Using new technology to re-construct gender

The relationship between gender and technology has been explored for several decades. Consistently, the field of technology has been described as being permeated by masculine discourses, which find expression in the cultural tendency to treat technological work as an almost exclusively masculine domain. In this paper I treat technology and gender as mutually constitutive, and illustrate this assumption with a case in which gender was re-constructed through the use of computers in physics education. Inspired by the ANT methodology, the study aimed at scrutinized the black box of technology and gender construction. The findings support the initial claim that the construction of technology plays a crucial part in the construction of gender. The same findings further indicate that, under certain circumstances, an attentive and gender-sensitive use of new technology can contribute to changes in the construction of gender.

[1]  Judith S. Mcilwee,et al.  MEN, WOMEN, AND THE CULTURE OF ENGINEERING , 1991 .

[2]  Karin Knorr Cetina.  The manufacture of knowledge , 1981 .

[3]  S. Turkle.  Computational reticence: why women fear the intimate machine , 2004 .

[4]  L. Rahman,et al.  Gender and Information Technology in Rural Bangladesh , 2006 .

[5]  Barry Turner,et al.  THE USE OF GROUNDED THEORY FOR THE QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR , 1983 .

[6]  Wendy Faulkner,et al.  “I’m No Athlete [but] I Can Make This Thing Dance!”—Men’s Pleasures in Technology , 2003 .

[7]  S. Woolgar.  The Turn to Technology in Social Studies of Science , 1991 .

[8]  C. Cockburn,et al.  Gender and technology in the making , 1993 .

[9]  P. Mitchell,et al.  Factors influencing the take-up of physics within second-level education in Ireland—the teachers’ perspective , 2007 .

[10]  Helen Peterson.  Gendered Work Ideals in Swedish IT Firms: Valued and Not Valued Workers , 2007 .

[11]  M. Ahtee,et al.  Primary Student Teachers' Ideas about Teaching a Physics Topic , 2006 .

[12]  Theo Vurdubakis,et al.  Information technology as organization/disorganization , 2005, Inf. Organ..

[13]  J. Kiboss,et al.  Outcomes of first year secondary students in a computer‐augmented physics program on measurement , 2005 .

[14]  F. J. Roethlisberger,et al.  Management and the Worker , 1941 .

[15]  Merete Lie,et al.  Feminism and Constructivism: Do Artifacts Have Gender? , 1995 .

[16]  Barbara Czarniawska.  Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity , 1997 .

[17]  S.-S. Liaw,et al.  Understanding user perceptions of World-wide web environments , 2002, J. Comput. Assist. Learn..

[18]  Sandra Katz,et al.  Gender and race in predicting achievement in computer science , 2003, IEEE Technol. Soc. Mag..

[19]  Rosío Alvarez,et al.  Confessions of an information worker: a critical analysis of information requirements discourse , 2002, Inf. Organ..

[20]  Angela Calabrese Barton.  Liberatory Science Education: Weaving Connections Between Feminist Theory and Science Education , 1997 .

[21]  W. Faulkner.  The technology question in feminism: A view from feminist technology studies , 2001 .

[22]  Ulf Mellström,et al.  Machines and Masculine Subjectivity , 2004 .

[23]  Joan Acker,et al.  Differential Recruitment and Control: The Sex Structuring of Organizations. , 1974 .

[24]  F. Henwood,et al.  Boxed in or Coming out? On the Treatment of Science, Technology and Gender in Educational Research , 2001 .

[25]  S. Blume.  Manufacturing knowledge , 1993, Nature.

[26]  A. Strauss,et al.  The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research aldine de gruyter , 1968 .

[28]  F. Henwood.  Establishing gender perspectives on information technology: problems, issues and opportunities , 1993 .

[29]  Geoff Walsham,et al.  Representations and actions: the transformation of work practices with IT use , 2005, Inf. Organ..

[30]  W. Faulkner.  The Power and the Pleasure? A Research Agenda for “Making Gender Stick” to Engineers , 2000 .

[31]  T. Jong,et al.  Supporting students' learning with multiple representations in a dynamic simulation-based learning environment , 2006 .

[32]  B. Latour.  We Have Never Been Modern , 1991 .

[33]  Karen Littleton,et al.  Gender and Social Comparison Effects in Computer-Based Problem Solving. , 2000 .

[34]  M. Lohan.  Constructive Tensions in Feminist Technology Studies , 2000 .

[35]  F. Heenwood,et al.  Exceptional women? Gender and technology in U.K. higher education , 1999 .

[36]  D. Haraway.  Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature , 1990 .

[37]  Sigmund Freud,et al.  The Interpretation of Dreams , 1899 .

[38]  Richard Baskerville,et al.  Generalizing Generalizability in Information Systems Research , 2003, Inf. Syst. Res..

[39]  Egbert G. Harskamp,et al.  Solving physics problems with the help of computer‐assisted instruction , 2005 .

[40]  W. Faulkner.  Dualisms, Hierarchies and Gender in Engineering , 2000 .

[41]  J. Law.  Introduction: Monsters, Machines and Sociotechnical Relations , 1990 .

[42]  Eileen Scanlon,et al.  How gender influences learners working collaboratively with science simulations , 2000 .

[43]  Flis Henwood,et al.  WISE Choices? Understanding Occupational Decision-making in a Climate of Equal Opportunities for Women in Science and Technology , 1996 .

[44]  F. J. Roethlisberger,et al.  Management and the Worker , 2003 .

[45]  Mustafa Özbilgin,et al.  Against the Tide: Gendered Prejudice and Disadvantage in Engineering , 2007 .

[46]  N. Brickhouse,et al.  Embodying science: A feminist perspective on learning , 2001 .

[47]  Jean Underwood,et al.  When does gender matter?: Interactions during computer-based problem solving , 2000 .

[48]  Gamel O. Wiredu.  User appropriation of mobile technologies: Motives, conditions and design properties , 2007, Inf. Organ..

[49]  Knut H. Sørensen,et al.  Genderization of Technology among Norwegian Engineering Students , 1987 .

[50]  Richard Whitley,et al.  Black Boxism and the Sociology of Science: A Discussion of the Major Developments in the Field , 1970 .

[51]  P. Pauly.  The Development of High School Biology: New York City, 1900-1925 , 1991, Isis.

[52]  Boel Berner.  Vem tillhör tekniken? Kunskap och kön i teknikens värld , 2003 .

[53]  P. Berger,et al.  Social Construction of Reality , 1991, The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.

[54]  Bente Rasmussen,et al.  Excluding women from the technologies of the future , 1991 .

[55]  B. Latour.  Science in Action , 1987 .

[56]  Mike Chiasson,et al.  If fair information principles are the answer, what was the question? An actor-network theory investigation of the modern constitution of privacy , 2005, Inf. Organ..

[57]  Barbara Czarniawska,et al.  The Question of Technology , or How Organizations Inscribe the World , 2001 .

[58]  J. Wajcman.  Feminism Confronts Technology , 1991 .

[59]  Michael D. Myers,et al.  A Set of Principles for Conducting and Evaluating Interpretive Field Studies in Information Systems , 1999, MIS Q..

[60]  Anna Danielsson,et al.  The gendered doing of physics: A conceptual framework and its application for exploring undergraduate physics students' identity formation in relation to laboratory work , 2007 .

[61]  V. Frissen.  Gender is Calling: Some Reflections on Past, Present and Future Uses of the Telephone , 2018, The Gender-Technology Relation.

[62]  G. Hall,et al.  The Interpretation of Dreams , 1914, Nature.