The underrepresentation of women in the IT workforce coupled with increased cultural diversity stemming from the globalization of the IT sector highlights a problem both for the practice and research domains of the IT field.

In “ A Multicultural Analysis of Factors Influencing Career Choice for Women in the Information Technology Workforce”, an article from the most recent issue of the Journal of Global Information Management (Editor-in-Chief: Felix B. Tan, AUT University, New Zealand), researchers Eileen M. Trauth, The Pennsylvania State University (USA), Jeria L. Quesenberry, Carnegie Mellon University, (USA), and Haiyan Huang, The Pennsylvania State University (USA) analyze the cultural factors influencing the career choices of women in the IT workforce.

“With regard to perceptions of women’s role that are embedded in a society, themes about maternity, child care, parental care, and women working outside of the home emerged from the data,” write Trauth, Quesenberry, and Huang. “With regard to socio-cultural moderators, themes about gendered career norms, social class, economic opportunity, and gender stereotypes about aptitude emerged from the data. Our analysis demonstrates how these themes influence variation in female IT career choice by culture within a country, by cultural differences within a country and by culture across multiple countries.”

“While themes related to parenting, family, and economics might be evident in studies of women in each societal context, the ways in which these themes are experienced by the women vary across cultures. That is, not all women experience economic or parenthood issues in the same ways.”

The researchers conclude that those engaged in IT workforce research need to reexamine the discourse regarding diversification of the IT workforce in a critical and broad sense including what diversity means and how to address diversification issues from multiple integrated perspectives.

(Portions of this article were taken from the Journal of Global Information Management.)