Alumni Reflections on Gender Equality in the ICT Context
: Koskivaara Eija, Somerkoski Brita
: Marié Hattingh, Machdel Matthee, Hanlie Smuts, Ilias Pappas, Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Matti Mäntymäki
: Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society
Publisher: Springer
: 2020
: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
: I3E 2020: Responsible Design, Implementation and Use of Information and Communication Technology
: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
: 12067
: 380
: 386
: 978-3-030-45001-4
: 978-3-030-45002-1
: 0302-9743
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45002-1_33
: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7134262/
This study aims to bridge the digital gender divide in information and communication technology (ICT) education and field by reflecting the alumni opinions on gender equality in the ICT context. The study aims to raise the awareness of gender equality issues through the work-life reflections. This is done to understand better the gender equality issue, and to give proposals to promoting equality also for the faculty members who teach ICT related subjects in the university. The data for the study was collected from 131 (n = 131) ICT alumni that represent 25 nationalities. Results reveal that men with 77% share dominate the closest supervisor positions and 14% of the previous ICT students in the university have felt some kind of gender-based discrimination in their work. The data-driven content analysis was used to analyze the data. In the analysis we found five main categories behind the gender-based discrimination: society, organizational; individual action; hard facts and zero. We argue, that society, organizational, and individual action proposals illustrate the digital transformation process.