An experimental online course for teaching Gender & IT to business and engineering students
Résumé
The gender imbalance in the Information Technology (IT) field is an ongoing preoccupation in most Western countries. Feminist researchers generally consider that women's absence from technical occupations is mainly due to the representation of technology as masculine and to the masculine culture in IT education and work environments. At Télécom École de Management and Télécom SudParis (business and engineering schools) we have developed a course entitled "Gender & Society - new perspectives" in order to encourage our first year students to question stereotyped representations of gender. This course has been taught since 2009 within the humanities program. Our objective now is to go beyond this introductory course, and enable students to apprehend the gender/technology relation in a more informed and sophisticated way. With this in view, we launched in January 2016 an experimental SPOC (Small Private Online Course) called "Feminine-Masculine in the digital world - a journey of discovery". The content enables students to discover the little known role of women in computer science (1950-1970) and women's involvement in IT occupations today (CIOs, CEOs and entrepreneurs in the digital sector etc). It further helps students understand when and why women have been taken out of the IT field. Lastly it provides a framework for analysing stereotyped representations of IT (in advertisements, posters etc) from a gender point of view. The communication presents the results of our study of this experimental course. Our central research questions are: Has the course contributed to weakening the gender stereotype that links technology and masculinity in the participating students' representations? Do female participants feel more empowered in the IT field? Have male participants become more aware of gender stereotypes in IT? Our analysis is based on all documents posted by students during the course (written assignments and interactions on forums), on student evaluations of the course (on-line and face-to-face), and on our assessment of the level of understanding shown in the final exam (comprehension of gender concepts, knowledge of women's involvement in IT etc.). In the communication, we provide additional information on the course structure, content, and implementation on a Moodle platform. Then, we present the results of our analysis of the impact of the course on Gender & IT representations. Lastly, we compare teaching gender online with in-class teaching. Is the digital format more attractive to our Y Generation students? Does a digital course attenuate possible rejection of course content which may arise when sensitive or controversial topics are taught face-to-face in large groups? Does it enhance the learning process of gender topics? Our contribution is twofold. It provides an example of reconfiguring a negative representation of women in a "masculine" sector through a gender course. Furthermore, our experimental research to initiate students to gender issues using online teaching could be interesting for other higher education institutions. Initial results are promising: the course has been one of the most popular in students' choices (out of 10 humanities courses), and male students represent 55% of those enrolled.