New Technology, Work and Employment 16:1 ISSN 0268-1072 Gendered patterns in computing work in the late 1990s Niki Panteli, Janet Stack and Harvie Ramsay Computing is one of the most growing industries offering many opportunities for employment and advancement. Fur- thermore it is one of the newest industries which comprises of mainly young firms and relatively freshly constituted forms of working practices. Using empirical work in the UK, this paper presents and assesses gendered patterns of work and employment in the computing sector whilst comparing it to other traditionally male-dominated sectors. Introduction This paper presents and evaluates evidence on gender-based patterns of employment and work experience in computing in the UK. Computing is a particularly interesting area of work for such investigation in a number of ways. Firstly, it is reasonable to see it as a ‘leading-edge’ sector 1 in the sense that it is still changing rapidly in techni- cal terms, and for the most part it is growing rapidly (especially software production) and seems likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is the fastest growing sector in Europe, and especially so in the UK where the market for software and computing services grew 18 per cent in 1995 alone (Holway Report, 1996, Financial Times May 24). Secondly, software-related jobs in particular have grown in diversity of title and content, and embrace several major and distinct subdivisions with quite different characteristics. These range from the relatively routinised and low-skill areas of data entry and computer operator (and indeed end-user roles, since the boundary between ❒ Niki Panteli is a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Cyprus. Janet Stack is a Lecturer in Computing Science at Glasgow University. Harvie Ramsay was Professor of International Human Resource Management at the University of Strathclyde. 1 The term ‘sector’ is used loosely in this paper, since computing work is found partly in companies specialising e.g. in software development, but mostly in computing departments of firms in other industries, such as finance, public services, electronics etc.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA. Gendered patterns in computing work in the late 1990s 3