In most economies, there are often links between capabilities, skills and career outcomes of individuals (Faulkner&Lie, 2007). Also IT sector requires special skills and capabilities. But although there is a need for skilled IT workers, many of them are currently underemployed and are using only a limited range of skills repertoirs. Underemployment is a particularly female phenomenon in the IT sector, where women are required to ‘prove themselves’ and often are frustrated as a re sult of being given work below their capabilitie s (Gutek, 2006).
There are also gendered perceptions of skills and capabilities that affect women in the sector. IT and ICT use and especially computing are often viewed as technical and masculine areas of work, which can lead women to feel disempow — ered and possibly excluded (Dittmar et al., 2004; Shih, 2006). Similarly, women are excluded from software development as this work is considered to be ‘too technical’ and a man task. Women and men software developers differ in focus on the client’s requirements versus product and process aspects. Indeed, according to essentialist researchers, women are better able to understand clients because of their superior communication skills. So managers who also hold such essentialist assumptions can prefer to employ women in socially oriented tasks such as project or quality management (Eriksson-Zetterquist, 2007).
The proportion of women entering computer science and engineering courses is static or in decline in most western countries. There is also a contradictory picture in most Eureopean countrie s (Faulkner&Lie, 2007). So it is critical to analyse the causes and consequences of the gender gap in the ICT field, rather than reifying gender stereotypes in the sector.