Blog Open Thoughts 2012 - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC): What if Steve Jobs had been a woman? Pages Home Open Thinkers OT2012 Question About Open Thoughts View all responses Gender and ICT Research Programme Research and Transfer Support Office Mar 6, 2012 What if Steve Jobs had been a woman? By Juliet Webster, Gender and ICT Programme (IN3, UOC) Director We have seen huge improvements in gender equality in recent decades. Women have made major advances in key areas of social life: in the world of work, in educational access and performance, and in securing and exercising political and social rights. However, there are persistent and stubborn forms of gender inequality. The gap between men's and women's pay remains significant: throughout the EU, women earn on average 18% less than their male counterparts with equivalent qualifications and experience. Women also remain remarkably under-represented in top jobs, disappearing from career ladders as they ascend. Even though today women make up about 60% of university graduates in the EU (often with better qualifications than their male counterparts), they are only 16.1% of board members of Fortune 500 companies. And persistent labour market segregation means that women continue to be over-represented in low-status, low-skill, and low-paid service jobs. This both bolsters inequality and simultaneously under-utilises a huge potential talent pool. «We are seeing major transformations in our ways of communicating, working, accessing services, being citizens —transformations in which gender identities and relations are central—. But where are the women shapers of these changes?» Despite this stubborn lack of progress, at another level we are seeing major transformations in our ways of communicating, working, accessing services, being citizens —transformations in which gender identities and gender relations are central—. But where are the women shapers of these changes? About 25% of all employees work in high technology knowledge intensive services, but only 2.4% of those are women. These are occupations which have high-status, high influence, and high pay. Given the centrality of these activities and their associated technologies to us all, it is deeply worrying that women are so noticeably under-represented there. It is sometimes assumed that if women do not enter computing, engineering or other technological occupations, it is because they simply do not want to. In our increasingly individualised societies, in which we all apparently exercise autonomy, self-determination and, above all, choice, feminist ambitions to dismantle patriarchy and its structuring social relations are often seen as outdated. Yet women have been fairly consistently under-represented in —and sometimes actively excluded from— technological work over time and across cultures. This points to a deeper problem. Power relations, differences in access to both technical and social capital, stereotypes, and constrained social roles, all affect the real choices that individual women can exercise in their educational and career pathways. This is well-known. There is much less consensus about how to address these issues in practical terms, and what implications —for women, for societies, and also for the technologies— would flow from a more equal gender balance in technological endeavours. «In a society where we all apparently exercise autonomy, self-determination and, above all, choice, feminist ambitions to dismantle patriarchy and its structuring social relations are often seen as outdated» So what if Steve Jobs had been a woman? During the late 1970s, when both Jobs and Steve Wozniak were building their first computers and simultaneously the Apple company, computing was a highly masculine playground. It had not always been so, but by the time these two men, and their counterparts in other computing companies, were constructing the forerunners of today's world-dominating computer systems, women had been edged out of the field, never to return in significant numbers. What would have happened if they had remained, and had played a central, or even a dominating, role in the development of today's systems? Perhaps, instead of Microsoft, Google and Apple, we would today have high-tech companies founded and run by women? Perhaps more pluralism of approaches to computing? Different designs? Different labour practices? Who knows which revolutions would have happened —how the sector, the technologies, and our Information Society, or societies, would have unfolded— if we had had not only a Steve Jobs but also a female, equal, counterpart to him. en 10:57 AM Etiquetas: gender gap , inequality , market segregation , revolutions , top jobs Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook 6 comments : rubenpermuy 3/6/12, 12:45 PM Congratulations for this blog! ReplyDelete Replies Reply Kryst Blogger 5/15/12, 8:30 AM This blog post is very nice. Macintosh Support London ReplyDelete Replies Reply Kryst Blogger 5/16/12, 9:07 AM Gladwell says that Jobs’s “sensibility was editorial, not inventive. ReplyDelete Replies Reply Unknown 6/4/12, 9:35 AM really very nice post. ReplyDelete Replies Reply seragam kerja kantor murah 10/12/12, 7:04 PM What if Steve Jobs had been a woman? so, steve jobs is not a man.. :D ReplyDelete Replies mensajes claro 1/27/13, 5:11 AM That sounds so funny Delete Replies Reply Reply Add comment Load more... Newer Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments ( Atom ) Follow us Worldwide, the percentage of women with a computer science degree is usually under 20% and can even drop to under 10%. The situation on the labour market is even more striking: In 2005, 25% of all European employees worked in high-tech knowledge intensive services (KIS). Only 2.4% were women. Interestingly, these gender differences do not apply to certain Asian countries and are found above all in advanced Western industrial countries. Posts Atom Posts Comments Atom Comments March 2014 ( 1 ) December 2013 ( 1 ) November 2013 ( 1 ) October 2013 ( 1 ) September 2013 ( 1 ) July 2013 ( 2 ) June 2013 ( 1 ) May 2013 ( 3 ) April 2013 ( 2 ) March 2013 ( 3 ) February 2013 ( 1 ) January 2013 ( 2 ) December 2012 ( 2 ) November 2012 ( 2 ) October 2012 ( 2 ) September 2012 ( 1 ) August 2012 ( 1 ) July 2012 ( 2 ) June 2012 ( 1 ) May 2012 ( 2 ) April 2012 ( 1 ) March 2012 ( 4 ) 2012 - 2013 | Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Powered by Blogger.