Gender and Information Technology: Perspectives from Human Cognitive Development

Abstract

This paper extends feminist critiques of information technology (IT) by examining the development of children's processing of information; for example, the development of the representation, manipulation, and use of information. My goal is to construct a theoretical framework to guide feminist research in computer science and cognitive science. This framework reflects a feminist focus on connections rather than an androcentric focus on separation and distance. I apply this framework to the interface of children's thinking and their experiences on the Internet. Thus, this paper will go beyond feminist critiques of current IT by outlining a fruitful direction that a feminist theory of IT informed by developmental perspectives might take. Research on children has not been integrated well into feminist scholarship. Women's studies scholars address intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation across a range of topics, including information technology. However, age typically is ignored, even though these intersections have a different effect on, and different issues for, babies, children, adolescents, young adults, and aging adults.' This is true also in the case of gender and IT. Most of the work in this area focuses on and privileges the perspectives and issues of young and middle-aged adults. Any work including children tends to focus on topics such as the effectiveness of educational software in schools and gender differences in computer practices. However, as I will attempt to demonstrate, the implications of IT for development during childhood are much broader and more revolutionary than this narrow set of topics would suggest. The outline of this paper is as follows. I first critique the traditional use of the computer as a metaphor of human thinking, including cognitive development. This metaphor has emphasized objectivity, separation, and decontextualized knowledge and thus has tended to ignore connections, a concept central to feminist thought. I then consider possibilities for a feminist transformation of this metaphor and suggest applications to the Internet, Web site design, and