PI: Enobong Branch Co-PI: Sharla Alegria University of Massachusetts Amherst
This dissertation project asks how and why gender remains salient in the Information Technology (IT) workforce where both individual, private firms and government agencies are taking steps to broaden participation and increase the number of women in the field as a matter of global economic security. Scholarship on the demographic composition of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math workforce (STEM) tends to focus only on gender, asking why women are underrepresented in STEM fields. Women's low participation in these fields is often conceptualized as a failure of the fields to attract women, either due to the subject matter or difficulty in balancing work and family life. Using only a gendered lens obscures the complicated racial and global demographic dynamics of the STEM workforce, particularly in IT. This research uses an intersectional framework to analyze gender, race, and migration together, shedding new light not just on women's representation but more broadly on how gender, race and migration operate in a high-tech field with global markets for both labor and goods. Using a mixed-method approach, this study examines the consequences of race, gender and migration status for IT workers' workplace experiences and wages. It asks the following questions: 1) What is the magnitude of unequal representation in IT when considering the intersections of gender, race, and migration? 2) Is the unequal representation by demographic group accompanied by unequal wages? 3) What differences exist in the experiences of workers across race, gender, and migration status? Descriptive demographic analysis shows the magnitude of unequal representation by gender, race, and migration status. Wage decomposition provides a quantitative analysis of differences in earnings across demographic groups and shows how much of those differences results from unequal treatment. Qualitative analysis of single gender, race, and migration status focus groups and interviews examines differences in workers? experiences to understand the causes and consequences of wage and representational inequalities.
Broader Impacts: This project makes significant contributions in three important areas: 1) It advances sociological understandings of how inequality persists and operates when discrimination has been disavowed and creating opportunities for historically underrepresented groups is a spoken goal 2) It corrects misunderstandings about the demographics of the IT workforce that have resulted from a nearly exclusive focus on gender 3) It offers a new approach to understanding the challenges of broadening participation initiatives in STEM, which will generate new strategies for recruiting a diverse STEM workforce.
