Service Learning, Gender and ICT. From gender inequality in ICT to the generation of technological vocations in the education

Abstract

Despite the efforts in recent decades, gender inequalities concerning access to ICT studies and jobs persist. Although women's exclusion from ICT relates to multiple causes, the research emphasizes on the need to encourage girls' interest to generate more technological vocations among pupils from school age and, increase the number of female ICT students and workers in the future. To respond to this need, we designed and implemented a Service Learning (SL) project in the field of Sociology of Genders at the University of Barcelona. The project consisted in holding conference-workshops on gender and technology for schools working on issues of gender inequality, gender socialization and making women more visible in ICT, as well as indicate ways to access jobs in ICT. In this article, we delve into the experience of four consecutive courses and present our main results. For the description and evaluation, we apply a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative methodology. On the one hand, we have the self-reflection reports of our participating university students, on the other hand, the surveys of 284 high school pupils and their teachers. With some limitations, the experience has been very satisfactory, for both the teaching staff and the participating students. The results show that SL from a gender perspective has great potential for learning, as well as for social and gender transformation.