A bit of good news during the November gloom: in the past week we had the offer of a contract from Policy Press (UK) for a book entitled Gender Inequalities in Tech-Driven Research and Innovation: Living the Contradiction which will deal with much of the research and many of the findings of our work in Nordwit. The book is likely to be published in the spring of 2022, so just when or immediately after our 5 years of Nordwit have finished. Writing it will keep us occupied during the next few months.
Among the issues that will be discussed in this volume is the question of how women arrive in tech-driven professions. Clearly at present we live in an age of workplace transformation as a function of the increasing technologization of workplaces. We have all found this during covid-19 when the need to work online – for those who can – has become paramount. For some this means that in the foreseeable future they will not return to an office; indeed, they may never. Simultaneously in many countries the acceleration of online retail etc. has changed both producer and consumer behaviour significantly. As I write this, one of the largest retail chains in the UK, Arcadia, is about to call in the receivers, with a potential loss of some 13,000 jobs. One reason for this business collapse is the massive move from offline to online shopping. For the 13,000 people whose job is at risk the immediate question is, where will they find new work? And what sort of skills will they need to make it in the new technologized/-ing workplaces? As we (still) struggle with zoom, even after months of self-taught adaptation to the new work situation, we note that many of us now inhabit technologized work places that were analogue in the past. This also means that our adaptation to our technologized work places has occurred in a context where we were not specifically trained for this.
Some of the studies in Nordwit have shown that women in particular arrive in technologized work places and work in tech-driven careers without necessarily having been educated or trained for this. They therefore do not make the education statistics (e.g. OECD) that detail the gendered structures of education. This also means that these statistics do not necessarily predict accurately what happens subsequently in people’s working lives. And: many jobs that are highly technologized are not necessarily labelled as such: the work of a university lecturer now is significantly different from what it was even a year ago. Covid-19 has certainly changed the world of work.
Gabriele Griffin
NORDWIT 