The experiences of women working in Information technology in Bucharest, Romania. Did it match their expectations?

The south capital city of Bucharest is Romania’s centre of technology outsourcing. In Romania, there are twice as many female students in engineering and more women in entry-level tech positions. Across Eastern Europe, it is far from unusual for women to work in technology and according to Eurostat data, Romania has 27.2 percent.

However, more women in Romania drop out of the tech workforce than in the US.

I knew Bucharest was a hub for tech jobs for women in Romania. Before my fieldwork, my research question was open-ended: Since many women in IT are the first women in their families to have a career, what are multigenerational perceptions of how women’s lives have changed due to these jobs?

After spending some time in Bucharest, I refined my questions to:
1) Why are so many women in Romania leaving IT jobs after just a few years?
2) How does the increase of women in IT affect gender equality at work and at home?

My methodology for finding participants included “snowball” sampling via my wife who is Romanian, or asking contacts during my internship in the City. However, I also sought a range of participants in terms of class background, religious background, and age, to represent the spectrum of women in IT. So, I went out of my way to find contacts in groups I had not yet spoken with.

I conducted over ten 30-40 minute interviews in addition to participant observation in workplaces, homes, and urban social spaces. While in the field, I periodically wrote up my interviews and field notes to begin analysis and make sure I was asking the right questions.

When I returned home, I transcribed and coded these interviews and my observational field notes using Nvivo, a qualitative data analysis software package into thematic groupings, with codes for each participant so their identity was anonymous while their demographic information was preserved.

I analysed the group for quantitative trends, such as, “How many women with children dropped out of the workforce?” (Answer: over half stopped working, a quarter were part time, less than a quarter were still full time)

However, I spent most of my time wrestling with the narratives and what these jobs meant to the women I spoke with. What were they most concerned about? What did they think was different for them as compared to past generations? What did working in tech mean to them?

Findings:
1) Gender equality must be understood in culturally specific ways

• Women in Bucharest leave tech jobs because culturally situated gender roles persist.

2) Urban spaces allow women to re-imagine their kinship identities

• Women deal with their frustrations by seeking belonging in new ways, largely through friendship.

3) Time is gendered

• The women I worked with experience a gendered anxiety I call “temporal liminality,” or the feeling that they do not fit in a recognizable historical or life course timeline.
• This idea inspired me to research the Sociology of time, and think about how time informs identity

In answer to my initial questions: Women in tech in Bucharest expected that working in IT would make their romantic relationships more equal and would reduce gendered kinship expectations at home. They also expected to have more success and respect from men at work.

But they were often disappointed because others’ expectations of them did not shift, especially in the workplace. As a consequence, many left their jobs. Women the world over choose to spend more time with their families as they get married and have children. However, the disappointment I found among women who had left their jobs led me to question the structural factors that led to that outcome, even as they explained it as their choice. Interestingly, they were most frustrated by static gender expectations in the workplace versus home.

Applied Solutions include:
• Match women with female mentors at work with a specific goal in mind, such as training younger women as managers or in a new technical skill
• Create small networks of women at different levels through management training teams
• Establish formalized support networks for female urban migrants in IT to address the challenges of moving to the city, being promoted at work, working in English regularly, and family concerns
• Rethink office social programming to include events that allow women from different class, religious, and family backgrounds to feel comfortable
• Create gender-blind promotion metrics to prevent women stalling at lower levels
• Find ways to account for family crises and caregiving, and allow for more flexibility and time off
• Facilitate child care solutions for families that do not have access to child care by elders
• Run workplace seminars featuring upper-level women who have careers and families to speak to groups of junior women and men in the office
• Explore creative ways to establish a culture of equal and appropriate treatment of women at work

Advisor: Dr Jana Javornik
This was an independent research made possible by a private research fund and the University of East London Student Grant Program.