Women and Feminism in Technical Communication—An Update

Abstract

The purposes of this study are to determine the current status of scholarship published in five major technical communication journals about women and feminism and to identify changes in focus that may have occurred over the last five years. We begin with a discussion of the frequency of publication for articles whose titles have keywords relating to women and feminism. After identifying 21 articles, we consider the thematic patterns in the narrowed corpus. We conclude that scholarly publication about women and feminism in technical communication has moved from a moderate or radical concern for inclusion to a postmodern concern for critique of visual, verbal, and mechanical “technologies,” which previously were not considered political.

Are We “There” Yet? The Treatment of Gender and Feminism in Technical, Business, and Workplace Writing Studies

“…In a follow-up study, Thompson and Smith (2006) updated the analysis by reviewing articles published from 1998 to 2004. Using the same methodology, they identified 21 articles about women and feminism from the total corpus of 640 articles published in that time frame.…”

“…The following article, then, is the result of this inquiry. In it, we discuss our findings from a review of five technical and business communication academic journals that build on previous quantitative evaluations (Thompson, 1999; Thompson & Smith, 2006). We also discuss our findings from a review of nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work.…”

Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication

“…Indeed, we see gender and feminism as an important antenarrative thread in part because it seems to repeatedly emerge only to be covered over again without having its due impact on the overall pattern of the tapestry (i.e., the field). Indeed, in their attempt to catalog women/gender/sex in the fields' five journals, Thompson and Smith (2006) reported only 21 articles published between 1994 (the height of the special issue surge) and 2004, and significant gaps remain. Since the turn of the century, for example, TPC scholars have offered gender, explicitly, limited attention (with some notable exceptions such as Brasseur, 2005;Lippincott, 2003;Zdenek, 2007).…”

“Just Roll Your Mouse Over Me”: Designing Virtual Women for Customer Service on the Web

“…In the field of technical communication, it is somewhat surprising, given the tight connection between gender and technology, that Thompson and Smith (2006) have discovered through a study of the field's journal articles that "technical communication scholars' interest in feminism and women's issues has declined over the past 15 years" (p. 196). Until recently, scholars in technical communication doing research in gender have been mainly focused on the problems of inclusion and gender difference: recovering the contributions of women scientists and inventors, studying women and men in the workplace, and redefining technology to include inventions traditionally associated with women.…”

“…Isabelle Thompson and Elizabeth Overman Smith write in their 2006 review of research on women and gender in technical communication (see also Thompson, 1999;Smith & Thompson, 2002) that "the current focus has moved from a moderate or radical concern for inclusion to a postmodern concern for critique of visual, verbal, and mechanical 'technologies,' which previously were not considered political" (p. 184). For Thompson and Smith (2006), postmodernism in gender and technology studies assumes that "sexism appears in all 'technologies' and is manifested in all of our behaviors and attitudes" (p. 196). In short, it focuses on "lay[ing] bare sexist practices that are typically overlooked" (p. 196).…”