• Artist: GK3 Online Interactions
• Title: Margarita Salas: Women ICT based enterprises
• Year: 2007
• Length: 8:03 minutes (3.69 MB)
• Format: Stereo 22kHz 64Kbps (CBR)

Margarita Salas
Sula Batsu Costa Rica
Researcher of Women, ICT and social economy models
http://www.sulabatsu.com

Summary:

IT is a sector that has been promoted by the governments of the region as part of a new economic model for the countries, especially for Costa Rica. There is also a lot of outsourcing from multinational companies that is possible because of the specific education and population conditions.

There is a lot of talk about teleworking and IT working benefiting women. We would like to propose a critical review of this issue. Women enter the lower ranking positions on the IT workforce, they are less paid and work on the less recognized parts of the IT industry. This is an industry that values the more traditional "masculine" roles in the sector such as programming and engineering, and is not valuing roles more traditionally occupied by women such as documentation, training, translation and user interface design. Sometimes women work in the sector but are not recognized as IT workers.

The sector is an opportunity for women because there are more resources and employment opportunities, women should take advantage of this impulse to IT, because the skills give value to jobs in other sectors as well.

We think microenterprises are a good model because they distribute wealth and ensures it's more spread in the community. Also, women should be knowledge producers, they should be able to develop innovative products with their own capacities. We identified that women's enterprises lack management capacities, have weaknesses on administrative areas, financial areas, costing, marketing etc. Because of gender socialization sometimes they don't see their work as business but as subsistence work. Women empowerment is also important, since they keep having double shifts while trying to be entrepreneurs, it brings more income but at the cost of women's quality of life. It is necessary to value the work of women and share the roles in the domestic life.

We've come across several experiences through our research, for example in Nicaragua there are infocenters and telecenters. Women who received traininghave taken over the business, train the community in relevant information for agriculture, coffee, banana production etc. In Costa Rica women with higher education have established software development enterprises in a market that is highly masculine. In their life stories you realize they have adjusted their relationship patterns and many other factors in their lives. Bringing more women in the sector will change the way the sector grows as an opportunity for women.