Lady Geek

I was very pleased to read that vocational qualifications are – according to the educational foundation EDGE – on the rise in the UK. While this is certainly a positive trend, my heart sank when I read that 36% of vocational qualifications achieved by women are in the areas of health, public services and care and only 3% in engineering and construction. It appears that the occupational segregation with men and women working in different areas of work is as strong as ever.

Why does this matter? We know that so-called women’s jobs tend to be lower paid than jobs classified as men’s jobs. More importantly for Ladygeek, women tend not to chose or to remain in technology work.

I just recently read a report by CRAC: The Career Development Organisation which stated that female IT students outperform male students academically and are as keen as men to enter IT jobs. However, despite of this, a lower proportion of women actually ends up working in IT jobs. I find it puzzling that women decide to study IT but then don’t get jobs in the IT area.

Unfortunately, the study was less conclusive in terms of why this is the case. One could speculate that women find the culture of technical education alienating. Maybe because men treat women as exotic and less able to use and create technology. To counteract this problem, in the 1980s women-only vocational courses were en vogue. The rational was that women would be encouraged by seeing other women in their course, have it easier to find role models and are in an environment where they can speak out freely. However these courses have fallen out of fashion.

So, even in cases where women decided to break gender norms and enter an area which is coded ‘masculine’ in society, they often do not end up working in technology fields. More often women do not even chose areas of study and training in which technologies are central. This means that women lose out on the opportunity to shape new technologies and add a women’s perspective to them. They miss the change to leave their fingerprint on technology.

The rise of vocational training courses in the UK is certainly laudable and important. It would be even greater if vocational training courses that challenge gender barriers in society and at work would be developed to attract women and indeed men to non-gender typical areas of work.