IIG

Feminist technology studies have for some time now sought to analyse the co-construction of gender and technology. Within this framework, both gender and technology are treated as fluid rather than fixed categories, which (like technology and society more generally) are mutually shaping and mutually constitutive.

The political significance of this framework is that gender-technology relations can, in principle, be re-shaped. Feminist technology studies have thus been concerned to destabilise essentialist and dichotomous co-constructions of gender and technology – such as the ‘hacker image’ which associates technology with masculinity and sociality with femininity. This raises very real challenges and contradictions – as will be demonstrated with reference to symbolic and discursive gendering encountered in gender inclusion strategies for computing and in ethnographic fieldwork amongst computer engineers.

On the one hand, policy initiatives to encourage more women into computer science and engineering frequently draw on stereotypical gender binaries. On the other, computer engineers themselves (women and men) often claim that ‘gender slips away’ in their field. In neither case should such symbols and discourses be read literally. Rather they need to be analysed in the context of the practices they accompany, as well as wider voices and images in society.

This approach reveals significant mismatches between what people do and what they say about it, as well as identifying the ‘gender work’ which is being attempted when shared symbols and discourses are mobilised. This in turn begs politically important questions about whether and how changes in symbols and discourses impact on changes in practices, and vice versa. It also raises theoretical and methodological concerns about how we should go about studying gender in/of technological occupations – in all its subtlety and complexity, and without in some way reproducing the very stereotypes, essentialisms and inequalities we seek to challenge.

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