Retaining women in the U.S. IT workforce: theorizing the influence of organizational factors

Abstract

The challenge of meeting the demand for information technology (IT) workers is addressed by examining three important organizational factors that affect women's retention in the IT field. Much of the research on gender and IT assumes a unilateral effect: all organizational factors affect all women in the same ways. An alternative view that is explored in this research is that within-gender differences offer rich insights into the gender imbalance in the IT profession. The individual differences theory of gender and IT enabled us to examine variation in organizational influences on women through analysis of transcripts from in-depth interviews conducted with 92 women in the IT workforce in the U.S.A. The results show that three organizational factors – work–life balance, organizational climate, and mentoring – affected the women's career development in a range of ways. Our findings shed new light on what has been interpreted by other researchers as contradictory findings because our theoretical starting point is the assumption that women are not all the same, that within-gender variation is expected and that it provides an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of gender relations in the IT field. Using this theory we were able to identify opportunities for the development of interventions by linking the themes embedded in the three workplace factors to the constructs of the theory. The individual identity construct revealed the ways in which a woman's demographic and professional characteristics affect her career choices. The individual influences construct focused attention on the ways in which differences in personality, abilities, and influential people shape one's career. Finally, the environmental influences construct characterized contextual influences on women's participation in the IT profession. Our findings show that both research and interventions directed at increasing the retention of women must be flexible enough to respond to the variation that exists among women and within IT workplaces.

Keywords:

• gender and IT
• women and IT workforce
• mentoring
• work–life balance
• organizational climate
• individual differences theory of gender and IT

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the research funding provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF 0204246). We thank the editors and reviewers for the very constructive comments that they made in the reviews of the manuscript. These comments helped us to clarify our thinking and, thereby, significantly improve the quality of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eileen M Trauth

About the authors

Eileen M. Trauth is Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Women's Studies, and International Affairs at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research is concerned with societal, cultural and organizational influences on information technology and the information technology professions with a special focus on diversity and social inclusion. She has lectured about and investigated gender under representation in the IT field in the U.S.A., Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. During 2008 she held the Universität Klagenfurt (Austria) – Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies. Her research has been supported by two Fulbright Scholar Awards, and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland.

Jeria L Quesenberry

Jeria L. Quesenberry is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. Her dissertation examined career values and motivations of women in the information technology (IT) workforce and the influence these factors have on their career retention decisions. Her current research interests are directed at investigations of the demands and motivations of IT human capital, and the comparison of how these professionals react to their workplace environment, administrative structures, technologies and policies that accommodate them. She received her Ph.D. from the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University.

Haiyan Huang

Haiyan Huang is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the School of Management at Purdue University Calumet. Her doctoral dissertation examined the influence of culture on global information technology work and cultural diversity management. Her current research interests focus on global information technology offshore outsourcing, global virtual teams, social inclusion, and global information technology workforce development. Haiyan Huang received her Ph.D. from the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University.