Disrupting the Impression of Stability in Gender-Technology Relations

Abstract

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have become vital in today’s society to such an extent that they even figure as a key symbol ‘defining’ our time (Lie, 1998). Technology is, however, not simply artefacts or technological systems operating according to technological logics, but is also part of what we will explore here as gender-technology relations. Men’s and women’s relationships to technology have been marked by difference; in fact, we have been talking about the ‘digital gender gap’ in the Western world since the late 1970s (Cockburn, 1983; Mortberg, 1994; Wajcman, 2004). We have seen research trying to reveal the mechanisms of this gender gap (Hacker, 1989; Lie and Sorensen, 1996b; Hapnes and Rasmussen, 2003; Cohoon and Aspray, 2006b), discussions on how to ‘bridge’ it (Sorensen, 1992; SalminenKarlsson, 1999; Margolis and Fisher, 2002), a number of initiatives to encourage girls and women to become more active computer users (Stuedahl, 1997a; Lagesen, 2003; Corneliussen, 2003b; Faulkner and Lie, 2007), and efforts to recruit, include and retain women in computer education and occupations (Gansmo et al., 2003a; Cohoon, 2006; Trauth et al., 2009). We have seen the digital gender gap being redefined from ‘a problem with girls and women’ to a problem with institutions and cultures of technology (Turkle, 1988; Hapnes, 1997; Gansmo, 2004, p. 96; Sagebiel and Dahmen, 2006; Bagilhole et al., 2008), and we have seen recent reports stating that the gap is about to disappear in certain fields (Gansmo et al., 2003a; Trauth et al., 2010).