WOMEN-ONLY COMPUTING IN HIGHER-EDUCATION

This paper critically discusses women's experiences in an introductory IT class. Previous research has shown that women-only educational settings offer advantages for women. In our work, we show that a women-only hands-on IT unit that actively takes gender into account by exploring the gendered nature of office technology is not necessarily received as beneficial by the students. We argue that consideration of women's experiences must take the diversity of women into account, with our work showing differences of race and previous IT and work experience as especially significant. We explore these issues using the following themes: students' conceptualisation of computing; contextualisation of computing as taught in the unit; and the social relations within the classroom/workshop setting.