Unseen, unheard and undervalued: experiences of Dutch women working in the IT sector

Abstract Book of the 8th Global Conference on Women's Studies

Year: 2026

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Unseen, unheard and undervalued: experiences of Dutch women working in the IT sector

Elise van der Mark

ABSTRACT:

Despite significant earlier gains, progress toward workplace gender equality in the Netherlands has slowed considerably. Particularly male-dominated sectors such as IT remain highly unequal and exclusionary for women. Addressing these inequalities requires a nuanced understanding of women’s lived experiences, yet empirical data on Dutch women working in IT remains scarce. This paper seeks to address this gap. It adopts a feminist relational lens together with the Gender@Work framework, foregrounding everyday relational dynamics and the interaction between individual experiences and systemic structures in sustaining gender inequality. A qualitative research design was employed, drawing on in-depth interviews (n=10), participatory observation, and three participatory group sessions (n=23 per group). The findings show that Dutch IT women operate within a dense relational web shaped by managerial hierarchies, peer relations, client expectations, and organizational norms. Within this web, women are frequently spoken over, see their technical contributions reattributed to male colleagues, experience restricted access to information, and are positioned as less credible in decision-making processes. They are also expected to perform emotional labor, remain flexible under shifting workloads, and adapt to masculine-coded communication styles that dominate team cultures. Six recurring relational configurations are identified as key mechanisms which reproduce gender inequality in IT workplaces. This paper contributes to gender studies by integrating feminist relational theory with the Gender@Work framework, thereby developing a relational diagnostic approach to workplace gender inequality. By translating experiential data into analytically tractable relational configurations, this approach supports systematic identification of intervention points across informal norms, organizational practices, and formal structures.

Keywords: Feminist Theory; Gender Inequality; Organizational Culture; Participatory Research; Relationality