Started in late 2015 as a result of the reflection process driven by the preparation of the gender action plan of the María de Maeztu (MdM) proposal, the MdM gender and ICT program at DTIC-UPF aims at contributing to a balanced gender composition in the ICT domain in the future. The ICT world replicates the unequal representation of women at leading senior levels but, unlike most other areas, this unbalance is also already present in the number of women pursuing engineering degrees. The impact during these 3 years can be summarised as:
Introduction:
The proportion of females in the entire research staff in our department is 25%. They reflect a troubling imbalance which, while present in many other ICT research centres across the world, we are very motivated to rectify. We are already making efforts to increase the gender balance in our evaluation committees, councils, governing bodies and recruitment actions. At the same time, this approach alone is insufficient and in the long run it may be unsustainable, since it imposes undue burden on female staff members to contribute to governance activities far more than their fair share. Clearly, what is needed is to balance gender composition in the research staff as a whole. The only sustainable, long-term solution is to retain talented young females in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields at earlier stages. Some will then continue to higher stages of education and change the reality of tomorrow for the recruitment of staff.
We have witnessed in the last two years an explosion of initiatives for a more equal society at all levels, and STEM fields are not an exception. However, back in 2015, although there was "on the air" a strong motivation by many individuals (mostly female) in our context, there were very few actions actively tackling it. A traditional risk in the explosion of actions around an emerging topic of interest is their fragmentation. Since the beginning, the avoidance of this fragmentation was a central concern, especially as we tend in the academia to create self-referenced programs that lack the required critical mass, are not sustainable over time and, therefore, fade after some time. The approach was to join forces with entities in our network of collaborators which were starting also actions along the same objectives or at least showed explicit interest in taking some action, so that their impact could increase. Only when a gap was perceived, did we only design then a specific action . In addition, given the fact that there were no resources allocated to it, the need for collaborations was also a good indicator of the relevance of the activities and their commitment, as either voluntary work or sponsorships were needed to turn them into reality. The collaboration and support by the UPF Equality Unit and the Vice-rectorate for Social Responsibility was in this sense instrumental.
Description
The program consists of four main lines of action, targeting a different population, each addressing a specific goal. The structure reflects the intellectual process that has taken place with the execution of the program and the active discussions with many other agents dealing with the topic. From an initial girl-ony approach, the program has been getting sophisticated to deal with the broader aspects and perspectives of this multifaceted problem. Other actions around gender equality in ICT have been also promoted in parallel by other units like the USQUID, faculty members or the UPF Equality Unit, so they are also included to give an overall view of all the actions dealing with gender balance at the department. Many other actions addressing the whole university can be found at the web of the UPF Equality Unit.
Goal: our present society associates an increasing number of activities to a gender, or segments them according to them. The main goal is to break the label that “engineering is for boys” with actions targeted exclusively to girls, replicating several experiences already implemented in other countries
Actions:
Expected impact:
Results:
Goal: provide female engineering students with mentoring from experienced professionals to avoid
3. PROFESSIONALS – support to external networks
Goals:
Expected impacts:
Goal: stereotypes are intertwined with deep societal forces, contribute to fight stereotypes at boys, girls, men and women
CONCLUSIONS
The María de Maeztu gender and ICT program at DTIC-UPF is a good example of a program driven at the level of a university department to contribute to the advancement towards a gender balanced society in general, and in particular in the field of ICT. The program targets several of the factors that may explain the current situation with specific actions designed for it. This multi-faceted approach is considered essential as it allows to create links among actions which otherwise may be just anecdotical, to provide a varied framework to the different tmotivations, capacities and commitments that the members of our community can have and, most importantly, to generate critical reflection both at individual and at departmental level. A critical aspect has been the collaborative approach, to avoid the reduced impact that individual initiatives have shown to have, to increase its visibility, to reinforce the main message that the issue is of collective relevance and to provide multiple ways for its sustainability.
The program aims at disappearing because it becomes irrelevant (which does not seem likely in the short term) or because the activities become mainstream and then are adopted and expanded by other actors, which is already being the case. The initial execution of the program did not find many internal barriers at its beginnings, probably because all actions were directed to provoke an external change. But despite the efforts, our department is still far from having included the gender perspective in all its processes. The future development will, without any doubt, target this internal change.
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