Implications of Gender Consciousness for Students in Information Technology

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of gender consciousness among students enrolled in IT programs at five U.S. universities. Based on 136 in-depth face-to-face interviews, we assess the overall level of gender consciousness among the IT students, proposing a new distinction between awareness of gender inequity and concern about such inequity, and identify characteristics of students with varying levels of gender consciousness. We then consider the relationship between level of gender consciousness and two self-efficacy measures—self-confidence and ambition—as regards the students' education and future IT careers. Our findings suggest that gender consciousness is related to lived experience, and has positive implications, via the mediating variable of self-efficacy, for women IT students' educational and professional success.

Notes

*Authors' names are in alphabetical order to indicate equal contributions.

¹More generally, “perceived personal efficacy influences the choices people make, their aspirations, how much effort they mobilize in a given endeavor, how long they persevere in the face of difficulties and setbacks, whether their thought patterns are self-hindering or self-aiding, the amount of anxiety and stress they experience in coping with taxing and threatening environments, their vulnerability to depression, and their resilience to adversity” (Bussey and Bandura 690).

² We use this composite term to refer to schools of Library and Information Science, Information Schools, and Schools of Information.

³In each unit, we aimed to interview two women and one man in the master's program, two women and one man in the Ph.D. program, and four women and two men in the undergraduate program, if one was offered by the unit. Undergraduates were oversampled, because undergraduate programs tended to have higher enrollments than graduate programs, and because there were fewer undergraduate than graduate programs in the IT units included in the study. This sampling method resulting in a roughly equal distribution of interviewees across the three academic levels.

⁴ While we do not have enrollment figures by gender for the units from which are interviewees were drawn, the gender breakdown of respondents to a Web-based survey of all students in the same 18 units provides some indication (Herring et al.). Women made up about 19% of CS, 33% of MIS, 35% of Informatics, 50% of IST, and 60% of LIS survey respondents.

⁵ The ethnicity and age distribution of the interviewees is similar to that of the Web survey respondents.

⁷ In American culture, a WASP is a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

⁶ Interviewee names used in this article are pseudonyms. Potentially personally identifying information in quotations by interviewees has been omitted or anonymized.