Men’s acts of legitimacy can help boost women in tech

“If we want more women in tech, we need the men around them to say, credibly and clearly: ‘This is your field too’,” says Professor Regina Connolly

Regina Connolly, principal investigator with Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software and Professor of Information Systems at Dublin City University Business School.

More women will thrive in tech if men tell them that technology is their field too, says Prof Regina Connolly of the Lero research institute in Dublin.

Professor Connolly is principal investigator with Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software, and Professor of Information Systems at Dublin City University Business School.

“If we want more women in tech, we do not need them to be braver or more exceptional. We need the men around them to say, credibly and clearly: ‘This is your field too’,” notes Professor Connolly.

“Decades of initiatives have focused on encouraging women into technology. Longitudinal research spanning four decades suggests a quieter but decisive influence is still overlooked: the role men play in legitimising who belongs in technical careers.” 

Prof Connolly says that Ireland has spent decades trying to close the gender gap in technology by focusing on girls and women. Ireland has reformed curricula, funded outreach programmes, celebrated female role models and set participation targets.

In this Q&A interview, she outlines that while these efforts matter, they have concentrated largely on access and aspiration – and far less on a quieter, more powerful force: legitimacy. More needs to be done to ensure that women are recognised as naturally belonging in technical spaces.

Can men play a role in guiding policy change in education? 

In my longitudinal research, conducted with a colleague at Penn State University, tracing women’s careers in Ireland’s IT sector over four decades, one influence appears again and again: the legitimising role played by men. Across women’s experiences – from school through to senior IT roles – fathers, brothers, teachers, managers and male colleagues often act, often unconsciously, as arbiters of whether a girl or woman’s place in technology is seen as natural or conditional.

This is not an argument against structural reform. It is an argument for recognising a powerful, underacknowledged social influence that operates alongside policy and education systems. 

Why is there a gender imbalance among those developing careers in technology? 

Despite years of initiatives and good intentions, women remain markedly underrepresented in technology careers. This is not because they are absent from higher education. In Ireland, women make up more than half of all higher education students, yet their participation drops sharply in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), particularly in Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

This gap begins before university. At Leaving Certificate level, girls are far less likely to take physics, applied mathematics and higher-level maths – the very subjects that act as gateways into many technology degrees.

What makes this especially striking is that girls perform at least as well as boys academically. The issue, then, is not ability. It is choice – shaped by culture, confidence, expectations and experience. The real question is not why women struggle in technology, but why so many capable young women make the entirely rational decision to opt out long before their careers have even begun.

Is confidence in technology socially shaped?

Many women in our study described periods of imposter syndrome: the feeling of being “not really good enough”, even when objectively succeeding. This is often framed as a personal confidence problem. Our research suggests otherwise.

Imposter syndrome is not simply internal doubt; it is socially constructed. Environments where women are consistently outnumbered, where technical competence is implicitly masculinised, and where few peers look like them intensify the sense of being an outsider. Over time, these conditions quietly erode a woman’s sense that she belongs.

What disrupted this pattern was not resilience alone, but endorsement – particularly when it came from men in positions of everyday influence. 

In the context of technology, what is the legitimising role of men? 

Female role models matter. But four decades of data show that visibility alone has not shifted the gender balance in technology in any sustained way. At school, encouragement from fathers, brothers or male teachers often reinforced girls’ confidence in subjects seen as “technical”.

At university, belief – the sense that “I can do this” – frequently determined whether women stayed in computing courses or switched out. That belief was often sustained by male family members or mentors through consistent messages that women were as capable as their peers and deserved their place.

In the workplace, male colleagues and managers who acted as allies by advocating for women’s contributions and challenging exclusionary norms played a similar buffering role. Silence or indifference signalled the opposite, and over time, the cost of that isolation led many to leave the sector prematurely.

How can tech roles change to be more open to female participation? 

Career structures built around long hours and constant availability reflect male–normed career trajectories and make sustained participation difficult.

Public debate about women in STEM too often places the burden of change on women themselves: more confidence, more role models. What this overlooks is how profoundly confidence and belonging are shaped by others – and how often, in technical spaces, those others are men.

If we want more women in technology, policy matters. Education matters. Culture matters. But so does legitimacy – and legitimacy is still shaped disproportionately by men’s actions and expectations.

This requires moving gender equality in technology out of the “women’s issue” box and recognising it as a shared responsibility. Change does not require grand gestures. It happens through ordinary acts of legitimacy: competence assumed; belonging affirmed.

The future of women in technology will not be determined by women alone. It will be shaped by whether men recognise – and take responsibility for – the influence they already wield. Not as gatekeepers, but as legitimisers. Not as heroes, but as active allies.

# Regina Connolly is principal investigator with Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software and Professor of Information Systems at Dublin City University Business School. Her research focuses on responsible digital leadership and the societal consequences of technological change.