Mapping ‘Women in Technology' Issue Networks across Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian National Google(s)

This article explores the intersection between women and technology with an experimental research design that uses online search engine data and digital methods (Rogers 2002, 2004, 2013).

We respond to Blagojevic’s (2016) call for online mapping of gender equality stakeholders by incorporating the practice of ‘issue mapping’, which Rogers et al. (2015) conceptualise as a series of techniques that can be used to map the network of actors around a public issue, and to understand the ways they associate with one another.

Specifically, we apply the software tool IssueCrawler and its co-link analysis of relevant queries to study national Google search result pages for Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia. We ask, what types of stakeholders are prevalent around the topic of ‘women in technology’ in the local contexts (demarcated by the national Google result pages) of these three countries? Are they country-specific or do they cross national borders? To what extent do they associate with each other?

Which actors are in the centre of the identified networks and which are on the periphery? The authors found that the issue networks of all three countries were heavily dominated by media and government actors, followed by business, entrepreneurial and nongovernmental sites, and websites containing information on EU grants.

The national specificity, however, was mostly embedded in the groupings of these actors; whether they were densely or loosely interlinked with each other, and whether they were present or absent from the maps.