Gendered Technologies

Posted by Gerda Wever-Rabehl May 10, 2006

While the percentage of women has risen in many of the formerly male dominated professions, the opposite is happening in information technology. The number of women being trained in information technology related fields are dropping. This is worrisome, especially considering that for better jobs, advanced technological know-how will increasingly be a requirement.

Yet when computer-programming jobs were still low-priority and lousy paying, women did them. All six programmers of the world's first electronic tube computer (1945), for example, were women. And some of them went on to bigger and better things afterwards (see also Drew Robb at http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/1564501). This situation has changed. Programming and design jobs have become high-status and high-salary positions. And men now hold the vast majority of these positions.

Why worry about the predominance of men in design and programming you ask? Well, the thing is, a program or tool is designed by someone for someone, to be used for a certain purpose. The design we come up with will undoubtedly embody all sorts of beliefs about the world and our relations in it. It would simply be naive to think that the product of our design is value free.

Take computer games for example. They are, on the whole, designed by, for and marketed to males. The games my nine-year old son plays, are by and large solitary. They are based on strict and rigid rules, either/or scenarios and result in winning or losing- all features that appeal to boys. The main characters in the majority of his computer games are more often than not aggressive, sometimes sexist and for the most part male. The female game characters are generally top-heavy and grotesque looking bystanders instead of positive and active participants. Somehow, I don't think that these features, while appealing to boys, attract girls in the same way and it wouldn't surprise me if they contributed to girls spending a lot less time playing computer games and them starting computer courses with less computer experience and confidence than boys do.

Women once dominated computer-programming domains. Bringing them back there is important, I think. But it seems to me that this return will have to start in technology education. Technology education can motivate girls by connecting technology with their preference to use technology to connect, communicate, and collaborate. Once that connection is made, who knows, women might once again be inventors, makers and repairers of technology.

Gerda Wever-Rabehl, The Write Room

www.thewriteroom.net