http://www.digitales-online.org/2002/

Forum * Digital education and cognitive processes - Wendy Faulkner, Rommes Els, Irma Van Slooten

During the 1980s training providers across Western Europe were offering women-only training courses in information technology, but by 2000 the strategy has all but fallen from fashion. It was increasingly difficult for such courses to sustain funding, it seems, with the turn to the politics of inclusion, diversity and gender mainstreaming. This paper argues that, whatever the merits of these recent trends, the need for women-only vocational training in technology remains, at least in certain circumstances. Drawing on two cases from the Netherlands and Scotland, we show that to be effective women-only vocational ICT training must be part of a ‘heterogeneous’ package of measures, concerning both the organisation and the delivery of the training, which together meet the needs of the target group(s) of women ‘as whole people’. We also show that building the confidence of women whose self esteem is low is key to the successful outcome of such courses, especially for women who have not been on the labour market for some time and/or are living in particular disadvantaged circumstances. We critically address earlier suggestions that the gender dynamics on mixed-sex courses are generally less good for women than for men, and that technology training especially demands women-only training because of the strong association of technology and masculinity. To this discussion we bring evidence that women and men on ICT courses can have distinct training preferences and learning styles, and that some men who are very computer reticent and/or suffer from poor self esteem are very digitally excluded but that such men benefit more from mixed-sex (than from single-sex) vocational training in ICT.

Wendy Faulkner is Senior Lecturer in the Science Studies Unit : Department of Sociology, University of Edinburgh, UK
Els Rommes, Researcher, Nijmegen University, University of Twente
Irma Van Slooten. University of Twente, Faculty of Business. Public Administration & technology

Strategies of Inclusion : Gender and the Information society (SIGIS)
www.rcss.ed.ac.uk/sigis/

Cet article a été écrit par SIGIS {www.rcss.ed.ac.uk/sigis/} le 11/01/2004