Deputy Chair
Dr. Catherine Lang, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Swinburne University
"By connecting students and young women with those already working in the industry we can help change the stereotype that IT is boring and encourage more girls to enter IT courses. The more we get in, the more the stereotype will change".
Dr. Catherine Lang is a senior lecturer in the faculty of Information and Communication Technologies at Swinburne University and is involved in researching women's experiences in the ICT industry. She has recently completed her PhD, titled "How girls make choices about careers and education in IT" with the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne and has a three year grant for a program to investigate the student experience of women in IT at Swinburne.
Catherine is a member of the Australian Computing Society (ACS) and its American counterpart (ACM). This year she has been appointed Australian Ambassador for the ACM committee on Women in Computing.
Catherine's interest in women's experiences in IT was sparked when as a geography, history and IT teacher in country secondary schools in Victoria she found herself consistently teaching to all boy classes, and had difficulty convincing young girls to consider studying VCE IT. Catherine gained a Teaching Fellowship at Monash University in 1996 which led to her Masters research on gender and computing. She conducted a cross-cultural comparison of female students in Australia and Singapore.
She says that much of her research to date has highlighted that students are not choosing IT careers because they don't know what they involve beyond the stereotypical programming roles. Catherine believes the Victorian Women for ICT Network is an opportunity for women in the industry to connect and to encourage girls not to be put off by outdated stereotypes.
