Career change or career progression? Motivations of women studying computing as adult learners

The proportion of female students qualifying in computing and IT degrees in the UK has decreased over the past five years and is one of the lowest in Europe. While most research on underrepresentation focuses on school age girls and young women entering higher education, there is little written about adult women learners and their motivation for entry into IT work. Adult learners are a compelling sample because they illustrate that studies of gender and careers can benefit from a life-course perspective. In addition, studying adult learners can add to intersectional understandings of underrepresentation by bringing in age/life-stage as a variable in the same way as considerations of ethnicity/race have enriched previous understandings. This paper addresses this gap using a mixed methods study of adult learners pursuing computing degrees part-time through distance learning at one UK institution. The study included an online survey of 253 students, as well as focus groups with women students. While women were underrepresented across the two main degree programmes included in the study, the proportion of women was higher on qualifications where computing was studied along with other subjects rather than computing on its own. The survey showed other gender differences - a higher proportion of men were already working in the IT industry, whereas more women were looking to enter into an IT related role for the first time. The women were also more likely to be career changers - more women than men had a previous STEM-related degree. Nevertheless, some women expressed confidence issues, in particular about entering into careers in the industry rather than their ability to study IT. This suggests that employability in computing, even among women who have successfully completed STEM degrees in the past, or are already working, continues to be influenced by gendered structural barriers and behaviours

Interacting with Masculinities: A Scoping Review

Gender is a hot topic in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Work has run the gamut, from assessing how we embed gender in our computational creations to correcting systemic sexism, online and off. While gender is often framed around women and femininities, we must recognize the genderful nature of humanity, acknowledge the evasiveness of men and masculinities, and avoid burdening women and genderful folk as the central actors and targets of change. Indeed, critical voices have called for a shift in focus to masculinities, not only in terms of privilege, power, and patriarchal harms, but also participation, plurality, and transformation. To this end, I present a 30-year history of masculinities in HCI work through a scoping review of 126 papers published to the ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) conference proceedings. I offer a primer and agenda grounded in the CHI and extant literatures to direct future work.Comment: 12 page

Bringing bioinformatics to schools with the 4273pi project

The work was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) under Grants STFC ST/R000328/1 (including salary to S.A.B., D.B., H.P., T.R.M. and non-salary costs) and STFC ST/T000872/1 (including salary to S.A.B., D.B., K.C., T.R.M. and non-salary costs), the Darwin Trust of Edinburgh (https://darwintrust.bio.ed.ac.uk; including salary to S.A.B. and H.P. and non-salary costs), the Wellcome Trust-University of Edinburgh Institutional Strategic Support Fund under Wellcome Trust Grant number 204804/Z/16/Z (salary to H.P.), a Public Engagement with Genetics Tier 2 Grant from the Genetics Society (https://genetics.org.uk; non-salary costs), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) under Grant NE/P000592/1 (including salary to N.C. and M.G.R. and non-salary costs), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) under Grant BB/S018506/1 (including salary to F.A. and non-salary costs), the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh (https://www.ed.ac.uk/biology; including salary to S.A.B. and H.P. and non-salary costs) and its Institute of Evolutionary Biology (https://www.ed.ac.uk/biology/evolutionary-biology; non-salary costs), the Access for Rural Communities project (ARC) at University of St Andrews (https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/study/access/projects/arc; non-salary costs) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under Grant EP/V52038X/1 (including salary to S.A.B. and non-salary costs). E.W.J.W. is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society [208779/Z/17/Z] (including salary to E.W.J.W.).Over the last few decades, the nature of life sciences research has changed enormously, generating a need for a workforce with a variety of computational skills such as those required to store, manage, and analyse the large biological datasets produced by next-generation sequencing. Those with such expertise are increasingly in demand for employment in both research and industry. Despite this, bioinformatics education has failed to keep pace with advances in research. At secondary school level, computing is often taught in isolation from other sciences, and its importance in biological research is not fully realised, leaving pupils unprepared for the computational component of Higher Education and, subsequently, research in the life sciences. The 4273pi Bioinformatics at School project (https://4273pi.org) aims to address this issue by designing and delivering curriculum-linked, hands-on bioinformatics workshops for secondary school biology pupils, with an emphasis on equitable access. So far, we have reached over 180 schools across Scotland through visits or teacher events, and our open education resources are used internationally. Here, we describe our project, our aims and motivations, and the practical lessons we have learned from implementing a successful bioinformatics education project over the last 5 years.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Interjecting the <i>geographies of skills</i> into international skilled migration research: Political economy and ethics for a renewed research agenda

There is now a large literature on skilled migration, which uses multiple definitions, concepts, theories and understandings of skilled migrants. However, this research has not adequately considered the geographies of skills—the spatial and temporal relations through which skills get meaning, are accrued and claimed and their outcomes and how these shape and are shaped by skilled mobilities and migration. This paper explores sites and networks as two interrelated elements of a geography of skills in order to highlight how they have prescribed, produced, prevailed and precluded who attains the skills to migrate. The paper goes on to outline how and why the geographies of skills and skilled migration matter in contemporary knowledge capitalism and the ethical issues they raise for a renewed research agenda on skilled migration. Crucially, it suggests that the spatio‐temporal configurations of skills raise not only empirical and analytical questions but also normative ones about the politics and ethics of skilling

Feminist Futures of Work:Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy

The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work—what we term as “FemWork" —is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities. This volume offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful

Understanding the impacts of gig economy platforms on freelancers’ work practices

Freelancing platforms have enabled opportunities for millions of knowledge workers worldwide to pursue a freelance career. Freelancing platforms are part of an emerging work model characterised by technology companies mediating work relationships through algorithms that manage, monitor, and evaluate work – the gig economy. Previous literature has studied freelance workers’ practices, for instance, how they go about getting work, cultivating their reputation, and managing their work. However, most of this research has been conducted prior to the emergence of freelancing platforms, leaving a gap in our understanding of how platforms impact freelancers’ work. This thesis comprises of three qualitative studies, engaging with views from a total of 476 freelancers, to understand the opportunities and challenges freelancing platforms introduce for their work practices. The first study explores how freelancers view online freelancing platforms through a qualitative analysis of discussions in four freelancing subforums. The findings suggests that platforms can enable opportunities to source clients, gain experience, and mitigate precarity while constraining control over their work choices, reputation, and client relationships. The second study focuses on understanding the impact of platforms on freelancers’ everyday work-life through a qualitative diary study followed by semi-structured interviews. Findings from this study illustrate how platform features and individual circumstances shape freelancers’ everyday life. Importantly platform features introduce new constraints on work availability, autonomy, and detachment. The last study builds from the previous two studies and literature recommendations to develop a design fiction that explored a model of online freelancing where platform features are designed to support (rather than constrain) freelancers’ work preferences. This design fiction is used as the basis for five focus groups, identifying novel areas for research and development to support freelancers’ autonomy, entrepreneurship, and peer support. This thesis makes contributions to knowledge, design, and policy. Firstly, it contributes novel empirical knowledge to the impacts freelancing platforms have had on freelance work by unpacking core challenges and opportunities. Secondly, it contributes design implications that move towards thinking about ‘worker-centred’ research interventions, platform configurations, and features to mitigate challenges stemming from platforms. Thirdly, it contributes policy implications to regulate and hold platforms accountable, rethink social institutions to better support freelancers, and legislate emerging technologies that manage work

The spaces in-between: An appreciative inquiry into cross-boundary collaborative design for social innovations

In order to support Social Innovation, Social Designers advocate for the use of collaborative design methodologies, inclusive design processes, which produce innovative design outcomes and inclusive societies. While there is a large amount of literature on this topic from a European and US perspective, there is little understanding regarding the effect large social disparity between stakeholders has on these types of engagements. The researcher describes this as cross-boundary collaborative design for social innovation, where "boundary" refers to social and collective identity such as, gender, race, class, etc., which is a reality in most South African collaborative design engagements and a gap in the literature. Thus, this thesis explores this gap by asking the research question, what practices, mindsets and interpersonal interactions help to support effective cross-boundary collaborative design for Social Innovation? In order to answer this question, the researcher conducted 32 interviews followed by a single focus group with disparate stakeholders engaged in these types of initiatives. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach and applying the lens of Appreciative Inquiry to her interview questions, she recorded narratives that focused on moments of effectiveness within these cross-boundary collaborative design engagements. What emerged from the data was a strong link between the quality of relationships between the disparate stakeholders and the effectiveness of the collaborative design process - what she described as "generative" relationships (connections built on trust, vulnerability, friendship and respect) that blurred the social boundaries between the participants and helped them move across the social divides with ease. This in turn increased the generative nature of the collaborative design process. Furthermore, these generative relationships were often established outside of the design process, in a preliminary phase (pre-project) before a design engagement began because this phase allowed the stakeholders to focus solely on building relationships, instead of generating design solutions. However, the importance of generative relationships does not feature strongly in the current collaborative design literature. Instead, it focuses mainly on developing communication methods as a way to support boundary crossing and views relationship building as a secondary by-product of a good communication method. This thesis, however, concludes that in order to support effective cross-boundary collaborative design engagements, this process should be flipped and attention be given to first building generative relationships that can then help to support the effectiveness of the cross-boundary communication methods and ultimately improve the over all crossboundary collaborative design process

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe next computing revolution‘s objective is to embed every street, building, room and object with computational power. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will allow every object to receive and transmit information, sense its surroundings and act accordingly, be located from anywhere in the world, connect every person. Everyone will have the possibility to access information, despite their age, computer knowledge, literacy or physical impairment. It will impact the world in a profound way, empowering mankind, improving the environment, but will also create new challenges that our society, economy, health and global environment will have to overcome. Negative impacts have to be identified and dealt with in advance. Despite these concerns, environmental studies have been mostly absent from discussions on the new paradigm. This thesis seeks to examine ubiquitous computing, its technological emergence, raise awareness towards future impacts and explore the design of new interfaces and rich interaction modes. Environmental information is approached as an area which may greatly benefit from ubicomp as a way to gather, treat and disseminate it, simultaneously complying with the Aarhus convention. In an educational context, new media are poised to revolutionize the way we perceive, learn and interact with environmental information. cUbiq is presented as a natural interface to access that information