The Shrinking Pipeline: A Critical Analysis of Australian Young Women’s Participation in the Undergraduate Computing Disciplines

Abstract

The flourishing information technology (IT) industry has offered Australia a great prosperity and opportunities to diversify as a competitive society. However, women have always been under-represented in IT field. The pipeline shrinkage problem for women in computing disciplines is a well know and documented phenomenon where the ratio of women to men involved in computing shrinks dramatically from the secondary school years to the bachelor’s level in the higher education. This stage of leakage correspondenly results in the low participation of women in the IT industry.
Considerable research has been conducted to understand the reasons behind the existence of the shrinking pipeline and in some cases to take action to increase the number of women in computing. Yet the most recent reports of female participation in the university computing disciplines are not encouraging. To add to the previous contributions, this paper adopts a social shaping approach to investigate the gendered construction of IT culture. The relationship between gender, technology and education is analyzed to better understand how the social factors deter young women’s participation in the computing disciplines at the bachelor’s level in the State of Victoria from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. The paper argues that information technology is not inherently masculine but invented and used in social contexts that is structured by gender relations. It is the social shaping of the information technology and hence information technology education and industry as masculine that limits females’ choices of computing as their university career.

九十年代以来，信息技术在社会各个领域的广泛应用，给澳大利亚社会带了繁荣和发展的无限机遇。然而，技术进步带来的社会发展也产生了不少前所未有的社会问题。其中，最值得关注的一个问题就是“性别数字鸿沟”。从事信息技术或相关工作的女性的数量大大小于男性的数量。导致“性别数字鸿沟”的一个重要因素就是这几年来选择学习信息技术相关专业本科学位的高中女生越来越少。
对这个现象的解释众说纷纭。本文从信息技术社会化的角度，探讨影响高中女生选择信息技术专业的各个因素，其中包括社会期望，对计算机水平的自我评估，以及在高中阶段学习过程和学习结果的影响四个方面。本文主要研究的是从九十年代晚期到二十一世纪早期澳大利亚维多利亚州的情况。本文主要论证作为社会文化的一部分，信息技术反映了发明和使用这些技术的社会的价值观。正是信息技术的社会化限制了高中女生选择大学里的信息技术专业，阻碍了女性在信息技术这个高薪行业的职业发展。