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Vietnam's Gender Divide In Technology
by Danielle Belopotosky
Quantitative evidence suggests that segregation based on gender is occurring in Vietnam's nascent software industry, according to a study presented Tuesday at the World Bank.
The impact on workforce segregation in employee training, promotion and income opportunities is clear, said Le Anh Pham Lobb, a post-doctoral candidate in the Australian National University's demography and sociology program. Pham Lobb, who has studied the gender divide in the emerging information and communications technology sector in Vietnam, presented her findings via videoconference.
She randomly selected 26 software companies, whose ownership ranged from state-owned and privately held to join venture and foreign-owned. She surveyed 1,056 workers, representing 70 percent of the 26 companies' software workforce in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
Pham Lobb's research shows that there is "no sufficient relationship" between the level of education achieved by men and women. Still, nearly 90 percent of men work on the creative and design side, or the "conception" side, of software development, whereas women comprise roughly 10 percent of that field.
Females in the software industry tend to work on the production side, performing what she called "execution tasks" like testing and support of products. Women represent one-quarter of the workers who test and build software products and 60 percent of those who provide support.
Women typically earned less income than their male counterparts, according to the findings. "Workers who implement conception tasks appear to have [the] highest payment, and men also outnumber women in this group," she said.
Of the high-wage earners in software design, 73 percent of men said their monthly take-home pay was $251, while 34 percent of women earned that amount. Meanwhile, nearly half of the female tech-support workers earned $125 per month, while 16 percent of men earned that much. The minimum monthly wage in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City is about $45.
Still, Pham said that while women feel somewhat limited in terms of job function, they remain optimistic about pursuing careers in the software industry because they have a "new opportunity to communicate and to learn new knowledge."
European Watchdog Wary Of Data Searches
A European supervisory agency on Tuesday expressed concern over a proposal to authorize law enforcement to search a travel visa database of European Union citizens.
The Council of Europe has put forth a proposal to give national security officials of EU nations access to the Visa Information System. The database is expected to hold biometric data, personal identification, visa status and other information for some 70 million travelers over the next decade, according to the council. Details are still being finalized.
"The VIS database will be the biggest cross-border one in Europe," Peter Hustinx, the European data-protection supervisor, said in a statement. The database will grow by 20 million entries per year, so he said it is "of utmost importance that data protection is taken seriously for these ... innocent people."
While Hustinx said the need to grant law enforcement access to certain information to combat terrorism may be necessary, he wrote in an opinion paper posted online that VIS was designed to support the European-wide visa policy -- "not as a law enforcement tool." Therefore, he said the council should bear in mind the privacy of travelers who agreed to grant access to their data only to process visa applications.
Hustinx further recommended that the council grant access to information on a case-by-case basis, only when that data would "substantially" contribute to detecting criminals or preventing serious crimes.
In an effort to prevent unintended consequences or misidentification of travelers, the supervisor agreed with the proposal for two-step access to VIS data. But he warned that keywords such as "purpose of travel" and "photographs" cast too wide a net.
"The results of such queries present in the current state of the technology an unacceptable rate of false matches," he wrote. He suggested that those terms only be considered as "supplementary information," if warranted after initial searches on other terms.
Hustinx called for a coordinated approach to supervising the processing of data by EU nations and for audits of VIS to ensure that it satisfies privacy laws.
Negotiations for the final VIS proposal are still under way between the European Parliament and the council. Plans to incorporate the biometric data are set for completion by 2007.
Middle Eastern Nations Plan Submarine Cable
An underwater cable line to connect the Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is set for completion by the end of the year, according to the Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, which is known as ETISALAT.
ETISALAT, the Iraqi Telecommunications and Post Company, and the Saudi Telecom Company signed a construction agreement last week, laying the groundwork for the first fiber-optic submarine cable ever to land in Iraq. The three telecom operators signed a pact in June 2005 to build the advanced fiber-optic gulf cables.
The 932-mile system, which will be capable of transferring data at 80 gigabits per second, will initially link the Al Basra province in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the eastern cost of the UAE, according to ETISALAT. It later could be extended to other gulf nations, reaching 1,367 miles.
The cable "will bring with it international connectivity to Iraq and aid in modernizing the Iraqi network," Khazzal Hasan Mahdi, director general of the Iraqi telecom company, said in a statement.
Brain Drain No More
The labor tide is turning in India's favor as educated Indians return to join the nation's information technology workforce, India's minister of commerce and industry said last week.
Shri Kamal Nath, who spoke at the CII Partnership Summit in Kolkata, said India is reaping the benefits of globalization and is on the verge of creating an economic paradigm. In addition to luring its native population home to build corporations, India also is attracting greater foreign investment. Nath noted that there is a "reverse brain drain" under way in India, with foreign-born workers returning from abroad to work in the IT industry.
Foreign investment in India rose to $6 billion in 2005, up from $5.3 billion previous year, according to a U.N. Conference on Trade and Development report. In December, Microsoft announced plans to invest $1.7 billion in India over the next four years. Intel also expects to invest $1 billion over five years, with much of it going toward improving the firm's research and development operations. India boasts $140 billion in foreign exchange deposits.
Nath further recognized the communist state of West Bengal for becoming an investment destination for foreign investors. "West Bengal is not alone in this 'great leap forward,'" he said. "Huge swathes of India, even states that have been traditionally been [viewed] as backward, are now in the race to attract investment and fuel growth."
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