Introduction and Thoughts

Hello all! I am a junior from India but living in the Middle East. I’m double majoring in Computer Science and Math here at Bryn Mawr. Deciding the major wasn’t really that difficult since I’ve always had a soft spot for numbers, computers and problem solving.

One of the reasons I was drawn to this class was because for me and for so many other people, the phrase ‘gender and technology’ immediately brings to mind how women are treated as technologically handicapped. This is an issue that I personally don’t have much experience with because growing up, I didn’t really feel the discrimination between genders with regards to technology. Both my sister and I leaned towards the sciences when we were in school – my sister towards Physics and Math and I towards Computer Science and Math. We had a good number of girls as well as boys in our classes and a large percentage of the people who would rank among the top three in each class were female. And coming to college and seeing so many women majoring in CS and Physics only fortifies what I’ve seen for most of my life – that women can deal with technology. Then why couldn’t the rest of the world see that? Why was the predominant thought in society that men could do it but women couldn’t? I know that people are slowly beginning to realize that this isn’t true but why is it taking so long? And what exactly is being done to draw more women into science and technology related fields? I look forward to the discussions we’ll have regarding these questions. I also hope that this class will give me a better idea of the other aspects of gender and technology, things that I haven’t really thought about or have been exposed to.