Research
Penn State Intercom......September
19, 2002
For women to succeed in IT,
ask them what they want
By Barbara Hale
Public Information
Analyzing the life paths of 31 women working in the overwhelmingly male world of computer and information technology (IT) reveals a pattern of "odd girls out," according to a researcher, which suggests that increasing female representation in these fields will not be as simple as finding out "what women want."
Eileen Trauth, professor of information sciences and technology, said, "You can't stereotype all women with respect to IT. You can't assume what women as a group want. You have to ask an individual woman.
"Successful women IT professionals do not all experience the same influences, nor do they all respond in the same ways," she added. "Each individual woman is shaped by the cultural assumptions of the countries which formed her, by her parents, family and teachers and by significant others and events."
These findings suggest that women can best be encouraged to enter and stay in IT fields by treating them as individuals. Respecting an individual woman or girl's particular interests will help her resist the subtle social shaping that tells her interest in IT is "normal" for males but not for females, Trauth said.
The researcher conducted her study on sabbatical at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. She did in-depth interviews with 31 Australian and New Zealand women who collectively had lived in 13 different countries, including the United States. The interviews showed that what is "normal" female IT employment in one country may be "abnormal" in another. For example, women are accepted as computer analysts in Australia but not as programmers. The opposite is true in India. Female computer engineers are typical in some eastern European countries but not in the United States.
"The ways in which the respondents felt different from other women were closely aligned with gender stereotyping," Trauth said. "The respondents, collectively, described themselves as powerful people: forthright, strong, driven, ambitious, mathematical, logical and competitive. They considered these traits to be necessary for success in the IT field and also what set them apart from other women."
"We need to see if we have a culture in which it is not OK for a woman or girl to be competitive or assertive, for example," she said. "Do we give women the same range of assertive behavior as males or is there a much narrower range of acceptable assertive behavior for women in the workplace? Women who had engaged in sports in school, where it's OK to be assertive and competitive, often cited this experience as encouraging them in the workplace."
The researcher also found that the family, for example, a supportive father or other close male relative or a self-confident, "level-headed" mother, helped many of the women to resist social shaping and dare to become an "odd girl out" in IT. In other cases, a teacher was mentioned as providing the essential encouragement.
Single-sex schools were cited as both a positive influence and a negative one. Women who felt a single-sex school was a negative influence complained about being ill-prepared in mathematics when they entered college. Other women praised being shown there that engineering and physics are open to women.
Trauth said, since social shaping has made the notion of success in some IT areas incompatible with being female, just giving young girls access to computers will not necessarily encourage them to enter the field. On the other hand, she added, a Barbie doll dressed for IT success and equipped with software just might play a positive role.
Barbara Hale can be reached at bah@psu.edu.
Web community conduct
makes it less vulnerable to attack
Contrary to the global "rich get richer" behavior of the World Wide Web as a whole, in which a relatively small number of popular sites receive a disproportionately large share of inbound links and traffic, a new study has found that smaller communities of Web sites accumulate incoming links in a more evenly balanced way.
C. Lee Giles, the David Reese professor in the School of Information Sciences and Technology and professor of computer science and engineering, said, "Previous studies imply a very bleak state of competition on the Web, where the 'winners,' -- the Yahoos and the Amazons, for example, -- are dominant while new entrants simply cannot compete. This highly skewed distribution also leaves the network susceptible to malicious attacks. Our results reveal that, in fact, many real networks are considerably less biased and may be more tolerant to attacks and our growth model explains precisely why."
The study is a joint effort of David M. Pennock, Gary W. Flake, Steve Lawrence and Eric Glover, all of NEC Research Institute, and Giles, who holds a joint appointment at NEC and Penn State.
The currently accepted description of the Web says the distribution of links to and from a Web page obeys a power law, a mathematical pattern also obeyed by movie actor collaborations, research paper citations and the power grid in the western United States, to name a few. Essentially, groups that obey a power law tend to have individuals or nodes to which the other members of the group want to and do all try to link. This type of behavior would make the Web particularly vulnerable to attack, since by attacking the relatively few dominant nodes, the rest of the Web could be brought down.
However, the new study has shown that some collections of Web pages of the same type -- for example, all American university home pages or all U.S. newspaper home pages or all public company home pages -- do not follow the power law pattern that characterizes the Web as a whole. The researchers suggest a new simple generative model or pattern that incorporates a mixture of preferential and uniform attachment, quantifies the degree to which the rich nodes grow richer and how new and poorly connected nodes can compete.
Giles said, "The Web actually works better than people thought it did. Company Web sites, for example, are more likely to connect to sites that are relevant rather than simply to sites that are well linked. This implies that the Web's growth pattern is driven by rational process rather than simply by a desire to connect to the dominant sites."
Study adds to knowledge
of how to stand up and walk
Standing up too quickly can cause some people -- especially the elderly -- to become dizzy and even faint.
What's often to blame? Lazy blood vessel response.
A study by Penn State College of Medicine researchers provides new data on blood vessel function and reveals the benefits of a measurement technique that gives more accurate data on the amount of norepinephrine, a hormone vital for blood vessel response, in tissues adjacent to blood vessels. The study was led by Lawrence Sinoway, program director of the General Clinical Research Center at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
Moving from a seated to standing position causes blood to pool in the legs. In most people, the body compensates for this drop in blood pressure by releasing norepinephrine, which triggers vasoconstriction, or blood vessel narrowing. Vasoconstriction revs up the pressure in the vessels and maintains adequate blood pressure. When a person stands and the vessels don't constrict, blood pressure drops and, temporarily, the brain doesn't receive enough oxygen. This causes dizziness and fainting.
Typically, norepinephrine levels are measured by taking blood samples.
"But because the norepinephrine sits in the tissue as well as in the blood plasma, when you measure it only in blood, you only account for a small part of it," Sinoway said. "What you really need to know is what's sitting in the muscle right next to the blood vessel because it's that norepinephrine that will signal vasoconstriction and maintain blood pressure when you stand up."