There are few women in the technical occupations of Information and Communication Technologies in Burkina Faso. To understand and explain this phenomenon, which occurs in the professional environment, we thought it advisable to ask what women’s representation in the fields of study leading to technological occupations is. Here too, it is the same story: there are few girls. The household and other spheres of socialisation of young girls and boys then become the breeding grounds for identifying the factors that influence their choices in terms of fields of study, in particular that of ICTs. Our study findings show that the acquisition of technological capital is to blame. It is unequally held depending on gender, and boys are best equipped with it.
Ghana’s return to democracy and a liberalised business environment in 1992 ushered the country into a period characterised by an ever-growing media/communication industry. From journalism, through public relations to advertising, there has been an upsurge in activity and, consequently, in competition. In the midst of this competitive environment, some women have made visible gains, having attained different levels of success evidenced by various awards they and the organisations they lead have won. This is in spite of the numerous challenges that women have been known to face in media-related industries (see for instance Okpara 2006; Steiner 2002). This paper reports findings from interviews with three such women that delved into their career journeys to explore whether there are gender implications for their success.
In this contribution, we will review gender- and ICT-related theoretical issues in the light of the positions developed by feminist research. An inventory of research in communication science will introduce the issue, laying emphasis on methodological and epistemological considerations. First, the universalist and differentialist approaches will be addressed and light will be shed on issues relating to their proponents’ positions on the issue of technology and information and communication technologies (ICTs). Second, the path taken subsequently by the constructivist approach will show how the reopening of the gender and technology categories is used to reconsider fruitfully the two previous approaches. The methods of the subsequent theoretical and methodological readjustment will be brought to light. Third, the ICTs and gender issue will be analysed in terms of its relationship to development, i.e., in so-called contexts of resource scarcity that happen to be located in so-called developing countries whose relationship to Western feminist research are already longstanding. We will show that the ICTs category is too wide to be used efficiently for the analysis, and that instead, we need to proceed as follows: first, distinguish ICTs according to the technical skills they require on the part of the user; next, consider that, in order to be able to analyse properly the practical effects of the problematisation, we need to take into account the various forms of accessibility (economic and geographic in particular); and last, that it is only in a third and final stage that the analysis of uses/non-uses will make it possible to think the improvement of women’s living conditions. In the concluding section, we will show that the way in which the issue of ICTs, gender and development is problematised makes the themes supportive of the universalist approach, despite some theoretical and strategic differences. A critical openness will enable us to lay the groundwork for an alternative research agenda that remains sensitive to the reduction of inequalities and the improvement of the living conditions of women and, more generally, of ICTs users in developing countries.
