Between a rock and a hard place: women and computer technology

Abstract

This paper explores certain possible reasons behind the uneasy relationship between women and technology. The cultural identification of technology with masculinity has been well documented through previous research. However, we feel it is useful to revisit this complex relationship through the scope of a more subtle distinction between 'users' and 'connoisseurs', and the struggle over power, which revolves around a specific form of hegemonic masculinity. We draw on interviews that examine students' experiences, emotions, and statements about gender, technology, mathematics, and education, and we try to offer an understanding of the ways women negotiate their position within the dominant discourse about computing and mathematics. Our analysis employs poststructuralist discourse theory. IntroductionAccording to the popular movie site IMDb, the 1984 film Electric Dreams (Steve Barron) is about an artificially intelligent PC and its human owner, who are in romantic rivalry over a woman. 1 Those few lines are enough to illustrate the dominant cultural stereotypes about the uneasy relationship between women and technology. Not only is 'human' identified as inherently male, but there is also a clear metonymical relation between masculinity and technology. 'Woman' is, once again, both the object and prize; moreover, she functions as the signifier of difference, as opposed to both man and computer. Today this film seems widely outdated, but unfortunately gendered stereotypes about computing are not. On the contrary, they seem to be rather persistent considering several statements made by the undergraduate students we interviewed for our study, who were barely born at the time the film was released. By analysing their narratives in this paper, we attempt to illustrate the subtle interconnections between gender and computer technology. Although the exploration of this theme is not new (see Weitzenbaum 1976;Turkle 1984), and a lot of attention has been paid to the under-representation of women in the field of technology ever since (Cohoon and Aspray 2008), we were intrigued by the way our female subjects strategically conformed to the dominant gender order, so as to serve personal needs, and to compromise contrasting subject positions.

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