National Science Foundation 01-33, Information Technology Workforce (ITWF) Proposal
Goals of the Project
This project investigates fifteen education programs in information science, information systems, instructional systems technology, and informatics, with computer science programs as a baseline, in five IT degree-granting institutions in the US, in order to determine which are most successful at recruiting and retaining female students, and what factors favor success over time. The programs are hypothesized to be differentially "friendly" to female students due to differences in academic cultures, 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. Our study will involve a systematic, large-scale investigation of the role of academic culture in relation to women's IT educational experiences over time, where culture is considered at both disciplinary and institutional levels.Previous research has identified culture as among the most important factors that discourage girls and women from studying computer science: computing is historically and conventionally associated with masculinity. This project contributes to knowledge in this area by operationalizing culture in the context of academic IT programs and systematically investigating its contribution to student experiences and outcomes. Moreover, 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, much as this project draws on findings from previous research on female students in computer science.
Findings of which factors encourage or discourage the success of women students will 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 replacing the present exclusionary masculine culture of computing in the United States with a more inclusive and diverse one.
Planned Activities
In order to determine which factors most strongly favor attracting and retaining women students to study IT, we will compare the presence or absence of a list of factors-measures of "woman friendliness" as found in previous research-with measures of student retention and success. In interpreting the results, we will relate student outcomes to the degree of "woman friendliness" of the unit, institution, and/or discipline. Student outcomes are the dependent variable, and environmental factors are the independent variables. This multivariate design will allow correlations to emerge between outcomes and individual environmental factors, as well as allow for broader interpretations in terms of the overall degree of "woman friendliness" of units, institutions, and disciplines.We will analyze students' experiences from data that we will collect through a web-based survey of approximately 5,000 students (1000 on each campus), followed by face-to-face interviews with an estimated 155 students (31 on each campus), over-sampling for females, three times over a two-year period. In addition, approximately 440 faculty, administrators and staff in the study programs will be interviewed by telephone and in person. Data collection will be supplemented by on-site ethnographic observation and collection of institutional data from publicly-available sources. We will make use of available data about the study institutions, provided such data are sufficiently current, so as not to duplicate previous data collection efforts. We will use IPEDS data for the proposed study institutions, supplemented by institutional data provided by the universities themselves. The universities will also provide information about student enrollments and outcomes.
We will also collect data about the availability of resources hypothesized to contribute to the "woman friendliness" of the institutions and programs from a variety of sources, including the World Wide Web, on-campus observation, and direct questioning of administrators and faculty at the study universities. This data collection will take place primarily during the campus visits. For each discipline, relevant data will be collected periodically from workshops, conferences, and programs targeted to women, following initial collection of statistics on women in the discipline from national professional organizations.
Key Research Questions
While a gender imbalance in computer science is still strongly evident, the prospects for women may be brighter in the growing number of IT-related professions that do not require training in computer science, but rather in cognate disciplines such as information science, management information systems, instructional systems technology, and informatics. Together, these fields train more IT professionals than does computer science, and their importance is likely to grow in the future. University-level programs in cognate IT disciplines are potentially more attractive to women than degree programs in computer science. However, as yet, few studies have focused on the experiences of female students in IT programs outside the domain of computer science. Nor has any systematic comparison been attempted of such programs to determine which are most successful at recruiting and retaining female students, or what factors favor success.Computing is historically and conventionally associated with masculinity, an association that attracts boys to computers who then become role models for other boys, creating environments in which girls feel marginalized. The abstractness of much computer science instruction exacerbates the gender bias, in that girls are more likely to be interested in real-world problem solving in contexts involving human users than in machines and programming languages per se. A related deterrent for women is that most introductory computer science courses focus on programming skills rather than concepts of computer science. Girls and women like IT, research findings suggest, but want to do something with it to improve the world; they are not satisfied with mastering computing skills for their own sake.
Applied fields such as information science, information systems, and instructional systems technology may have an advantage over computer science when it comes to attracting future female professionals. First, they are grounded in the contexts of real-world problems: business, education, information management, etc. Second, they are not as male-dominated as computer science: information science and instructional systems technology are both traditionally associated with female-dominant professions (librarianship and education, respectively), and business, although traditionally male-dominated, has been changing rapidly in this regard.
Our first hypothesis, therefore, is that more women will choose to pursue training, and have more successful educational experiences, in applied IT fields than in computer science.
Our second hypothesis is that some obstacles to gender equality will persist in cognate IT fields, but that they will vary in importance according to the disciplinary context. Specifically, we expect that fields such as information science and instructional systems technology will attract and retain more women than fields such as information systems. Informatics, as a new field lacking in traditional associations with either male or female practitioners, has the potential to attract both in equal numbers. Alternatively, it could carry over the masculine connotations of computing technology.
Our third hypothesis follows from previous research about the kinds of resources that help create more female-oriented institutional cultures. We expect that more female-friendly institutional cultures, as determined by the availability of resources such as female role models, mentoring, networking, curriculum, advising, and financial and administrative support, will produce more successful outcomes, where success is defined both in terms of the quantity of women who enter and finish IT-related educational programs, and the quality of their educational experiences.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, Award # 03050859 and by Indiana University. It has received approval by campus Human Subjects Committee, approval log 6-2403.
