This chapter addresses the inclusion of women in the field of information technology from a perspective that promotes the creation of interdisciplinary spaces, making visible the knowledge inherent to the different professions capable of adding value to technological development. The model presented here was created to evaluate the level of technological development that will allow the determining of the components needed for the transformation towards Industry 4.0, from which you can determine the knowledge necessary for the development of products in their real context of use. Areas such as data science, virtual reality, or human-computer interaction design techniques, models, and/or tools for the construction of solutions that do not require strictly engineering-based knowledge. This chapter proposes a journey towards the development and adoption of technologies in the industry, which requires the inclusion of interdisciplinary knowledge, hence giving new meaning to the role of women in technological development.
TopIntroduction
Technological development requires engineering-based knowledge from hard sciences for the construction of correct and efficient solutions that solve increasingly complex problems. However, the understanding of the problem, the analysis of the users, the evaluation of each real context of use, as well as the knowledge of the specific domains, do not require a set of strictly engineering-based knowledge for the solution.
Techniques, methods or analysis models from the social or humanistic sciences, from various disciplinary fields, prove very useful when analyzing problems from the perspective of the domain and / or the real users of the solutions. In this way, engineering-based thinking can become a limitation of the understanding of the problem by constructing a correct technical solution that is detached from its context.
In this sense, women in Latin American countries, for various cultural reasons, are consolidated as professionals in soft disciplines aimed at the analysis and knowledge of a variety of problems in the real world. Multiple authors have addressed the analysis of cultural aspects that, from early childhood to undergraduate training, logical mathematical thinking and solving engineering problems outlines technical thinking, marking a deep division of genders (Dekhane, 2017).
On a world scale, the dominant technological development of recent years has generated an impact in all fields of the socio-productive life of different societies and cultures. Knowledge areas of multiple disciplines are traversed by technological advance in terms of digitalization, massive data generation, virtualization, robotization, artificial intelligence and the connection between objects.
The effect in all the socio-productive areas and sectors of today's societies generates changes in the forms of work and in the habits of life, imposing the cultural logic of technological development. The manufacturing industry is traversed by the insertion of these new technologies, modifying the productivity variables, as well as the generation of value, promoting what is known as the fourth industrial revolution, transforming companies into what is identified as “4.0 Industries” (Mon, 2019).
This concept arises in the second decade of the 2000s in which the production process that has been developed and expanded since then is based on the digital modeling of production processes and on the exchange of data generated in the manufacturing process itself between different machines or equipment.
However, when identifying the specific products that make up the new industry that is emerging, there are few works that explicitly identify the specific components that are developed; and that require characteristics, attributes and specific knowledge in their design, development and implementation in the real context of use, in order to generate the inevitable transformation.
In another sense, knowledge from humanistic disciplines such as sociology, communication sciences, anthropology, psychology or the areas of art and design, provide central knowledge for the development of these products that constitute the engines that drive the evolution of technologies.
In Latin American countries, the dominant cultural aspects exclude women from the possibilities of professional insertion in production areas. When the participation of women in the labor fields related to engineering that develop Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is analysed; the gap is even greater. This limitation is historically determined by the training of professionals with engineering-based thinking.
The discussion raised then, resides in that technological development requires a set of multidisciplinary knowledge for the detection of problems, definition of data, construction and analysis of information, among others, that come from different disciplines of knowledge; in the opposite way to classical engineering analysis. That is why the incorporation of knowledge from social disciplines, as well as the way that marks the great participation of women in them, seems to be an unavoidable path for technological development to be effective in each socio-productive environment.
By way of discussion, this chapter presents a model for evaluating ICTs in industry, which makes it possible to calculate an index of technological development and visualize the characteristics of the evolution of the sector towards Industry 4.0. From there, the specific products, the necessary knowledge for said transformation and the role of the professions in Latin America - chosen mainly by women - as the central axis for technological development are analyzed, establishing itself as the engine of development of the productive forces in the region.