Struggling to reclaim futures in the neoliberal university

12-13 November, along with a number of Nordwit colleagues, I participated in the Gender Studies Conference 2020, organised virtually by Tampere University and the Association for Gender Studies in Finland. The theme of the conference was Reclaiming Futures, and Nordwit coordinated, in collaboration with Maria Pietilä from NORDICORE, a four-part series of panels, titled Gendering research in and outside academia. In this blog post, I’ll reflect on what I heard at and learned from the conference, focusing on some of the challenges that scientific research and specifically feminist research currently faces.

“Which narratives can statistics tell about men and women’s participation in ICT?”

This is the question we ask in our recent article “What Can Statistics Tell About the Gender Gap in ICT? Tracing Men and Women’s Participation in the ICT Sector Through Numbers“. The aim of the article was to identify how the gender structure in ICT education and work was represented through statistics. We often associate statistics with “facts” – the pure numbers that can show how things really are. And statistics are indeed important to monitor fields, but statistics are also representations of someone’s choices of which stories to tell.

Read the full article here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-62803-1_30

Abstract

Which narratives can statistics tell about men and women’s participation in ICT? The question is relevant across the western world showing a pattern of more men than women in ICT work. This chapter presents an analysis of available statistics that contribute to an image of women’s participation in ICT work and education. The scope of the study is European countries with an emphasis on Norway, however, we also present statistics from OECD. The statistics confirm that the gender imbalance in ICT work is significant, suggesting that monitoring this field is important. The analysis also reveals challenges and gaps in the material, for instance the challenge of finding comparable numbers, a reduced use of gender as a variable in later years, difficulties in identifying the gendered structures of ICT due to a mixture of occupational fields for some of the relevant numbers, while other issues found to be relevant in qualitative studies are not represented in the available statistics. The monitoring of gendered structures of ICT work can be improved by developing statistics that better can capture inequalities and hierarchies. The findings also suggest that qualitative research is an important complement and correction to statistical overviews, in particular for identifying factors that alone and together contribute to gender inequalities in ICT.

Cite as:
Simonsen M., Corneliussen H.G. (2020) What Can Statistics Tell About the Gender Gap in ICT? Tracing Men and Women’s Participation in the ICT Sector Through Numbers. In: Kreps D., Komukai T., Gopal T.V., Ishii K. (eds) Human-Centric Computing in a Data-Driven Society. HCC 2020. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 590. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62803-1_30

Meeting innovation – business as usual?

Last week Nordwit had its annual Centre meeting including its very own Scientific Advisory Board: Thorgerdur Einarsdóttir, Hilda Rømer Christensen, Julia Nentwich, and Yvonne Benschop (who sadly couldn’t be there as she was involved in an assessment). Like many other events, this meeting over three days was held on Zoom, a facility to which we have all had to become used rather rapidly under covid conditions.

Zoom, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams have all become indispensable tools in our everyday interactional repertoire. They emblematize what N. Katherine Hayles calls ‘cognitive assemblages’ – the intra-action (in Karen Barad’s terms) of human and technology/machine which creates new forms of disciplinization. The somatic clues we use in face-to-face interactions to read what is going on in its broadest sense are greatly reduced when we use zoom. Peering at postage stamp views of each other, our interactions are slowed down – we can have discussions but they are not ‘lively’ in the conventional sense as zoomic disciplinization requires us to operate in sequential fashion. Simultaneously our bodies are coerced into a particular position vis-à-vis our computers, more restricted by the need to be available to that machine’s camera so as to be present to others. This also means that meetings need to be shorter to allow for respite from this bodily demeanor. Much has changed. We have adapted to this – but to what extent are we dealing with innovations here? We know relatively little as yet regarding how our meeting culture has changed or is changing as a function of covid – or whether/how long-term any such changes will be. There has certainly been much uptake of online meeting facilities – but will we desert them at the nearest opportunity? The joy of meeting in person when it happens remains intense. So the jury remains out.

Gabriele Griffin