Women engagement in ICT professions in Tanzania: exploring challenges and opportunities
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Date
2016
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Serials Publications
Abstract
While the government of Tanzania tries to increase number of women representation in all sectors, there are still fewer women in ICT sector. ICT has a great potential in reduce gender gap as it overcome geographical barrier and provide information and knowledge with easy and low access cost. Scholars from different countries have conducted research on the reasons of lesser number of women in ICT profession; however there are insufficient studies in Tanzania which systematically show the reasons of why women are underrepresented in various arenas of ICT professions. Therefore this study aims at identifying barriers that hinder women to engage in ICT professions in Tanzania and thereby exploring opportunities that could be adopted to overcome gender inequality in ICT professions. The study employed literature review and survey methods to achieve the objectives. Through Literature review and survey this paper has found that lack of awareness on the importance of ICT (76.2%) and lack of moral and financial support (65.6%) were the most dominant factors hindering women to pursue ICT professions. Additionally it was also found that having good background on science subject (86.4%), being confidence and focused on a certain career path (84.2%), and encouragements from role models (72.9%) were the most important factors which would provide women with opportunities to engage in ICT professions. We concluded that there is a need of formulating polices in higher institutions which are gender sensitive in order to engage women in ICT related professions.
Description
Abstract. Full text article available at https://tinyurl.com/2s3fkkzy
Keywords
ICT, Women and ICT, ICT professions, Tanzania, Information technology, Information and communication technology
Citation
Muro, C., & Gabriel, M. (2016). Women engagement in ICT professions in Tanzania: exploring challenges and opportunities. Int. J. Comput. Inf. Technol, 5(5), 443-447.