Why don’t women program? Exploring links between gender, technology and software

Abstract

The main question to be discussed in this article is: Why do women not program? In other words, why, in an activity that appears similar to others where women have gained ground, one cannot find an analogous process of incorporation? We propose a scheme of five related factors in order to analyse the genealogy of women’s exclusion from the world of software. First, we discuss the relation between gender and technologies in general, focusing on the initial stages of socialisation. Second, we fast forward a few years in the lives of boys and girls and we analyse their first interaction with digital technologies. Next, in relation to puberty or adolescence, we inquire into peer-group dynamics which are established by those who dedicate much of their time to computers. Fourth, we take into account the gender gap in college or bachelor degrees related to informatics. Lastly, we analyse the common representations of and beliefs about gender that employers hold in relation to informatics workers. These five parts of the explanation have different foundations. Some rely strongly on our qualitative fieldwork in Buenos Aires; others are based on texts or statistics which belong to other authors.