also challenge some of the main assumptions of theories emphasizing the importance of self-efficacy and interest in the discipline in question (Eccles, 2009; Master & Meltzoff, 2020; Rohatgi et al., 2016).

One common factor across the pathways was that the women needed some kind of input, insight, or experience that made IT seem relevant. Having a family member presence in the industry made IT visible as a potential choice for some of the women, while only one woman identified friends as having played an important role. Only two women had experienced that recruitment initiatives had made them want to study IT, while the more common experience for most of the women across the pathways was of school as being either irrelevant or making IT seem less tempting as a career path, similar to findings in other studies (Alshahrani et al., 2018; Engström, 2018). The women illustrated both the benefit of having multiple sources for inspiration, and the abrupt change from a more gender-traditional study choice to IT once the possibility had been presented for them, for instance in recruitment initiatives (cf. Chap. 2, Corneliussen, Seddighi, Simonsen, et al., 2021). Thus, while the women’s narratives emphasize that they needed input to make IT appear as a relevant study choice, their stories also point to scarcity in such support. The foreign women’s narrative of being invited to study IT because it was considered suitable for women puts the Norwegian women’s experiences, in particular their lack of support and encouragement, into sharp relief.

While the six pathways analysed here are neither the only routes, and nor are they exclusive to women, the women’s narratives reflect how they had experienced this as a journey through a gendered landscape where being a woman had certain implications. The stories about how gender affected their experience had, however, not surfaced when analysing the factors that had enabled women to enter fields of IT. Though the sample here is limited, it is still disheartening that merely a handful of the women had chosen IT because they had an early interest in it or recognized being encouraged or recruited. This will be further explored in the next chapter, which will engage more directly with the questions of how the pathways can be understood in relation to the cultural construction of IT as a gendered field.