Revisiting Career Path Assumptions: The Case of Woment in the IT Workforce

Many researchers have argued that additional systematic analysis of the information technology (IT) workforce is necessary in order to more deeply understand organizational human behavior as it relates to career anchors or values and motivations that attract an individual to a particular career. For these reasons the purpose of this paper is to examine the career anchors of women in the American IT workforce and their relationships to occupational decisions. The data for this examination comes from interpretive interviews conducted with 92 women and a quantitative survey conducted with an additional 210 women. The results of our analyses give cause for challenging some longstanding assumptions about career anchors that exist in the literature. This research also makes a theoretical contribution through its extension of an emergent theory about within-gender variation to the context of career anchor variations among women in the IT field

Are Women an Underserved Community in the Information Technology Profession?

The role of women as an underserved community in the world of information technology (IT) is both unique and perplexing. In this paper we consider the question of women as an underserved community in IT, and in particular, their role as producers of IT. In order to better understand the ways in which women do and do not represent a coherent underserved community within the IT profession, the research question motivating this paper is: Do women vary with respect to the factors that help to explain the underrepresentation of women in the IT profession and, if so, how? In order to address this question, we draw on data from a multi-year qualitative investigation of the underrepresentation of women in the U.S. IT profession. In doing so, we investigate gender discourses with respect to: domestic responsibilities, career opportunities and IT as a masculine domain. We also demonstrate the range of responses to these discourses. This research contributes to an understanding of socio-cultural factors that serve as barriers to and facilitators of women’s recruitment and retention in the IT profession and to the factors that have enabled some women to overcome these barriers