Odd girl out: an individual differences perspective on women in the IT profession

By Eileen M. Trauth. Information Technology and People, 2002

389 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper develops a theoretical perspective on gender and information technology (IT) by examining socio‐cultural influences on women who are members of the information technology profession in Australia and New Zealand. In‐depth interviews with both practitioners and academics give evidence of a range of socio‐cultural influences on the professional development and working lives of women IT professionals. The paper rejects the essentialist view of women and their relationship to IT that has been put forth in the information systems literature arguing, instead, the primacy of societal and structural influences. The particular contribution of this paper is a theoretical perspective of individual differences which is presented to characterize the way individual women respond in a range of specific ways to the interplay between individual characteristics and environmental influences. This perspective contributes to a better understanding of women’s involvement in the IT sector and suggests areas for proact...

Subfields: Gender Studies, Information Systems, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/224a9b4b2e5b22de565198159a213a17f1a9baf3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. V. Venkatesh
2. Parvati Raghuram
3. Ann Light

In Information Systems

1. V. Venkatesh
2. Parvati Raghuram
3. Ann Light

In Media Technology

1. V. Venkatesh
2. Parvati Raghuram
3. Ann Light
4. Byoungsoo Kim

Citations in the corpus

• Achieving Rigor in Literature Reviews: Insights from Qualitative Data Analysis and Tool-Support (2015, background): “This study (which is outside the top basket of IS journals) helped us to better understand the foundations of such gender and IS theory as the individual differences theory of gender and IT (Trauth, 2002).”
• HCI as heterodoxy: Technologies of identity and the queering of interaction with computers (2011, background): “Trauth (2002) unpicks essentialist beliefs about why women do not work in IT.”
• Gender and age differences in employee decisions about new technology: an extension to the theory of planned behavior (2005, background): “…approach, the changing nature of today’s workforce has significantly broadened the typical user base in organizations and has spawned recent research focusing on the importance of gender (e.g., [1], [36], [75], and [87]) and age effects (e.g., [24]) on technology-related issues in the workplace.”
• Migrant women in male‐dominated sectors of the labour market: a research agenda (2008, background): “Firstly, the number of women and the roles that women perform in the ICT sector can depend on a range of factors, such as gendered perceptions of technology, types and nature of ICT training offered (see, for instance, Trauth, 2002, for an interesting example) and so on.”