Judith Glover

‘Technical, but not very….’: constructing gendered identities in IT-related employment

Changes in the nature of skilled roles in the IT sector were predicted to create new opportunities for women, yet the proportion of women in this sector is falling.This article presents findings from interviews with senior managers in organizations that are attempting to change this situation.There was little evidence from these respondents of a radical reappraisal of the cultural assumptions about jobs and considerable evidence that gendered identities at work were being constructed in traditional ways drawing on women’s perceived ‘soft skills’.‘Hybrid’ roles combining technical and traditionally female skills were seen as the way forward. These were presented as a new way for women to work in a male dominated environment without compromising their gendered identity. The article confirms and develops, in an IT context, the challenges inherent in changing gendered occupational roles and we conclude that traditional expectations and contexts persist.

Women and the Sciences in Britain: Getting In?.

Abstract We address here the issue of girls and women entering the sciences, both in terms of education and employment, focusing on the occupational outcomes of science, engineering and technology (SET) graduates. We observe that compared to other professions such as the law and medicine, womens and girls’ entry to the sciences has been slow, although we point out that the differences between the sciences in terms of numerical feminisation are considerable. We show that women and men SET graduates use their human capital in different ways in the labour market and that there has been rather little change in these patterns over the past 15 years. Women translate their scientific degrees into professional scientific jobs less than men do and also show higher levels of overqualification in the labour market. We consider the policy implications of our findings, arguing that labour market policies, not just education policies, need to receive attention.

Highly Qualified Women in the New Europe: Territorial Sex Segregation

The proportion of women in highly qualified scientific employment in central and eastern Europe and the Baltic States (CEEC-10) is higher than in western Europe. However, this relatively high representation is counteracted by unequal access to resources. This is illustrated by a new measure, the ‘honeypot indicator’. The focus of the EU ‘Lisbon strategy’ summit on increasing overall numbers of scientists does little to address the key issues of retention and advancement. Although social closure mechanisms may undermine the employment prospects of highly qualified women, the conclusion is that the accession of the CEEC-10 to the ‘mainstreaming’ of equal opportunities proclaimed by the European Union provides the best hope of improvement for their employment prospects.

Studying Working Women Cross-nationally

This collection of books uses comparison between and amongst countries to examine the issue of womens paid and unpaid work. One (Dominelli) has a broader brief: in addition to income maintenance, she examines how the welfare state in different countries treats women in the areas of family policy and health policy. In this article, I will firstly take a brief look at ways of approaching cross-national comparison. Secondly, I will consider how these books fit into existing theories of womens work.

Diversity Management Change Projects: In Need of Alternative Conceptual Approaches?

Drawing on a meta-analysis of an evaluation of a European Social Fund project aimed at enhancing employment opportunities for women in Information Technology, Electronic and Computing (ITEC), this paper critically debates how effectual a diversity management approach alone is as an underpinning rationale for change in the complex area of diversity. The paper draws on the experiences of ‘partner organizations’, gathered through interviews conducted during the evaluation stage of the project. The paper discusses some of the tensions experienced by partner organizations, thus providing new insights into why such projects are not as effectual as they might be. The paper concludes by presenting a case for the need to re-conceptualise how change as part of a wider diversity management approach might best be conceptualized. We suggest that a ‘systems approach’ could prove a more fruitful way of conceptualizing change of this nature given the inter-dependences between different organizations and institutions.

British Women in Scientific Education and Employment

This chapter reviews the entry of British girls and women into scientific education and employment in the latter half of the twentieth century. It provides detailed empirical evidence for the last decade or so of girls’ and women’s education in the sciences (abbreviated to SE this is particularly important for physics, a science which I argue needs to be seen in a different light from the others in terms of women’s place in it. Some sciences — biology and biochemistry, for example — have a high representation of women, whilst others — and here physics and engineering are clear examples — show very little encroachment by girls and women.

Exclusions: American Women of Science

In this penultimate chapter, I take Witz’s theoretical work on patriarchal exclusion in the medical profession (Witz, 1992) and apply her concepts to a key study from the USA on the history of women’s exclusion from science (Rossiter, 1982; 1995). My aim is to understand the meticulously researched detail of Rossiter’s two books in a sociological way by asking whether Witz’s categories help explain women’s relationship to science in twentieth century America. In so doing, I am trying to ‘see the wood for the trees’ and I am also asking whether Witz’s categories, developed in the context of British medical men’s exclusion of medical women, are adequate in bringing about an understanding of American women’s relationship with the sciences. These categories are: exclusionary, demarcationary, inclusionary and dual closure.

Women Scientists in France and the USA

In this chapter I look at women’s position in the sciences in two other countries: France and the USA. In my introductory chapter, I justified the choice of both the USA and France for cross-national comparison. To reiterate, the American material on women and the sciences stands out for its empirical and theoretical richness. I rely heavily on the National Science Foundation’s quantitative data, the detailed collection of which stands as a model which other countries could well follow. Another source of American historical empirical data, both qualitative and quantitative, which is outstanding in its attention to detail is Margaret Rossiter’s work. My selection of France is based on quite different reasons: French women’s employment patterns stand out from European and North American ones in the sense that French women tend to work full-time and continuously over the life course, much as men do. Nevertheless, occupational sex segregation — both vertical and horizontal — persist, along with pay differentials between women and men. France differs from both the USA and Britain in having very little official rhetoric on women and the sciences — yet, as I show in this chapter, there have been significant increases in the quantitative feminization of French engineering. This may lead us to question the usefulness of policy, such as that of the USA and Britain, which seeks to change labour force patterns by encouraging particular social groups to enter.

Is Physics the Issue

In this book I am making the case that the issue under consideration is not one of women and science in general, but rather one of women and the sciences. In this chapter I investigate physics, which is seen by many as the science which underpins all of the other sciences, the ‘most fundamental and all-inclusive’ science (Feynman, 1994, p. 47). The fact that physics is the science which is the most neglected by girls and women is particularly regrettable, say the Royal Society and the Institute of Physics, because of its ‘fundamental nature in relation to the other sciences’ (Physics Education Committee, 1982, p. 4). I examine first the empirical evidence and then discuss a key piece of work which has sought to explain why physics appears to be the most persistently male of all the sciences (Wertheim, 1997).

Explaining Women’s Representation in the Sciences

Chapters 3 and 4 give detailed information about the slow rate of increase in women’s representation in science, both in education and employment. Women with science degrees were shown to be using their degrees in different ways from men and a salary differential for women and men with science degrees was identified. In academic science, I showed that there is clear vertical sex segregation in all of the sciences, whether quantitatively feminized or not. I pointed out that there is very little information on private sector science, but that it seems reasonable to suppose that similar patterns of vertical segregation might be found there.