Keywords

Introduction: A Global Digital Transformation

There is a global shortage of skills and a growing demand for IT professionals, calculated to a deficit of 20 million experts in key areas in the European Union (EU) by 2030 (European Commission, 2021b). Digitalization is transforming the labour market and working conditions, and altering how we work. Emerging fields, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, robotics, and e-health, are expanding rapidly, taking new roles in new sectors and industries with accelerating speed (United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 2021). It is at present unclear who will be involved in this transformation, which is currently having gender-specific impacts (Barbieri et al., 2022). Despite differences between individual economies, the gender digital divide and differences between men’s and women’s access to technology and digital competence is reproduced across nations, irrespective of geographic location, economy, and the overall level of access to information and communication technologies (Sey & Hafkin, 2019). Differences in access to digital skills, education, training as well as opportunities in IT-related work have consequences for social difference, including access to social status, wealth, and power (Mariscal et al., 2019). This makes the gender disparity in IT a critical problem to solve, not only for women, but also for nations, economies, and companies (The European Institute for Gender Equality, 2017).

This global challenge of gender disparity in technology is notable also in the Nordic countries, which are simultaneously recognized for their gender egalitarian culture and their political regimes with a long history of gender equality policies (Hernes, 1987; Teigen & Skjeie, 2017). This book has illustrated that the cultures, images and imaginaries of tech professionals are still strongly affected by gender cultures and stereotypes in Norway, one of the Nordic “superpowers” of gender equality (Larsen et al., 2021).

In the context of these gender equality superpowers, the main goal of this book has been to develop our knowledge of how to produce a more gender-inclusive digital future, one in which it will be equally natural for girls as it currently is for boys, to opt for a career in technology. Starting from the realization that IT education is highly male-dominated in Norway, the aim was to learn from the women who did enter these fields of higher education. Chapter 2 contextualized the analysis by revisiting research literature on girls’ and women’s participation in IT. Chapter 3 presented the women’s chronological pathways with a focus on the positive factors that had enabled them to enter higher IT education. Here gender was mainly unspoken, and yet gender was entangled in the women’s experiences, which was elaborated in Chap. 4. Women’s experiences in IT brought new perspectives and perceptions, while the women also themselves contributed new meanings, including a picture of IT as a more inclusive field. Realizing that women need insight and support to consider IT a relevant career path, Chap. 5 analysed schools’ attitudes and practices. Despite large variations, this showed a tendency for schools to passively trust that women made their own choices guided by the gender egalitarian culture of Norway.

Different from most studies that explore one arena or one transition, for instance from upper secondary to university, the women’s chronological narratives, analysed using an explorative analytical model guided by grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), helped to understand how women navigate the gendered landscape of IT in ways that do not always fit the traditional routes and models. Gender entered the Norwegian women’s narratives when they recounted challenges and barriers, and when describing how they engaged to develop their belonging in masculine spaces of IT. A rather different story was narrated by the foreign women, of being encouraged to study IT because it was considered suitable for women in their home countries.

Research of, as well as solutions to, the gender gap in technology have often involved an idea of conventional routes to IT as shaped by an interest in IT, preferably developed early, followed by the “proper” choices in school that leads to a higher education in IT. The unconventional pathways that proved important for many of the women might not have been reserved for women alone. However, the women’s association of IT with men greatly affected how they experienced the journey. This was evident in the women’s accounts of feeling that they were disturbing the masculine norm, making them doubt about fitting in as well as experiencing the “burden of doubt” questioning their competence. The space invader metaphor (Puwar, 2004) captures the women’s wish to participate, having the right to be there, some of them even excelling in core fields of IT competence, but still having a feeling of being not fully accepted within the masculine norm of IT.

The previous chapters illustrate how the conventional route to IT appears as a bumpy road that mainly fails to recruit young women, not the least because also the women’s environments had internalized (Berger & Luckmann, [1966] 1991) a cultural image of IT as a masculine space (Puwar, 2004). Insight into how the schools understand and deal with the disparity of women in IT shed light on their ability to act as an arena for developing women’s ambition to study IT. Some of the schools’ postfeminist assumption (Budgeon, 2015) that doing nothing is the right thing to do, explains the weak role that schools took as well as the tendency for women having to find their own pathway and for “doing IT for themselves”.

The effects of gender stereotypes remain one of the major challenges in Norway. Stereotypes still produce expectations to which activities that represent important routes to IT involves gaming and programming. Few of the women had this kind of hands-on experiences with technology. This led them to question whether they would fit in IT, and whether they could compete at all with the young men whom they assumed had already acquired competence in IT, especially programming, before higher education. These findings are nothing particularly new, nor are they unique for Norway (Margolis & Fisher, 2002; Vainionpää et al., 2019; Wong & Kemp, 2018; Yates & Plagnol, 2022). Thus, the challenges and barriers pointed to here are recognized across most of the western world where IT expertise and work are still highly male-dominated fields (Borgonovi et al., 2018; Mariscal et al., 2019). This, however, also raises the important question, of why things are not improving, not even in a gender egalitarian culture such as the Norwegian. Although we should not assume that reasons for gender gaps in IT are the same today as they were 20 or 30 years ago, it seems as if the world of digitalization and emerging technologies are constantly changing, while the gender patterns are stuck with women tuned to being underrepresented in numbers as well as in cultural images of IT.

While some of the stories about explicit gender discrimination in fields of IT shared by the women are certainly discouraging, we should perhaps be even more troubled by the stories of how doing nothing appears as the best solution, by actors who trust that the national gender equality norm has already done the job. Such stories fail to capture the importance of being invited and initiated in the secret masculine spaces of IT for the women, the turning points that put IT on their agenda.

The insights into the schools’ responses to gender patterns in IT, along with their role in encouraging women to choose gender untraditional technology education discussed in previous chapters, give insights into how not only women should be a target group for initiatives aiming at fixing the disparity in IT. Other actors such as schools should also be included as target groups for such initiatives, as their attitudes, actions, or lack of action also shape the women’s experiences of IT. It is vital to look beyond women’s educational choices to find the necessary answers and solutions to the challenge of gender equality policy losing its guiding quality as it rather takes on the impression of being a description of society instead (Ahmed, 2012). This suggests that educational authorities hold a key role in facilitating and providing guidelines for improving the gender balance in fields of technology.

Here we have the possibility to learn from women who did succeed in finding their way to IT. Below I will sum up the main lessons from the women’s space invader (Puwar, 2004) experiences, as they described not only barriers but also events representing turning points for putting IT on their agenda, and how their reconstructed images of IT opens for a more inclusive image of IT experts. Furthermore, the chapter will discuss how this field is riddled with paradoxes and a counter-productive postfeminist reaction that results in a non-performative (Ahmed, 2012) gender equality norm. Finally, the chapter will consider the women’s experiences as a foundation for action points that a wider ecosystem can engage in to improve the gender disparity in IT.

Space Invader Lessons: Barriers, Turning Points, and Reconstructions

The previous chapters have explored how and why women find a route to IT, focusing on the events and people that contribute as positive drivers. However, we have also seen that spaces of IT appear as populated by men and shaped by a male storyline that contributes to expectations not only of who are participating, but also of what the “proper” routes to IT should include, such as gaming and programming as pre-study activities. The women’s chronological narratives illustrated how most of them as teenagers with references to these assumptions, had considered IT a male space, and therefore their engagement in IT had been far from straightforward. The women’s chronological journeys from childhood to IT education at university through this unfamiliar landscape were characterized by gendered barriers that had made them doubt their choice, turning points that had put them on a route to IT, and ways of reconstructing images of IT as they negotiated their own participation and belonging. The main findings relating to these three phases of experiencing barriers, turning points, and reconstructions are illustrated in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1 Space invader lessons identifying barriers, turning points, and reconstructions
Full size table

Barriers The barriers identified here are related to the cultural and stereotypical gendering of IT. This shapes the women’s space invader experiences of disturbing the masculine norm of IT. However, it also affects the women’s environments and potential supporters, such as schools. The main barrier for early ambitions in the direction of IT is the young women’s lack of knowledge about IT, which makes few of them consider IT as a relevant study choice at secondary school and when advancing to university. While IT is relatively invisible at school, once it is put on the agenda, it initially appears through gender stereotypes for most of the Norwegian women. Thus, gender stereotypes presenting IT as a masculine space further inhibit young women’s ambition to enter fields of IT, making them question whether they will fit in and causing them to doubt their competence. Further adding challenges to imagining themselves working in IT was the relative invisibility of women and female role models in IT. The absence of images of women succeeding in IT made women question their belonging and, for some, this also created a feeling of being “alone” or being the first woman in the field. Most of the women, including those who did develop an early interest in IT, experienced little support in building knowledge and interest, and in finding the (best) route to IT. Absence can be difficult to identify, however the women’s pathways are to a large degree shaped by absence; by their lack of insight and knowledge about IT, missing invitations to learn about IT, missing adequate guidance and lack of support, and of not being recruited when moving from lower to higher secondary, and when entering university. These gaps of insight and support impacted their pathways, resulting in the delayed entry or a detour that sent many women on a first round of studying something else before discovering IT as their preferred choice. For some this felt like a penalty round that they, quite literally, paid a high price for. Although women’s experiences in IT gradually challenged and changed their perception of gender stereotypes, they then also faced gender barriers. More particularly, women faced the “burden of doubt” as “bodies out of place” who were disturbing the norm in masculine spaces of IT (Puwar, 2004). Even some of the most skilled women could sometimes feel that they had to prove their competence, simply because they had the wrong bodily cue for appearing as an expert in, for instance, programming.

Turning points The turning points identified also reflect how the women move through the gendered landscape of IT in specific ways. Lack of knowledge about IT was a major barrier, and this is reflected by the most important turning point common for all the women: gaining insight in IT. Hands-on experience, in particular with regard to programming, was crucial for making the women start thinking about IT as a relevant and interesting study for themselves. The women recalled this experience as a surprise in which they realized that programming was nothing like the boring spreadsheets they remembered from school. Programming was completely different from all other school subjects, as Anna explained, and therefore it was impossible to know from school experience whether or not you would be good at programming. While programming for most of the women still was the one area of IT where they would not take up the competition with men that they assumed to be more skilled, being initiated in the magic world of programming was also the one thing that several of the women recalled as the moment they were “hooked” and realized that studying IT was their highest dream. Thus, programming, often assumed to scare women away from IT (Denning, 2004), was one of the activities that most clearly had triggered many of the women’s interest in IT, as a special and new competence promising an empowerment through new ways of producing and controlling technology.

Another important turning point for the women was the realization that IT is relevant for nearly any field and occupation, from being an artist to being interested in “the world”. Struggling with the gendering of IT, most of the women also appreciated meeting female role models. Seeing women as equal participants in IT and role models helping them to deal with the cultural contradiction of being a girl and being interested in technology, represented important turning points. While few of the women had been recruited through the more conventional channels of education, most of them came to higher IT education through less conventional pathways, brought there by their interest in another field or discipline. They entered via a detour that for some was a necessary period of development, while for others it marked a penalty round, and a surprisingly large group of women came to IT as a result of random events. These alternative pathways allowed women to enter IT via less masculine spaces.

In common for the turning points that made the women start thinking about IT as a potential career was the input of new insight by seeing, hearing, or learning about technology. Some women had several sources and experienced a gradual development of interest, while others, particularly those who had never previously thought about studying IT, often recalled an event that resulted in a dramatic change as if a rocket had transported them to a new place. The events that had a particular strong effect such as recruitment initiatives targeting girls, illustrate the power of seeing female role models—women who not only succeed but also enjoy working with technology and who have solved the conflict between being a girl and pursuing an interest in technology. The power of being initiated in this new image of technology was illustrated by the dramatic change of direction for some of the women, from a more gender-traditional education to technology.

Reconstructions The women’s initial space invader experiences of participating but not fully belonging, gradually developed into more of an insider position as they challenged the gendering of IT. Their reconstructions of IT reflect the positions they found available. Despite the fascination for programming expressed by many of the women, this remained a field marked by the male storyline of the young men who developed this skill at an early age. Most of the women rather redefined interest from IT to an interest in other disciplines and fields when defining their own engagement and belonging in IT. While mathematics and sciences were important for many of the women, probably because these disciplines were obligatory for many of the IT degrees, the women also included social science, humanities, and arts in the backgrounds that justified their entry into IT. The target for their interest was not limited to IT but was much wider, even including “the world”, as one of the women symbolically described it. Reflecting the unconventional pathways that involved detours via other fields, a notable group of women had their first university experience in a field other than technology. Ranging from life sciences to social science, economy, humanities, and the arts, this meant that many of the women developed a multi- and cross-disciplinary competence profile in IT. Finally, the women also challenged the hegemonic cultural images of IT experts by actively claiming space and making themselves visible as women in spaces of IT. This contributed to reconstructing IT from a narrow space associated with men to a more open and inclusive space, often reflecting the women’s experiences at university where they found IT environments that included “normal people” and “people like me”. The women’s narratives guide a reconstruction of IT in which traditional images of IT competence as gendered are challenged by their translation of a wider set of competences into relevant backgrounds for IT.

The women’s pathways illustrate that taking for granted elements such as early interest in IT, technology-related leisure activities, or even school as an important recruitment arena, risk overlooking other factors guiding women towards IT. This risk also applies to research that focus on interest, self-efficacy, and value related to technology alone, thus failing to see the translations and reconstructions that were vital for women’s participation in IT.

The women’s narratives also illustrate that women are not alone in navigating the gendered landscape of IT. While the women described a series of barriers for developing an early interest in IT, the school representatives had a more ambivalent understanding of girls’ relationship with technology, similar to an ambivalent attitude to women in IT also found among representatives for IT organizations (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a). While fully agreeing with gender equality and increasing women’s participation in fields of IT as a goal, they observed that women made other choices and thus started to doubt women’s interest. In the case of some schools this resulted in a strategy of sorting girls by (assumed) interest in IT, while the same view sometimes developed into a doubt about women’s competence in the IT sector (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a), reflecting the power of the hooded-gamer storyline. For schools as well as IT employers, the tendency to assume that these patterns reflected girls’ and women’s choices made doing nothing to recruit girls and women appear the right thing to do.

Lacking support, the women had therefore themselves been instrumental in finding their way into IT. They also had an important role in making IT a space more welcoming for women after entering higher education. Many of them had experienced being one among few or perhaps even the only woman in an IT class or at a conference. Such situations threaten to make women appear as a “token” (Kanter, [1977] 1993), making them visible as a woman while facing the “burden of doubt” as a professional (Faulkner, 2009; Puwar, 2004). The narratives that the women shared, however, rather showed their energy put into turning this into a positive situation; challenging the masculine space of IT by raising their hand to claim women’s visibility in male-dominated spaces of IT, raising their voice to make sure that everybody realized that women were present. These actions were triggered by a space invader experience of feeling like an insider but still facing exclusion as members of a group not representing the bodily norm (Puwar, 2004). When challenging the disciplining power of the gender norm, they recognized this not only as an act on behalf of themselves, but also as a strategy for making women as a group visible and as an act of empowering women in technology (Corneliussen, 2021b).

Paradoxes, Postfeminism, and a Non-performative Policy

The women’s narratives demonstrate that being a woman had consequences for how they perceived and approached IT. These consequences were not experienced in any random place, but in the midst of a culture recognized as one of the most gender egalitarian in the world (World Economic Forum, 2020b), and in a nation with a high level of commitment to gender equality (Larsen et al., 2021; Teigen & Skjeie, 2017). When considering the women’s experiences of IT and the school representatives’ reflections about their role in supporting women to study IT, there are several contradictions appearing, some of which are captured in the notion of a gender equality paradox. The paradox points to the mismatch between assumptions of gender equality already in place in society and continuous gender segregation in education and working life, reflected, for instance, in the low level of gender diversity in the tech workforce (Ellingsæter, 2014; Minelgaite et al., 2020). In international studies this has been labelled a Nordic paradox, pointing to how the recognized gender-egalitarian and affluent Nordic countries have a more extreme gender segregation than countries recognized as less gender egalitarian and less affluent (Chow & Charles, 2019; Minelgaite et al., 2020; Stoet & Geary, 2018).

As I have discussed earlier (Corneliussen, 2021a), international analysis of the Nordic gender equality paradox often rely on a particular rhetoric such as using the national gender equality regime as a reference point for analysing individuals’ choices. Where the nation succeeds in proving a high level of gender equality, it appears as if women fail to exploit the same freedom of gender equality (Charles & Bradley, 2006). Furthermore, women’s gender traditional career choices have been interpreted as a reflection of the national affluence giving less economic strain and therefore leading to lower career ambitions compared to women in less affluent countries (Stoet & Geary, 2018). Since the national gender equality is already seen to be in place, this triggers a postfeminist notion of gender barriers already being removed, thus suggesting that free choices, rather than societal structures, explain women’s continuous gender traditional study and career choices (Budgeon, 2015; Corneliussen, 2021a). My suggestion here is by no means to do away with gender equality; however, the rhetoric of the gender equality paradox is problematic for several reasons. It simplifies the situation and produces an uneven analytical frame measuring the nation already celebrated as a superpower of gender equality (Larsen et al., 2021) against individuals’ choices, which then appear to be responsible for the continuous gender segregation. Furthermore, the rhetoric risks to make a causal connection between facts that exist together but may not necessarily explain each other, such as national affluence and women’s career choices (Corneliussen, 2021a). Similar to findings in Sweden, the women studying IT are a rather homogenous group with a high degree of social and educational capital (Engström, 2018) with education to at least degree level. In addition, most of them also have highly educated parents. Furthermore, the high proportion of women students in higher education, including in high-status disciplines (The Norwegian Universities and Colleges Admission Service, 2022), does not support an image of Norwegian (affluent) women having less career ambition.

The rhetoric of the gender equality paradox was echoed in some of the views expressed by school representatives. The schools supported the ideal of gender equality; however, one of the characteristics revealed in the interviews was the schools’ divergent views. Thus, while some assumed that girls could become interested in IT, others rather believed that turning girls interest towards IT was an impossible task. This resulted in divergent views on whether or not to focus on gender, and conflicting perceptions of the school’s role and responsibility to intervene in girls’ and women’s career choices. Some schools’ practice of sorting girls by interest had the paradoxical consequence that girls’ and young women’s greatest chance of receiving support and encouragement to learn about IT was if they were already considered to be interested in IT.

The women’s narratives suggest a different experience, not only of gender stereotypes as challenging their participation, but also of not recalling being invited to learn about IT at secondary school. Several of the women suggested that they could have been recruited to IT sooner if only they had been invited to learn about it earlier. The mismatch between the women’s and some of the schools’ interpretations of the situation demonstrate that women’s choice of pursuing a career in IT should not be considered an isolated act. Rather, it needs to be understood in the context of how, among other things, some schools hesitated to focus on gender differences and the resulting negative circle made it less likely for girls to become initiated in IT (see Fig. 5.1). Furthermore, the conflicting views, which become visible in the different interpretations of the situation by women and some of the school representatives, illustrate a tendency for gender equality to change from being a political goal to becoming a description of society. This made it less important to deal with gender inequalities, thus affecting schools as potential supporters. A similar effect was found among IT employers that also questioned the possibility of making change, which affected their willingness and ability to address existing gender inequalities in IT jobs (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a). In these examples the postfeminist assumption of gender barriers being removed (Budgeon, 2015) translates gender equality into freedom, including the notion of free choice that neither should nor could be forced (Snickare & Holter, 2021). This way it appears more important to support and protect the choices that girls and women make regarding their careers, even gender-traditional choices, than to try changing them (Corneliussen, 2021a; Ellingsæter, 2014). Thus, the passive responses found both among schools and in other contexts of technology (Corneliussen & Prøitz, 2016; Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a) illustrate how the postfeminist myth has become performative in the shape of a narrative that makes it possible for gender differences to be ignored, even in the context of the gender-egalitarian Nordic countries. The passive responses to gender differences can thus coexist in harmony with the widely accepted gender equality norm (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a).

The conflicting perspectives suggest that the gender equality paradox cannot be explained in the light of girls and women’s career choices alone. Instead, a wider context, including other groups’ attitudes and actions that affect the young women’s career choices, also need to be considered as a part of the explanation. The evidence in the previous chapters suggest that it is not women’s low ambitions or lack of interest in IT that leads to their low level of participation in IT, but rather the stereotypes and lack of support leading their pathways towards detours and penalty rounds.

The discrepancy between the gender equality ideal and a reality of continuous gender segregation has made researchers ask if gender equality is an illusion (Sund, 2015). Others have pointed to the ironic effect of gender equality measures (Kaiser et al., 2013) that, when simply by existing, make it appear as if the problem is solved (Ahmed, 2012). The ironic effect makes it even more difficult to intervene when facing structures and practices that continue to reproduce gender inequality (Kaiser et al., 2013). This is one of the mechanisms producing a gap between well-meaning gender equality policies on the one side, and practices that are inhibited and constrained by a myth of gender equality already in place, on the other side. This inextricable and endless circle is hard to break because the policy itself seems to feed the myth. This is illustrated, for instance, in the schoolteacher’s assumption that interventions to make girls interested in technology are superfluous since the national situation of equal opportunities in the end makes this a question of girls’ preferences to pursue their free choice. It reflects what Ahmed calls a non-performative gender equality policy, which, simply by naming the goal, appears to have solved the challenge (2012). A new paradox appears, in which the national gender equality norm has lost its disciplining power, while the postfeminist myth has gained the power to guide schoolteachers as well as others (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a).

The discrepancy between gender equality policy and practice has led to many contradictions for women in the Nordic countries, where, on the one hand, there is a strong public discourse emphasizing the importance of increasing women’s participation in fields of technology, while, on the other hand, women remain a minority in both traditional and new emerging tech-focused work environments (Griffin, 2022). The gap between policy and practice has been identified as a major factor contributing to ongoing gender inequality in the Nordic countries (Griffin & Vehviläinen, 2021).

Reconstructing Motivation with Interest as Key

Interest has been identified as a key for recruitment to IT. Above we have seen examples of schools relying on interest in IT as a prerequisite for being invited to learn about IT. In research, interest has also been an important feature for evaluating women’s motivation to study IT (Cheryan et al., 2015; Lang et al., 2020; Master et al., 2016). Furthermore, interest is often seen in relation to ability, belief and how well women expect to master the core tasks, the value they assign those tasks, and whether gender stereotypes affect women’s sense of belonging (Eccles, 2009; Master & Meltzoff, 2020; Sáinz & Eccles, 2012). In a study of identity expression threat, referring to a concern about inconsistency between gender identity and the identity expressed by study choice, Cheryan and colleagues found that this threat made it more likely for women than for men to downplay their interest in computer science (2019). The women’s narratives, to a large degree, confirm theories of women downplaying the traditional interest in IT activities. However, instead of describing a weak or even missing interest for technology, the women’s narratives point towards a very different understanding of what interest in technology can be.

Exploring the narratives through the metaphor of the space invader highlights how the ways in which the women reconfigure the field reflect a response to the masculine norm of IT, including their redefinition of relevant interests for engaging in IT. By relating to a wider set of disciplines the women have expanded the target from a narrow interest in IT to nearly any discipline. While the space invader experiences highlighted how the women came to disturb the masculine norm of IT, the women identified other types of background competence and interest. This new landscape leading to IT, one in which gender stereotypes are less exclusive and limiting, opens the possibilities for a wider set of backgrounds having relevance for IT, and also makes it possible to target a wider set of potential students.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are often treated as one in discussions of gender disparities and recruitment. The findings here, however, suggest that there is something quite different going on when women make choices to enter fields of IT compared to other STEM subjects that they are familiar with from school. Vrieler and Salminen-Karlsson’s study of computer science teaching and learning environments suggest that this has to do with the different “types of capital that are considered legitimate” in computer science compared to natural sciences (Vrieler & Salminen-Karlsson, 2022, p. 44). The women’s chronological narratives confirm that few of them had access to the types of capital necessary for putting them early on a route to IT. This also helps to explain the importance of the wider set of backgrounds engaged in the women’s narratives. Thus, instead of comparing themselves to the masculine stereotype portrayed through the hooded gamer-storyline, the women described their interest in IT through a wide set of disciplines and engagements, not all of them directly related to technology, and few referring to early interest in IT, and even less to gaming. Establishing their competence and interest in a different field, a discipline they already knew, allowed the women to hold on to something safe and recognizable, while entering the unfamiliar field of IT. Here they could also establish their ability belief and self-efficacy in a field in which they already had a high level of confidence. Although many of the women found their safe platform within mathematics or sciences, it was not limited to STEM disciplines, but also included humanities, economy, law, life sciences, and the arts, all of which were used for declaring their interest in studying IT. Most of the women expressed an interest in technology as being applicable to nearly any aspect of work and life. Thus, Ingrid had become interested in studying IT when she realized that she could “work with society, but also with technology”, and Marte had found that programming “ticks all her boxes” since she wanted to become an author, and Ellen saw her interest in IT as an interest in the world, because “technology is a large part of the world”.

The women’s reconstructed notion of interest that leads to studying IT highlights how a narrow perspective of interest tied to IT risks excluding these wider notions of interest. As Marte reminds us, a wider definition of interest, such as her reference to creative writing, does not exclude an interest in core fields of IT such as programming. Another characteristic for the women was that many of them had initially chosen a more gender-traditional education before experiencing this moment of change. A large group of the Norwegian women had started, or even completed, a higher degree before entering an IT degree. This suggests an explanation to a tendency for women working in IT to have more education than men working in IT, yet at the same time less education in IT than their male colleagues (BCS, 2019). This also illustrates a tendency for women to develop a hybrid competence, where they bring their competence in another field into IT. The multi- and cross-disciplinary competence profiles that women acquire as a consequence of pathways involving alternative platforms and detours, can be a good fit for the competence needed in the ongoing digitalization. Emerging fields such as AI, e-health, robotics, and cybersecurity also increase the need for cross-disciplinary knowledge in the IT sector (BCS, 2019). The women identifying their interest in society and in the world should be a good fit for fields such as AI that is no longer isolated to problems explored in computer labs, but have rather found their way into all corners of society (Castañeda-Navarrete et al., 2023; United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 2021). Furthermore, the lack of diversity among IT experts is recognized as one factor producing gender bias in, for instance, AI algorithms (Barbieri et al., 2022; Corneliussen et al., 2023). A more diverse IT workforce is necessary to ensure that the technology can reflect the needs of people across society (Palmer, 2021). The multi- and cross-disciplinary competence that the women exemplify can be of high value in the emerging tech fields that will need a huge number of professionals in the years to come.

Herein also lies a large potential for recruiting girls and women to IT and new emerging fields of tech work, as the women’s narratives demonstrate that they can be invited to IT based on nearly any field of interest. Though, as women still experience gender barriers to their participation in technology, this means that interest in IT alone is neither a guarantee for making women pursue a career in IT, nor is it a requirement for doing so. This has consequences for strategies for recruiting girls and women. It also has consequences for researchers, as limiting the study to a narrow interest in IT and hegemonic routes to studying technology risks overlooking the space invader experiences that make many women move through the gendered landscape of technology in unexpected and unconventional ways.

Doing IT Together with the Ecosystem

Research has provided ample evidence of how relevant actors, including friends, family, school, and IT companies, affect girls’ and women’s study and career choices (Eccles, 2015; Lang et al., 2020; Wong & Kemp, 2018). The main challenge today, however, seems to be that many of these potential supporters renounce their responsibility, such as the professor we met in Chap. 1, suggesting that there is nothing they can do, and the schoolteacher in Chap. 5 claiming that girls make their choices based on girlfriends, doubting that their career preferences can be changed, or the IT professional suggesting that perhaps it is not so important to recruit women if they are not interested in IT (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2020a). The study involving schools illustrated a lack of coherent responses to issues of gender differences in technology. This is not unique to Norway, however. Despite the recognition of how gender stereotypes affect youths’ career choices across Europe, education institutions struggle “when implementing inclusion policies”, the European Commission claim, due to a “lack of clear guidelines” for how to deal with these challenges (2021a, p. 29).

While recommendations for inclusion activities and measures have been provided for decades, and in a multitude of ways and formats, on national and international arenas (Castañeda-Navarrete et al., 2023; Pawluczuk et al., 2021), the evidence shared here and in other studies (Griffin, 2022) suggest that the main challenge today is the gap between policy and practice. The women’s narratives, as well as schools and other actors’ attitudes to the gender disparity in IT, point to how the potential supporters—those who should have been first in line to motivate girls and women—have doubt about women’s interest in IT. Contrary to the passive strategy we have seen here, research has demonstrated that reaching goals of gender equality requires long-term and systematic engagement and investment in the goals of gender diversity for companies (Dixon-Fyle et al., 2020) and for academia (Lagesen et al., 2021). Schools can also become a resource for making young people choose non-traditional educations; however, this also requires a comprehensive and targeted engagement (Reisel et al., 2019).

The concept of ecosystem has been used to emphasize that a diverse set of actors such as family, educators, policymakers, and others are needed to develop an inclusive environment for recruiting girls into male-dominated STEM disciplines (Sammet & Kekelis, 2016; Traphagen & Traill, 2014). Involving a wider set of actors from across sectors and industries can support the need to present a wide set of role models, tasks, and values related to technology (Cheryan et al., 2013).

Thus, the challenge at hand is not about changing girls, but rather about strengthening the engagement and investment in these issues from a wide range of actors, from education to the private and public sectors, that can contribute to creating more diverse and inclusive images of what IT is, what it is used for, and who the IT experts are (Corneliussen & Seddighi, 2019; Talks et al., 2019). Thus, the ecosystem could change the situation that is reflected in the experiences of the women having to identify the pathway to IT on their own, to a situation where girls and women are invited to “doing IT together” with supportive actors in their ecosystem. The barriers, turning points, and reconstructions identified in the women’s chronological narratives can help to identify some basic guidelines for developing a more gender-inclusive future.

Learning points from the women’s experiences of barriers include the importance of inviting girls to learn about IT. Provide them with less gender-stereotypical narratives of technology. Encourage and support them (even if they do not initially express interest). Promote female role models and images of women in technology. Make sure to fight gender bias in tech education and work.

Important lessons from the turning points suggest again that invitation to learn about IT is key, hands-on experiences in particular, and that filtering women based on an assumed interest in IT will filter out potential targets. Facilitating images of IT as relevant for nearly anything can reach a wider group of women, and probably a wider group of men as well. Promoting images of women who not only succeed but also enjoy technology can make the field more welcoming for girls. Recognizing that it is never too early and never too late to recruit women to IT means that all relevant actors have a job to do.

Learning points from women’s reconstructions also involve the varied set of competences they bring to IT, as this reflects multi- and cross-disciplinary competences that will be needed in the fields of emerging technologies. Finally, the women’s participation in IT support the development and promotion of images of IT experts as a more diverse and inclusive group, disconnected from the masculine stereotype.

The postfeminist challenge of not seeing the need for action is still the biggest threat to future gender equality in IT. With this in mind, the list below offers six rules of thumb for any actors within young women’s tech-related ecosystem:

  • Do not underestimate young women’s fascination for technology, however, do not overestimate their insight.

  • Do not underestimate the effect of inviting, encouraging, and supporting women to become familiar with IT.

  • Not doing anything different from before will not produce change.

  • Claiming not to make any difference between the genders (being “gender-blind”) will often mean that gender-discriminating practices can continue undetected.

  • Claiming that there are no women applying to IT jobs indicates that you did not look where women are.

  • Claiming that it is someone else’s job to make girls and women interested in IT is true, but it is also your (and everybody’s) responsibility.

The International Picture

While the analysis here was based on studies performed in Norway between 2018 and 2021, they reflect challenges recognized in large parts of the world. The underrepresentation of women in technology is found across the western world (Barbieri et al., 2020; Eurostat, 2021c); however, it is not universal. More women find their way to computing fields in particular in Asian countries and former Soviet states (Charles & Bradley, 2006).

Using Norway as an example has provided insight into how a recognized gender-egalitarian culture (Teigen & Skjeie, 2017; World Economic Forum, 2020b) still struggles with a continuous gender imbalance in IT education and work. Women’s underrepresentation in IT, as well as most of the challenges described by the women in this book, have also been observed in other western countries (Arnold et al., 2021; Holtzblatt & Marsden, 2022). Gender stereotypes, gendered cultures and structures have been identified as barriers for women’s participation across the western world (Chavatzia, 2017; Cheryan et al., 2015; Cohoon & Aspray, 2006; Frieze & Quesenberry, 2015; Frieze & Quesenberry, 2019; Turkle, 1988; Wajcman, 2004; Watts, 2009). The challenge of identifying and developing girls’ and young women’s early interest in and ambition to study technology has also been identified (Borgonovi et al., 2018; Master et al., 2016; Master & Meltzoff, 2020; Yates & Plagnol, 2022), and the same is the case with women’s fear about facing more skilled male students (Margolis & Fisher, 2002; Yates & Plagnol, 2022). A lack of support and school being experienced as an irrelevant arena for developing an ambition to study IT has been demonstrated in other Nordic countries (Engström, 2018) and also in the UK (Alshahrani et al., 2018). The low proportion of women working in IT has resulted in a lack of female role models in most western countries (Cheryan et al., 2009; González-Pérez et al., 2020), which has made it difficult for many women to identify with the field (Lang et al., 2020). Women’s tendency to have varied educational backgrounds when entering fields of IT has also been identified in the UK (BCS, 2019). Among the less-documented features internationally is the wide set of interests that the women’s reconstructed image of IT involved, although this might also rely on a trend to focus on a narrow interest in STEM disciplines when exploring women’s motivation. One challenge identified internationally is related to women’s larger part of care work and challenges relating to their work–life balance (Barbieri et al., 2018), which did not appear as a challenge in the Norwegian women’s chronological narratives. Furthermore, the Norwegian women did not report on equally negative experiences as Michell et al. found in Australia, of being “chased away from [computer science] as part of a border protection campaign by some males” (Michell et al., 2017). Thus, a consideration of the international situation of women experiencing similar barriers suggests that the knowledge produced in this book can provide some answers to this mystery, not only in the case of the Nordic countries but also across the western world.

Closing Reflections: The Untapped Potential

Women are not a homogenous group. They have different backgrounds, interests, and histories, and they find different pathways to IT education. Women’s relationships with IT are not similar, and they are not excluded nor included in exactly the same way (Dee, 2021). The many different IT disciplines represented among the women are not uniform either. But there is still a consistent pattern showing that most young women growing up in Norway do not think of IT as a potential educational option in the transition from secondary school to higher education. This remains the pattern until something happens and IT is put on their horizon as an option also for women; also for them. Most of the women had not chosen IT education because they were encouraged by someone, but rather despite the many small and large barriers, including the lack of support that they had encountered. These included their association of IT with boys and men, or, alternatively, as a boring school subject; knowing little about IT educations and professions, expecting them to be populated by men that they assumed would have more knowledge about IT than themselves. This even made them question whether or not they needed IT skills before applying to an IT degree. These were amongst the things that made them doubt they would fit in a world where “you only see men”. To top the list of challenges, few of the women recalled having been encouraged or motivated by people around them or at school, which also reflect some of the schools’ hesitancy to focus on gender differences. As the list of barriers is based on the experiences of women who already studied or worked with IT, there are reasons to assume that it would look at least as gloomy among women who never chose to study IT. Thus, this suggests that the right question might not be why there are few women in IT, but rather how women still find their way into IT education despite all these barriers.

In the end, the mystery that motivated this book, of how to create efficient and lasting initiatives to increase women’s participation in fields of IT, appears to be less about women’s lack of interest in studying IT and more to do with their experiences when traversing the gendered landscape of technology. Furthermore, in the larger picture it has more to do with gender equality having turned into a myth and a description of society, and a non-performative policy that feeds passivity, rather than women’s lack of career ambition. The suggestion here is not to take gender equality off the political map, but rather to identify ways of making gender equality become an operative value that makes schools and other potential supporters put in an effort in making girls and women see fields of IT as being as inviting for them as it is for boys and men. And it is not really a mystery how to make IT more welcoming for women, if we are to believe some of the women who contributed their chronological narratives to this book, such as Berit suggesting that “it is really just about advertising it, having proper information about what it is, and to mention that it is not as difficult as many may think”. This, however, applies to the Norwegian women. Those foreign women who had been encouraged to study IT because it was suitable for women, contribute to underlining the cultural construction of the Norwegian women’s experiences. On a positive note, this suggests that the gender–technology relation can indeed be different. On a more negative note, even the women who had grown up in cultures which encouraged young women to associate themselves with a career in IT started to question their belonging in IT after meeting the male-dominated IT departments at Norwegian universities.

The many detours, penalty rounds, and random events are examples of many different routes that have led women into IT education. Despite not initially recognizing an interest in IT, many of the women described how a random event had fuelled their fascination, great joy, and becoming “hooked”, once they started learning more about IT. This not only points to how insight is key, but also suggests a large pool of untapped potential for recruiting women to IT studies. The greatest loss is likely among those women who never considered studying IT because they never acquired the insight that made them able to bridge the seemingly contradictory positions of being a girl and also being interested in IT. One notable challenge is that the experiences that made the women change their perception of IT as a more open space do not seem to have much retrospective power: these insights had not been available for the women before they entered university. Paradoxically, for many of the women it was the pathways that took them on a detour that made them able to identify IT as their dream education. For some of the women, the detour was important in terms of preparing them for entering what they perceived as a masculine space of IT, such as Signe, who thought that she was not tough enough to do that when she was still a teenager. For others, the detour was rather a penalty round, an extra round they had to go because they had not been initiated in the magical world of IT during secondary school.

Are we now any closer to solving the mystery of how to increase women’s participation in fields of IT? The women’s message is clear: cultural images of gender, including stereotypes, matter for their ability to imagine themselves in a career in technology. Reviewed evidence suggests that in the current situation of IT being still strongly associated with men and perceived as a masculine space, girls and women need support and input for starting to see IT as a place where they can participate and thrive. Thus, while IT continues to be dressed up in gender stereotypes, targeting girls and women will remain important because traversing the gendered landscape of IT involves different challenges for women and men (Sultan et al., 2019). It is not unusual to assume that gender segregation in educational choices is a result of individual choices (Snickare & Holter, 2021); however, it is necessary to recognize the underrepresentation of women in IT as a structural problem that needs structural solutions (Ahmed, 2012). One route to a more gender-inclusive digital future involves an ecosystem of supporters for young women. The ecosystem, however, also needs support and better guidelines for becoming active champions for gender equality in fields of technology (European Commission, 2021a).

Some of the most interesting insights developed in the studies reported here have come from the encounters with women who never had imagined to study IT and still ended up there, such as Gro, who made a blind choice and now holds a PhD in IT. Reflecting their gendered journey of coming into spaces of IT as outsiders—lacking the expected background associated with boys and men, several of these women found support in character of Pippi Longstocking, the strongest girl in the world, from the children books by Astrid Lindgren. Pippi was herself an outsider who was disturbing the social norms guiding other children her age, finding most ordinary activities quite unfamiliar. However, she was never afraid of taking on new challenges, and it is this courage the women evoke when quoting the motto reflecting Pippi’s take on life: “I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that”.

There are still many unanswered questions of how to create a more gender-inclusive digital future. This book provides some answers, pointing to the responsibility of a wide ecosystem of parents, educators, policymakers, IT specialists and others for supporting, inviting, and encouraging girls and women to think of IT as equally open for them as it was for boys and men. This requires us to stop thinking of the gender equality norm as productive for our everyday life and rather starting to ask how our everyday activities can contribute to enacting gender equality. Meanwhile, many women are doing IT for themselves, some with support from Pippi, as if the strongest girl in the world and her disregard for reserved spaces and unfamiliar skills can help to shatter the masculine norm of IT.