Building an "I" for Inclusion in IS

Despite decades of declining enrollments in IS and computing majors in general, particularly among women and other minorities, it seems that little is being done to understand the lived experiences of these potential students, much less how to resolve the problem (Kvasny, 2006). Some attempts to recruit women and minorities have the opposite effect, because they highlight differences rather than accepting them as part of the status quo. Some interventions fail because they start from the majority viewpoint; they expect women and minorities to become more like them and to “fit in” rather than admit the “boys’ club” might be broken or that technology might be about more than tinkering with a computer (Adam et al., 2006; Stout, Dasgupta, Hunsinger, & McManus, 2011). In the workplace, women downplay their technical abilities and their gender identity, fulfilling gender stereotypes to fit in with the boys, even when men and women do the same work (Faulkner, 2000). It is also well known that black men and women have to work twice as hard as whites in the same job to get ahead, in addition to cultural labor such as mentoring and sitting on diversity committees.