Exploring Antecedents of Gender Equitable Outcomes in IT Higher Education Manju Ahuja Kelley School of Business 1309 E. 10 th Street, 812 855-2655 mahuja@indiana.edu Susan Herring School of Library and Information Science, Library 011 812 856-4919 herring@indiana.edu Jean Robinson Department of Political Science Woodburn Hall 210, 812 855-7230 robinso@indiana.edu Chris Ogan School of Informatics 901 E. 10 th Street, 812 855-1699 ogan@indiana.edu ABSTRACT This research-in-progress paper reports on a National Science Foundation funded project aimed at examining ways to engage women and girls in courses of study that will qualify and motivate them for information technology (IT)-related careers. This Information Technology Work Force (ITWF) award provides support to investigate 15 tertiary education programs in information systems, information science, instructional systems technology, and informatics, with computer science programs as a baseline comparison, in five major IT degree-granting institutions. The purpose of the study is to systematically investigate the contribution of organizational culture to student experiences and outcomes, determining factors that favor female success over time. The programs are hypothesized to be differentially responsive to female students due to differences in academic culture, operationalized in terms of the availability of mentorship, role models, peer support networks, grant programs, and other resources at the departmental, university, and disciplinary levels. These measures of organizational culture will be correlated with measures of student outcomes and self-reports of student experiences. Data about students' experiences will be collected through a web-based survey of a sample of 5,000 students, followed by three face-to-face interviews with an estimated 155 students, over-sampling for females, over a two-year period. In addition, faculty, administrators and staff in the study programs will be interviewed by telephone and in person. Student survey data will be collected by April 2004 and analyzed by May 2004. At the conference, we will report preliminary findings based on analysis of data collected from our pilot site (Indiana University). The project will identify encouraging and discouraging factors, and produce comparative statistics, that can be used as a baseline in future research on IT education and gender. Findings can be used to inform programmatic recommendations aimed at moving more women into the IT pipeline through a diverse range of educational programs. To the extent that new IT paradigms such as are taught in schools of information, informatics, education, and business help to create those cultural associations, they can contribute to reducing the persistent gender segregation in academic IT-related programs and thus IT employment. Categories and Subject Descriptors A.1 [General]: Introductory and Survey General Terms Management, Measurement, Performance, Design, Human Factors. Keywords Information Technology, Workforce, Gender, Retention, Enrollments, Mentoring, Work-life Balance, Computer Science, Informatics, Information Science. 1 This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, Award # 03050859 and by Indiana University. It has received approval by campus Human Subjects Committee, approval log 6- 2403. 2 Authors are listed in alphabetical order, indicating their equal contribution. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGMIS’04, April 22–24, 2004, Tucson, Arizona, USA. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-847-4/04/0004…$5.00. 120