| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 58

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Krista Scott-Dixon, Doing IT: Women Working in Information Technology (Toronto: Sumach Press 2004)

IN THIS TIMELY BOOK Krista Scott- Dixon offers one of the first, if not the only, account of Canadian workers' experiences negotiating the complex, and sometimes perplexing, world of work in information technology. Drawing on interviews with women working professionally (or semi-professionally) in a range of information technology [IT] jobs in the Toronto area, she undertakes a detailed study of their labour market situation, asking such questions as: what kinds of jobs are women entering? what opportunities have they found? what obstacles? what are their work conditions and how much are they paid? (15) Doing IT: Women Working in Information Technology answers these questions by weaving together an industry analysis with personal narratives from 62 interviewees who tell the "real story" of women working in the IT sector.

Athough IT has been constructed, especially during the heady days of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, as the new nirvana for economic growth and prosperity that promises workers skilled in IT secure high-paying jobs in an expanding innovative field, the reality, as Scott-Dixon points out, is an industry undergoing tumultuous change which is more likely to offer moderately paid, precarious employment with limited economic gains for the economy. According to industry studies IT does not necessarily contribute significantly to increased productivity. (148) Nor is there an overwhelming demand for IT skills; in fact, industry analyses indicate "no evidence of a generalized shortage of technical skills." (68) Still, employment in IT grew significantly throughout the nineties, growing three times faster than the job growth overall of the Canadian economy between 1995 and 2000. (119)

It is against this backdrop that Scott-Dixon asks how women are faring in the IT industry. Are traditional gender job hierarchies being reproduced in the industry, or are women resisting sexist stereotypes and gender power structures, and moving into new employment categories customarily reserved for men? As new forms of IT work are being created, are women able to challenge masculine ideological conceptions concerning the value of technical skills and locate themselves in jobs offering greater skill and pay opportunities than those typically granted to feminized work? According to Scott-Dixon, "IT work for women is complex and contradictory, neither wholly negative nor wholly positive. IT work can constrain and liberate, restrict and empower women. Women's situation in IT both reflects and challenges norms of women's role in the labour force." (19)

In the first chapter Scott-Dixon situates IT work within a broader analysis of industry and occupational gender segregation in Canada which shows that women's domestic responsibilities consistently define their relationship to the labour force: "Nearly one-third of women, compared to 11 percent of men, work part-time." (37) However, only 5 per cent of men say they chose part-time employment to help them balance their domestic responsibilities, while 42 per cent of women report choosing part-time work because of family obligations. In keeping with traditional expectations of women's domestic role, Scott-Dixon finds that women in IT wish to work from home in an effort to balance their domestic duties with paid employment (continuing a long historical gender employment pattern). However, they continue to experience stigmatization related to home-based work, as this respondent explains: "Something about a woman working from home still sounds like housewife." (40) Harkening back to the insights of early feminists Virginia Woolf and Betty Friedan, Scott-Dixon argues that women in IT are living out some of the same contradictions of middle-class housewives as in previous decades. While Betty Friedan spoke about the promise of fulfillment for the American 1960s housewife supposedly derived from her material privilege and maternal role, today women are told they will be liberated by technology as they have the ability "to mix and match jobs or even to create their own self-employment ... [which] should be making all of this [combining work and family] better for them, not worse." (46–47) But like the suburban housewife of 40 years ago, home-based women workers in IT experience dissatisfaction from their isolation, from competing demands juggling their paid and unpaid work, and from the perception that their work is not "real work."

Chapter two discusses how technical skill becomes gender-defined in IT. IT culture is infused with a sexist value system whereby what is "male" is valued and what is "female" is devalued. As Scott- Dixon explains, "skill supremacy is viewed as inherently masculine and imbued with macho values" while "women tend to be implicitly or explicitly excluded from the community of technical experts." (69) She found that what is viewed as "technical enough" to adequately perform IT work, a rather elusive determination, is heavily decided by men who reside high up in the IT occupational hierarchy. (96) At the same time, however, Scott-Dixon observes a tension over "what counts and is valued as skill" and who gets to do IT work. (66) Because IT is a burgeoning new field, there is greater value placed on hands-on experience, something women may be more likely to acquire than costly formal credentials; this provides them with an opening (albeit slim) to enter the industry. Women have been able to carve out positions for themselves that men were less interested in pursuing, usually those combining traditional female skills with some technical know-how. The position of web designer is a perfect case example. Women represent one-third of web designers, whose average age is 32, but they are paid far less (under $30,000) than many other job categories in IT and work some of the longest hours in the industry. (55, 60) Scott- Dixon goes on to explain that "as certain types of IT positions become less associated with 'hard' technology and academic computer science, more women appear to be performing them," (56) and, as noted, at less pay. In fact, gender pay inequity permeates the industry and at least one study showed that men are paid more than women regardless of "fewer computer skills overall than women, particularly word processing and statistical/analytical skills." (81)

Chapters three and four describe work in the lower-end service sector of IT. Interviews with call centre workers who were thrown out of better paying jobs after the dot-com debacle (or dot.bomb, as one interviewee referred to it) illustrate the increasing precariousness of the IT job market. Even well-educated, youthful workers who are well trained in the industry may find themselves in less than ideal circumstances as they are either underemployed, employed outside their area of expertise, or work temporarily, often parttime, and hold multiple jobs. Rebecca, once employed in a variety of IT jobs including managing a database for museum collections, is an ESL instructor, while Mike, downsized after Y2K, is working in a call centre. A second and related theme of these chapters concerns the promise of information technology for workers to control the location, scheduling, and pace of work. As the narratives of IT workers demonstrate, IT-related "work has both expanded and contracted work space and time," (131) meaning that workers have to do more with less time, and may find big gaps during their work day/night which are filled with intermittent employment in different spaces and under different temporal conditions. Non-standard work, a characteristic feature of IT, operates in marginalized spaces (e.g., at home, fly-by-night operation), produces chaotic work time (e.g., split shifts, part-time), and is more likely to be performed by youth and women, especially in service jobs. As the information technology sector undergoes restructuring, IT work is becoming increasingly gendered.

Scott-Dixon demonstrates how gender is an overpowering factor shaping women's experiences in the IT field. Throughout the book "gender," more than any other social relation, dominates women's experiences: from their education and training in IT, to their relationships with employers and co-workers, to the workplace and industry culture, and, perhaps, most importantly, in regard to their perceptions about the technology. As Scott-Dixon explains, information technology work is infused with gender qualities symbolically manifest, for instance, in technical terms such as "digital binary of 0 and 1 ... [where] the spiky linear '1' symbolizes the phallic skyward thrusting male, while the '0' indicates the lack, the void, the chthonic chasm of the female." (98) In this symbolic schema in which the "female zero signifies nothingness" women are erased, made invisible, in the masculine techno culture. Indeed, masculinized values seep into every dimension of IT work, a "fact of life" that is not lost on the women trying to establish themselves in what, in their experience, is a deeply hostile and alien world. As one respondent explains: "Male geeks are horrible, terrible, and unhelpful and incredibly misogynist ... I never got promoted and get constantly overlooked in favour of males. Guys didn't like women coming into their little group." (92) This woman explained to the author that while she was working hard to improve her skills for promotion, men spent their spare time downloading pornography.

I am struck by the immense force gender exerts in this industry, both symbolically in the culture of IT work, and in actual material terms where women are systematically discriminated against in employment in such areas as pay, promotion, and occupational designation. This is why Scott-Dixon's contention that "women's awareness of their own situation allows them to make choices from options they feel are available to them" (22) does not sit well with me. While I agree there are times women may resist gender norms, the narratives of women IT workers convey a dominant masculinized discourse that overrides almost any attempts to defy the gender power hierarchies inherent in IT work.

This excellent book should be read by anyone interested in women and work, and would make an excellent contribution to a sociology, labour studies, or women's studies course syllabus. Scott-Dixon's writing is animated and accessible, and her use of personal narrative offers a fascinating look into the work lives of the "new" IT work force in the expanding knowledge economy.


Jan Kainer York University

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