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BRAZIL: Women Turning Backs on Information Technology Studies

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 13 2007 (IPS) - Women are increasingly abandoning information technology courses in Brazil, in line with a global tendency, warns the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) and women professors in the field.

Twenty years ago, nearly half of the seats in university classrooms where information technology is taught were filled by women, but that proportion has fallen off steadily since then, said Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, president of the SBC and a professor at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), located 100 km from Sao Paulo.

Only 3,049 (22 percent) of the 13,606 students who graduated in computer science and engineering in 2004 were women, according to Ministry of Education statistics.

In graduate courses in that area, women still represent 30 percent of the professors, but that is a holdover from the previous period, which cannot be maintained, Bauzer told the newspaper Jornal da Unicamp in December, after receiving a prize from the U.S. Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in recognition of her technical leadership and advocacy for women in technology.

That trend was also observed by Clevi Rapkiewicz, a professor at the State University of Northern Fluminense (UENF), who pointed out that when she was living in France in 1986, there was a large number of Brazilian women studying computer sciences. The UENF is in the city of Campos, 280 km north of Rio de Janeiro.

She explained to IPS that in Brazil, computer courses emerged from the field of mathematics, rather than engineering as in France. Engineering, “by tradition,” is seen as a more masculine field, and the tendency to associate information technology courses with that area contributed to the decline in the number of female students, she said.


At the Federal Technological University of Paraná (UFTPR), in southern Brazil, “no woman applied for studies in computer science,” said Marilia de Carvalho, a social anthropologist and professor at the university. She said that was the culmination of a constant decline in the number of women registering for the courses, combined with increasing numbers of women who were dropping out.

Female students are also a minority in other areas of engineering, especially mechanical engineering, although the proportion has risen, albeit “very slowly,” said Carvalho, by just five percent in the last ten years at the UFTPR.

“It’s not a biological, but a cultural, issue,” Carvalho said in response to a question from IPS. In the process of socialisation, boys are encouraged to move into technical professions, while young women tend to be steered towards “areas involving interpersonal relations and services,” like health care, education or ecology, she said.

Another reason, which was also noted by Bauzer, is the aggressive competition in information technology-related employment, where the environment “is very hostile, making insertion into the area difficult for women,” said Carvalho. “Many decisions, for example, are reached outside of the office, in social gatherings to which women are generally not invited; there is discrimination, in ways that are largely imperceptible.”

As a result, many women prefer teaching to finding a job in the corporate world. “In academia, competition is also strong, but the rules are different, and there is no difference in salaries, at least not in public universities,” she said.

Rapkiewicz, who has a doctorate in computer systems engineering, said she turned to teaching after working for several years in different companies,” in order to “improve my quality of life” with shorter working hours and better schedules, not because of cutthroat competition.

Competition for jobs in information technology is less intense, she said, because the industry does not suffer from unemployment in Brazil, but from a lack of qualified personnel.

What can get aggressive, according to Rapkiewicz, are the “internal disputes” in companies for management positions, especially because information technology, more than some other areas, represents power and can be decisive to the fate of a business, and men – in her view – “have a greater thirst for power.”

Companies and society at large lose out as a result of the reduced presence of women in this field, as they do any time that one gender dominates a specific area, said Rapkiewicz.

“Quality and creativity are reduced when there is a lack of diversity, whether gender-based, ethnic, generational or ideological, because homogeneity means less debate and less questioning,” she argued, quoting “an important Brazilian playwright, who said ‘unanimity is always stupid’.”

“Greater gender balance can probably lead technological research and development down different paths,” said Rapkiewicz. “How many female scientists were involved in the construction of the nuclear bomb?” she asked, to illustrate her point.

Expanding women’s participation in the computer sciences is very important, and one of the ways to do that is by holding discussions in engineering courses about gender questions, which are ignored even by professors, said Carvalho.

In her classes on the issue, students “initially react with sarcasm, but then they listen and many of them change their attitudes when they begin to understand that discrimination is a social construction,” she said.

In the field of information technology, there is a “division of labour,” in which men are more focused on the equipment itself and on business aspects, while women tend to be more oriented towards software, she said.

Studies by Indian professor Swasti Mitter, an expert on the relations between gender and new technologies, indicate that hardware design and maintenance, or “building computers,” tends to be considered men’s work, while women focus more on the uses of computers, on information technology as an “activity,” said Rapkiewicz.

 
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