Exploring antecedents of gender equitable outcomes in IT higher education

Abstract

This research-in-progress paper reports on a National Science Foundation funded project aimed at examining ways to engage women and girls in courses of study that will qualify and motivate them for information technology (IT)-related careers. This Information Technology Work Force (ITWF) award provides support to investigate 15 tertiary education programs in information systems, information science, instructional systems technology, and informatics, with computer science programs as a baseline comparison, in five major IT degree-granting institutions. The purpose of the study is to systematically investigate the contribution of organizational culture to student experiences and outcomes, determining factors that favor female success over time.The programs are hypothesized to be differentially responsive to female students due to differences in academic culture, operationalized in terms of the availability of mentorship, role models, peer support networks, grant programs, and other resources at the departmental, university, and disciplinary levels. These measures of organizational culture will be correlated with measures of student outcomes and self-reports of student experiences. Data about students' experiences will be collected through a web-based survey of a sample of 5,000 students, followed by three face-to-face interviews with an estimated 155 students, over-sampling for females, over a two-year period. In addition, faculty, administrators and staff in the study programs will be interviewed by telephone and in person. Student survey data will be collected by April 2004 and analyzed by May 2004.At the conference, we will report preliminary findings based on analysis of data collected from our pilot site (Indiana University).The project will identify encouraging and discouraging factors, and produce comparative statistics, that can be used as a baseline in future research on IT education and gender. Findings can be used to inform programmatic recommendations aimed at moving more women into the IT pipeline through a diverse range of educational programs. To the extent that new IT paradigms such as are taught in schools of information, informatics, education, and business help to create those cultural associations, they can contribute to reducing the persistent gender segregation in academic IT-related programs and thus IT employment.