We wrote a book!

In 2017, the FemTech.dk project kicked off and with it my post-doc position at the Computer Science department of the University of Copenhagen. Previously I had been working on public issues and I was particularly interested in controversies. I was driven by an interest in doing research with activists, civil society, and public officers on issues related to democratic participation. When Pernille Bjørn proposed I work on gender in higher education I thought there was no controversy in there for me – and I couldn’t be more mistaken. As I started to work on FemTech.dk, the project grew on me and I grew with the project. We investigated and experienced the different agendas around diversity. We developed installations, organised events, and workshops aimed to sparkle debate on the gendered narratives in computer science. We wrote many papers, and many of them were rejected. In 2018, Martha Larson invited us to give a keynote at ACM Multimedia, where many people became interested in our work on fostering debates on equity in computer science, and some others thought there was not an issue – they couldn’t be more mistaken. After our presentation, we were invited to write a book on the project, and the result can be openly read here. The book tells about our experience in Denmark trying to open computer science to different backgrounds and interests – it is not about attracting minorities to computer science or teaching them how to code. We chose to include insights about our journey, including failures and successes, and there were many of them. We wrote this book thinking of different audiences including teachers, policymakers, researchers, and journalists – if you work on diversity in higher education we hope you find something in this book for you.