Paradigms of Computing Science:

Abstract

Gender research in computing science is not well developed. The gender question in the field of computing is mainly addressed as a political question (bringing more women into computing science) or as a research question for humanities (investigating the situation of women in the field). This article starts with a description of the situation of women in computing science in Germany, and then places this in the history of computing that has its origins in a Western history of male-dominated fields of research and development. Computer science is grounded in abstraction and ‘pure mind’ as a key feature of the (hu)man being on the one hand and in the Western tradition of engineering (as a field dealing with hardware) on the other. Both of these conceptualizations not only exclude the ‘female’ but also define the male norm in contradiction to the female. I view these conceptual formations as one of the starting points for an examination of ‘gender’ in computing science and address this as an epistemological problem. The low percentage of women in computing science in Germany is brought in to discuss whether there is any connection to the epistemological issues raised.