Skill Shortages, Women and the New Information Technologies

📖 The Scoop

The spread of New Information Technologies (NITs) to every sector of the economy has far reaching implication for the design of jobs, for patterns of work organization, and for vocational educational training systems. The full potential of the NITs is however being restricted by chronic skills shortages, particularly of high level NIT skills. Women will comprise a more significant proportion of the European Community (EC) labor force in the future, but they have traditionally been clustered at the bottom of the ladder in a limited number of industrial sectors. This report addresses three main issues: the extent to which the shake up in the work organization will facilitate better use of women as a resource; barriers to women filling the skill shortages in NITs; and how these barriers could be overcome. The report is divided into seven sections: (1) Introduction; (2) Barriers to Women's Employment (the gendering of jobs, child care and domestic commitments, qualifications); (3) Skill and the NITs (deskilling, upskilling and polarization; the "new pedagogics"; the social construction of skill); (4) Skill Shortages in the NITs (technicists, "hybrids" or "business analysts"); (5) Women's Employment and the NITs (gendered subject choice at school, qualifications and segregation, discrimination in employers' recruitment and promotion practices); (6) Women's Training in the NITs (the androcentricity of training provision, women returners' training needs, confidence building, women-only training, female tutors for NITs); and (7) Conclusion and Recommendations. The recommendations focus on ways in which women's access to training in NITs might be facilitated by school based education, vocational education training (VET) systems, and employers. Three tables display data on women's and men's employment in the EC; women's training and the European Social Fund; and students in IT related degree and postgraduate degree courses in the EC. (Contains 48 references.) (ALF)

Genre: Business & Economics / Office Automation (fancy, right?)