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Fewer girls and women are learning how to invent, create, and design computer technologies. |
Have no doubt ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) is not living up to its potential for improving the world. The way it is currently being taught in most Kenyan schools only reinforces the gender power imbalances of the past and present. ICT has a hidden curriculum—a curriculum that empowers boys and perpetuates the myth that young women are failing in a technological world; a world they were allowed to enter back in 1995 when the door of the needlework room allegedly slammed shut following the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Gender disparity has arisen in the use of computers and the Internet in education. This is because, despite computer-related technologies revealing dramatic new opportunities and challenges, girls are excluded from the challenge, underachieving and forced out.
Technology For All
Gender inequality in education is vividly illustrated by quantitative disparities between girls and boys’, women and men’s literacy rates, enrolment rates, educational attainment, distribution across subject specialties and other educational indicators. While girls and young women are surfing the Web in equal proportion to men, fewer girls and women are learning how to invent, create, and design computer technologies. Clearly, it does matter at every level if the creators of computer technology are mostly male because even in a country such as Kenya, reeling under unemployment, computing salaries are high, jobs are plentiful and entrepreneurship opportunities unbounded. Furthermore, a command of ICT is a valuable asset in many contexts outside of the field itself.
It is a forgone conclusion that a product design group that is not representative of all its users will fail. For instance, some early voice recognition systems were calibrated to typical male voices. As a result, women’s voices were literally unheard by the software. The conversations among computer scientists can no longer be isolated to all-boys clubhouses; women’s voices and perspectives must be part of this conversation. For this to happen women must know more than how to use technology; they must know how to design and create it. We must strive for gender equality in ICT. This entails an aspiration to work towards a society in which both women and men are able to fulfill their potential and live fulfilling lives, but not on terms defined and determined by a patriarchal technological agenda.
What Women Need From ICT
Gender equality does not mean treating young women in the same way as boys. Young women face different constraints in accessing educational opportunities and in achieving their educational potential. These must be addressed in different ways. Young women have different interests and priorities when it comes to learning. For them to achieve, these differences need to be taken into account. Programs to promote gender equality only seek to redress existing imbalances. Treating women as men does not lead to equal opportunity or equal outcome as there is no level playing field to start with. Targeted interventions are necessary to address particular aspects of inequality.
Key to the gender gap in ICT lies the lack of flexibility of ICT educators, mainly male, to recognize the importance of learning styles in engaging all learners. There are differences in girls and boys’ preferences concerning computer use and learning style. Whereas boys tend to like technology for its own sake and enjoy playing mindless games or tinkering with computers for fun, young women want to know what ICT can do and use computers as tools to accomplish certain purposes. Much of the research on learning styles has been directed to gender issues regarding group work in ICT. Working together is unavoidable in many schools because there are not enough computers for individual work.
However, there are also social and cognitive benefits of working together. Young women are alienated when the use of computers is coupled with competitive or even individual tasks and they prefer and benefit more from working together. Some researchers argue that young women perform better in all female groups, others that they are better in mixed groups. There is more unanimity in the findings on the process of working together—with consistent evidence that boys tend to focus more on the task and girls on the process. Assignments that focus on and reward both process and product will enhance the performance of girls.
E-mail and the Internet make computers unique and powerful tools for communication, and the evidence is that girls are responding positively and enthusiastically to the opportunities this opens up as they have particular interest in and aptitude for communication. Electronic discussions have a favorable effect on the participation of girls in classroom discussions. Girls are empowered by the fact that they determine the tempo of discussion, that there are opportunities for reflection, and that dominant classmates cannot intervene.
Female ICT Trainers
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| More female ICT trainers will make a big difference in changing the perceived sexual dominance of the male instructor |
There is no doubt that software style affects girls’ performance. There are two issues: firstly, the extent to which educational software exhibits gender bias, stereotypes, and the effect this has on girls’ performance, and secondly the extent to which educational software has been specifically designed to appeal to girls’ interests. Only a glance at Laura Croft (from Tomb Raider) reveals what a man deems as appealing to girls, a stereotypical erotic male fantasy feeding the mass media.
The role that teachers play in challenging these perceptions is critical. Left unchallenged, the perception may be one factor in the complex process where girls learn from an early age that not only is the world of computers associated with dominant masculinity, but also that academic success is dependent upon sexual approbation.
There is no doubt that more female ICT trainers will make a big difference in changing the perceived sexual dominance of the male instructor. However, changes to software, the curriculum, examination specifications, the format of examination papers, and learning styles are a distant conquest. Women have an ICT mountain to climb; the peak being not parity with men but new heights exposed by a cultural avalanche that must reshape the very landscape of ICT; a landscape that ceases to be defined by men, and is free from prescription and domination.
The ideas expressed in this article represent solely the opinion of the author.
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