Women and Technology: Opportunity Is not Enough

The relationship of women to industrial technology has been a curiously passive one. Women have been both acted upon by technological change and exploited by capital as unskilled operators of the new forces of production. But we have seldom been the inventors of new technologies. Very often we have been completely absent from the scene of the action. Today this absence is at last becoming a subject of debate (McGaw, 1982; Rothschild, 1983; Zimmerman, 1983; Griffiths, forthcoming).