Gender and IT: do stereotypes persist?

The media depiction of IT users being predominately male was reported by Ware and Stuck in their 1985 paper "Sex-role messages vis-A-vis microcomputer use: a look at pictures". Much has been written in the intervening years about gender and IT, and in a climate of declining proportional representation of women in IT, the effect of media portrayals is recognised as a powerful yet under-investigated influence on career choice. This paper replicates part of Ware and Stuck's study to report whether stereotyping of computer and IT use in teenage magazines persists. Current statistical information on gender and IT enrolments in Australian secondary schools and higher education institutions is presented, as well as the findings of the analysis of pictorial representations of IT use and application in teenage magazines. This Australian study found that pictorial representations in advertisements and articles in computing magazines are gender-balanced and did not find the stereotypical representations that were evident in 1985. However, stereotypes appear to persist in gaming advertisements and the absence of depictions of computer use or advertisements in the most popular girls magazines could be construed as stereotyping of IT as male.