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Abstract‘Datalogy’ (or computer science) is the academic foundation and practice that determines how digital technologies are designed, developed, and introduced into peoples’ lives. Digital technologies shape society, life, and work and influence how people think and act with technology in all aspects of life. In a democracy it is vital that the people who create technology mirror the society’s diversity, to ensure that new digital technologies do not constrain people’s agency but enable people to act and take part in society. Today, in 2022, diversity and inclusion is one of the main challenges for computer science as a field and profession in Western countries such as Denmark and the USA (Frieze and Quesenberry 2019; Borsotti and Bjørn 2022), and studies have shown that computer science will not reach gender parity in this century (Holman et al. 2018) without interventions directed at change.

FemTech.dk is fundamentally about combining research and interventions with a focus on making long-term change. Inspired by sociotechnical design (Mumford 2006) and action research (Bjørn and Boulus 2011; Bjørn and Boulus-Rødje 2015), FemTech.dk follows two main interlinked paths: (1) unpacking and understanding the challenges related to unbalanced gender representation in computer science, and (2) intervening and extending the field of computer science to allow for multiple, diverse agendas. In this way, the overall methodological approach is characterized as action research.

As digital technologies are integrated into societies, questions about who participates in technology development become increasingly crucial. When in 2016 we began FemTech, we wanted to redefine the nature of computer science in a way to reach out to people who were not already within the field – and who did not consider or see themselves as potentially successful in technology development. To make such change through interventions, in some of our first initiatives, we sought ways to create design artefacts that manifested alternative narratives of computer science while meaningfully interlinking with people outside computer science. Thus, our interest was to strive for gender equity in computing with an impact not only on educational programs but also on the underlying structures and society, through opening educational programs in alternative ways.