Introduction (finally!)

I’m a senior economics major, and I’m very excited to be taking my first english class!

I was very interested when I first heard about this class, because I’ve always been very interested in both gender and technology.

Thinking about gender and technology reminds me of an Econ class I took, where we were doing some analysis on the career paths of women in science and technology. There were a lot of things I wasn’t surprised to learn about why there were fewer women than men in science and technology fields: fewer women got the education that would qualify them for jobs, and more women left the work force to take care of children.

What I was pretty shocked to learn though, is that many women left the fields of science and technology in various points in their education and careers simply because there was not a social place for them. I guess I’d always thought that women had been kept out of science by social expectations, or the belief that women were somehow less capable than men. But I never would have imagined that women would feel pressured out of these fields just because they were women, once they had already proven themselves capable.

One things I’m particularly interested in investigating in this class is how technology complicates things in terms in gender. In the past, I’d always sort of seen technology as purely empowering, so I’m interested to see how technology works to make things more complicated in terms on gender.