Gender and Technology Spring 2009

Hi everyone, I’m a senior psychology major at Bryn Mawr, with a neural and behavioral sciences concentration. I decided to take this class because it’s my last semester here and I wanted to take something purely for interest and I’ve never taken an English, Computer Science, or Gender Studies class. I had never considered how gender and technology intersected until we started discussing our first experiences with technology. When people started bringing up stories about how their gender affects the way others evaluate their competence with technology, I realized how amazing it is that everything I’ve learned at Bryn Mawr is interrelated.

My thesis research is on something that seems completely unrelated- individual differences in spatial ability. More specifically, I’m looking at gender differences and how playing sports affects the gender gap. Previous literature has repeatedly shown that males have superior spatial ability in comparison to females. During my literature search, I found that many contributing environmental factors focus on gender socialization and experience in spatial-related activities such as video and computer games, which are often associated with males. Furthermore, taking into consideration a biological component, the “bent-twig” theory states that males self-select into these spatial activities because of an innate predisposition for spatial ability. In other words, the initial bend among males directs their interests and choice of activities. Participation in these spatial activities then helps further develop these abilities, which ultimately increases these gender differences. I know this was a bit tangential, but perhaps it might help explain why there’s such a gender disparity associated with technology and I would like to explore this further.

Also, when we were talking about our first experiences with technology, I didn’t even think about things like a stove or a shotgun. My mind went directly to the internet, which occurred later in my childhood, but it was such a significant time. I just remember the beginning of the AOL Instant Messenger craze and I would spend hours and hours online talking to my friends. The internet changed how we communicate, and in turn, it changed the nature of relationships. When we can’t see the face or hear the voice of the person we’re communicating with, especially if it’s a stranger, gender becomes almost invisible. I am very interested in discussing how the internet affects the way we think about gender.

Hello. My Name is Alexandra Funk. I’m a sophomore Computer Science major at Bryn Mawr. So to be honest, one of the reasons I’m taking this course is that it is being taught by Anne and Laura. My favorite class since coming to BMC was Emerging Genres (taught by Anne) and I worked for Laura in the ETC.

That being said, I am also very interested in the course content. In class on Wednesday when we were told to share a story about when we first realized we were gendered, I realized that I didn’t really have one to share. I’ve always known there is a difference between girls and boys, but the difference I perceived was in everyone else, not in ME. I recognize that girls chose things that are “feminine” and boys chose things that are “masculine”. (Some part of this I feel is done consciously. At least once you reach a certain age anyway.) My interests, however, never felt gendered. I liked to read, to run, and to travel. None of these really scream female. I didn’t have a brother to compete with as a child (he came later, much later, so much so that he was a baby for my adolescence). Until I came to Bryn Mawr the fact that I am a woman never even seemed all that important to me. Now it feels like something I can’t escape from rather than something that just is. It’s almost as if Bryn Mawr affected me in the opposite way from which it seems to affect everyone else. I do consider myself a feminist and I would never want to attend a different school, but to me gender just seems like such a foreign subject.

Which brings me to why I’m here. I want to figure out why I never felt gendered and I want to know why things like Technology somehow become gendered. I love Computer Science and I’m a woman. This is a reality. So why do I feel like most of society views it as a contradiction?

Hey! I’m a freshman at Bryn Mawr, and I have no idea what my major is. I think I’m leaning towards English but who knows? I don’t!

Anyways, I have to admit that I sort of stumbled onto this class in a: “OH NO. I NEED A FOURTH CLASS!” kind of a way as I was frantically flipping through the BMC course book. It caught my attention, however, because I don’t think I’ve ever linked gender and technology together. Maybe, it’s because I grew up with one of those mother’s who believed that “women should be seen and not heard” (it’s a bit embarrassing how many times she told me that one!), and thus I was scolded any time I tried to learn how to whistle (side note: I eventually learned!) or when I played too rough with the other boys.

As much as I disagreed with my mother in that aspect, I can’t really say that I went out of my way to be technologically savvy either.  I didn’t start playing video games until I was about 13, and to this day I don’t play them very frequently—it doesn’t help that I’m horrible at a lot of them, too. However, because I didn’t live with my father (who loves computers, and technology in general) growing up, I did have to know how to work the computer at home because neither my mom, my aunt nor my grandmother were particularly good with it, so I was usually on my own when it came to that. From since I was around seven or eight it was my trial and error with the computer that allowed me to be fairly okay with computers today. But now that I’m taking this class I’m starting to wonder, that if I DID live with my father would I know how to use my computer so well? It’s almost if I was FORCED to learn how to use one, because there was no alternative.

My other questions for this course are: if a women is good with technology, do you think this strikes a sort of “fear” or “resentment” in both men AND other women? Why do you think other women may feel resentful if they see another women being able to hold their own against another man? Also, how much does a woman have to know in terms of technology in order to strike this “fear” or “resentment” or for it to seem just plain unusual? Is it easier to handle that a women knows how to change the oil in her car as opposed to being able to write software? Finally, how does race and class play into this? Is it more surprising (or maybe “alarming”?) for a working class woman of color to be technologically savvy?

See everyone next class!

In Rosalind Gill and Keith Grint’s Introduction to The Gender-Technology Relation, the authors discuss Sherry Turkle’s paper. They summarize her writing as saying that women enact a gender role in disliking computers, that by “rejecting computers they are doing femininity” (11). This was a particularly interesting comment in light of the fact that I am a female computer science major. So, it doesn’t really seem that I’m rejecting computers at all; it appears I am embracing them (though I am being very open in interpreting the term computer here). Was I losing femininity by choosing this major? It didn’t really feel like it. But then again I go to an all women’s college. When you attend a computer science class here, it’s 90% women. When you go to the computer lab here (to do your homework, to do a joint project with other women, to discuss assignments, to discuss life), it’s 90% women. Also, since this is a women’s college, the computer science department here wants women in the field, and so they’re constantly thinking of ways to make the field attractive to women – by making computer science fun, real, and interactive, by giving intro students their own robot to program for the semester, and by encouraging collaboration and cooperation. I think the program here, though, is radically different from that at most colleges.

I was eating lunch this summer with seven of my fellow interns at ITA Software Inc., all of whom were male (there were female interns at the company, but that particular day I was eating only with guys), and I told them that my computer science classes consisted mainly of women. They laughed. They all had so few women in their computer science classes that they found it incongruous to imagine a CS classroom with a majority of women. Indeed, according to The New York Times article “What has Driven Women out of Computer Science?” (check the article out here for some facts on the status of women in the field), women comprised only 22 percent of computer science undergraduates receiving degrees in 2004-5. While I may be embracing computers, a lot of women in perhaps less female-receptive learning environments, are not.

It is unclear to me whether Turkle’s comments are in reference to computers themselves, computer science as a field, or technology in general. In light of that, I’d like to make another point which troubles my previous statement of “embracing computers”. I’ve always liked Math and problem-solving. I remember my best friend in fourth grade and I using those wooden unit cubes to learn long division and having a lot of fun. The aspect of creative problem-solving is what drew me to computer science, not computers. Also, as someone who loves nature and (in general) dislikes TV, I fit into the eco-feminists’ dogma viewing women as connected to the earth. So to be clear, it is the field of computer science that I personally am embracing, rather than computers themselves (these are in some ways quite disparate things).   If Turkle was indeed commenting that many women reject computer science, than I am among the minority and her comment holds.

If she is saying women reject computers and technology, then while she has a point it is an exaggeration. I remember my Dad fixing the washing machine, and my Mom refusing to use email. I remember many guys loving video games and many girls not being as enthused. I remember computer games being more neutral territory, though it seemed more guys became obsessed with them. But I also recall TV and movies – and don’t those count as technology too? – being in my perception equally beloved by males and females (on another note, though, there are a lot more famous male directors than female directors, and hence more males control the content produced using this technology). I remember, too, many of my high school female friends who used AIM every night, were impressive google-searchers, and used Word to type up their papers. So while technology may be “masculine culture”, I wouldn’t exactly say that women “reject computers”.

I’m a junior English major, Spanish minor at Bryn Mawr, and I’m taking this class because I found that I thought a lot in Anne Dalke’s “Emerging Genres” class last spring.   We talked about Gender and Technology, but not often simultaneously, so I’m interested to see all the connections between the two that we can come up with together.  One idea from Emerging Genres (and Methods of LIterary Study) that sticks with me as we begin this class is the idea of what is “natural”, especially in opposition to what is “technical”.  In my mind, the two aren’t black and white; there’s a continuum.  If human beings are naturally occuring, then shouldn’t we consider everything we make “natural”?  At what point do we make the distinction between technology and nature?  If we’re considering technology any kind of artifice, like we said in class, then as soon as we use our intelligence to put two things together in order to make them more useful, do we categorize our creation as technical as opposed to ourselves, who remain natural?   How do we talk about human conception, then?

If those questions made any sense, I think they’re also useful to ask about gender.  Is gender natural or artfully created?  If it’s natural, then it might be intrinsically part of us, but if it’s more ‘technological’, then we can categorize it away from ourselves and shape it any way we want.  The classes I’ve taken in the bi-co so far that have dealt with gender (and almost all of them have at some level) have convinced me that gender is a fiction or construct.  It’s not too much of a leap from there to call it a technology, if we want to.

I just got back from a semester abroad in Valparaiso, Chile.  It was a great experience, but one of the reasons I’m glad to be back is because classes like this don’t exist yet in societies like Chile’s, with deeply rooted machismo (male sexism).  It’s not that these discussions wouldn’t be allowed; the idea of “gender studies” just hasn’t caught on.   But interestingly, in the past 30 yearsor so, as Chile has quickly adapted to the world’s new technologies, I think the sexism has lessened as well.  In fact, Chile has a female president, and in the past 5 years finally passed a law making divorce legal.  So, another question I have is, How do people use technology to overcome gender divides?  Is there a link here?  In Emerging Genres, we talked about this question in a different way when we looked at how people take on “fake” identities on the internet.  The writer’s or gamer’s gender can be the same, opposite, or just different from their “real” one, or it can be a non-issue.  How do people use technology to change their own genders or fight the idea of gender?

Hi, I am a freshman at Bryn Mawr with plans to major in Economics and minor in Film Studies. Film has been something which I was interested in from a very young age since I literally watch every movie I can lay my hands on! I did want to start off my Film Studies minor with an intro class, but the topics which will be covered in this class seem quite interesting since I never really sat back and thought of how our everyday lives and our gendered identities shaped the technologies that exist today. I feel this class will address the stereotypical issues society has on how women are apparently ‘inept’ to function certain types of contraptions. Then again, I find it funny that my mother seems to know how to run all the technology-related stuff in my house whereas my father is usually curled up within his newspapers. My sister and I once tried to teach him how the computer works but he just brushed us off with the excuse that he had to watch the news. But yeah, that’s my dad.

Technology did play a major role in shaping our existence and it continues to do so to this very day. The implication that toying around with equipments is a masculine act should be changed in the near future. There are many questions that need to be discussed within this class such as: How has gender shaped the way technology is used today? Why do both the sexes undergo some degrees of separation when dealing with certain types of technology? Why is it that a woman is ‘supposed’ to lack knowledge and be less exposed to particular types of technology?

I look forward to the class discussions which will answer all my queries above.

Hi, I’m Solomon Lutze, sophomore at Haverford College. I’m going to preface this by saying that I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out a pseudonym before I decided that I really don’t expect to need to insulate myself from anything I say here. Watch me accidentally say something inflammatory in this very post to destroy this illusion.

Things that drew me to this class. The only class I’ve had so far where gender was an explicit and important topic was my writing seminar last spring, which focused on the history of black women in the U.S. Our teacher talked about how “history” often meant “white men’s history,” “black history” meant “black men’s history,” and “women’s history” meant “white women’s history.” It was fascinating to me, and more than a little embarrassing when I realized that I’d just taken what I was fed in history classes without really questioning the roles of non-whites or non-males, let alone any of the other important groups (I’d start trying to name them but I’d feel bad about any I left out). I feel like a lot of what I’ve learned about technology has probably been from a male perspective whether I’ve known it or not, and it would be interesting to see it in a different light.

I’m a computer science major, mostly because I like computers. More generally, however, I’m very interested in technology as a whole. It has always seemed to me to be a very natural extension of humanity. Technology as a way that people define themselves, or technology being used to help people create an image of themselves that they like, fascinates me, and I’m excited to see how this class can illuminate those subjects.

So, I suppose to summarize, my questions are: What impact has gender had on the way technology has been developed? How do we consider technology a part of gender today? How do we establish our gender using technology? How does the internet affect our perception of ourselves as gendered human beings, and of both genders and sexes?

I’m sure there are other questions I have, and I’m sure I’ll come up with more. Generally, I’m excited for this class because the two subjects in its title are both subjects that are really interesting to me, and I look forward to working with all of you.

Hello! I am a senior at Bryn Mawr with a Computer Science major and Math minor. As a Computer Science student in a women’s college, I did not personally feel the shortage of women in technology until I went to attend/participate in technical conferences and internships in co-ed environments. I would be one of three women in a room of more than a hundred men! I wondered about the connection between gender and technology, and whether it had to do with how girls and boys interacted with technology and/or computers as children.

I did research with two other students at Bryn Mawr on this topic for a year where we designed, developed and taught a course in Computing for middle school children with robots that we believed would be interesting to both girls and boys. While the course gave us positive response with all the students being more interested in Computing and technology at the end of the course than before, we only had 1 girl out of the 13 students who had enrolled! It was an interesting find and made me realize that the “division” probably gets created a lot earlier than the middle school age. I feel like this course will answer a lot of the questions I have had over my time at Bryn Mawr. When do individuals understand and feel the difference between male and female genders? Just around what age does the attitude of “Boys are good with technology but girls are not” start to affect children, if at all? Why are there so few women in technology and how can we address this?

As a Computer Science student, I guess I tend to relate technology with computing and computers mostly, as my post probably reflects!

I’m a senior archaeology major with plans to go to law school next year for human rights. I somehow managed to get to my last year without having taken either a Gender and Sexuality or English course- two things I love dearly. Now I suddenly find myself enrolled in three!

I come from the South, where traditional gender roles are still very much in place. Fortunately, I have a mother who despised these roles and made it her mission in life to keep me from feeling “gendered” for as long as possible. I only fully realized this on Wednesday as we were sharing our stories. She dressed me in every color, including blue, and sometimes people thought I was a boy because of this. I played with dolls, but also with trains and cars, and mostly in the dirt (archaeology comes as such a shock now, right?). I was never a “lady” in any traditional sense of the word.

I’m very interested in the perception of gender, and how people chose to alter themselves to conform to one particular side or another. I’ve always loved Marlene Dietrich, and I’ve been watching a lot of her movies lately. One thing always seems to come up: she plays very feminine and traditionally attractive women, but there’s something deeper lurking that makes you think that she resents it all. Probably because she, in fact, did. The way she secretly works a lesbian kiss into Morocco, or stages an uprising of Western wives in Destry Rides Again are uncommon things that she intentionally did to preserve her sense of self. How do we chose to alter ourselves for others? And how do we still retain our own sense of self against society? Additionally, in contemporary society, gender divides with respect to technology are becoming more and more blurred. In the future, how will society define our gender if it’s completely acceptable for women to build supercomputers and men to straighten their hair and be stay-at-home parents? These are the things I ask when I wake up in the middle of the night and scribble illegibly on my notes. I hope I read them correctly, and if not, I’ll just have more questions later.

I got really excited for this class after our first session, and I can’t wait to read and hear about everyone’s ideas. I’m a junior English major, Education minor, and I decided I really wanted to take this class even though I did all the 200 levels I have to already. In Methods, we talked about some gender theory; we read Judith Butler, and then some feminist film theory with Laura Mulvey. It was really interesting, and I was looking for a class that would examine further and more in depth the socially constructed nature of gender. Personally, I always tried to make myself into a boy when I was a kid, which I think is a fairly common experience. I cut my hair short, loved the Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers, and collected toy bugs and snakes.

In terms of gender AND technology, I have to admit, the “technology” part made me a little skeptical. I couldn’t imagine how long we could talk about the lack of female representation in the sciences, so I assumed there would be more to it, i just didn’t know what it was. If we understand technology as “the study of that which has been artfully made,” the range of what we can think about opens up a lot. The first question that came to my head is whether gender itself can be understood as a technology. People put a lot of effort into constructing their gender – with how they act, the clothes they wear, the activities they participate in, etc. In that sense, it could be something artfully made. I’m just curious to see if that idea could go anywhere.  I also am curious about how the evolution of technology has changed our concept of gender. In my history of photography class, we just looked at a daguerreotype of a naked woman from behind, who was beautiful, but today would be considered overweight, and definitely too fat for contemporary media images. Did technology have anything to do with this change in the idea of the female body, or does it simply reflect societal changes?

Hi everyone,

I hope everyone enjoyed the first class and find that it may be a new experience for all of you. I know my main motivation for taking this class is basically Anne. I took her Big Books of American Lit class and had a wonderful time growing as a writer and a person in there and I was eager to repeat the exploration. I look forward to getting to know Laura as well for the duration of the semester.

The basics: My name is Catherine and I’m a senior at Bryn Mawr (It’s my last semester so I’m a little scared and sad 🙁 ). I’m a Math major and I hope to enroll at a dental school this coming September. I have never taken a gender studies course or a technology course let alone a course that combined both so this class is an entirely new concept to me. I feel that being at Bryn Mawr we should all study our gender since this is the place that can best provide us with these evaluations. I’m also an equestrian here on the team and love to watch movies and baseball. I’m originally from New York City and love Philadelphia, which is where I spend most of my weekends with my best friend (another Bryn Mawr alum) at her apartment there. I also anticipate meeting all of you and hearing what you have to say about your backgrounds and what ideas you contribute to the discussions in class. I also hope you are open to listening to my stories and input and that you will have opinions towards them whether they are contrasting or not.

This class I am most looking forward to this spring. I have consistently taken classes that have been necessary for my major or beneficial to the workplace and I have enjoyed to a degree enrolling in all of them. This class however, I see as an enriching class as I leave this wonderful environment and enter the real world. I want to discuss something new and challenging and contribute richly to highly intellectual conversations about subjects I am unfamiliar with. This class will be another opportunity to mature from the person I already am with new knowledge from persons like all of you. May you enjoy your experience in this class and for those of you not seniors, enjoy your time here…it is too short. For seniors, I shall miss you all. Thanks!

Regards, Catherine

I’m a Biology Major at Bryn Mawr. I was born and raised in Maine as a Quaker. I wanted to take this class because i knew it would be different then anything else i was taking, and its something i wouldn’t necesarily find anywhere else but Bryn Mawr. Something that i have started to see in my self is a number of dualities and a wide range of contradictions to classical culture and many places were i “fit” right in. After the first class I realize that my questions circle around the duality that can be found i feel in most people. The dualities of going against the grain and being a woman who really likes and has a general aptitude for technology, enjoying the construction of things, (and owning my own power tools) but at the same time still having some waspy tendencies to enjoy dressing up and shopping. I can feel the different sides of me pulling me in different directions and i am looking forward to a semester of intraspection and looking at the bigger picture of the ways in which technology affects our and societies views of someone’s particular genderedness.

I’m a senior at Bryn Mawr majoring in computer science and minoring in math. This is the second course in college that I’ve taken that’s been labeled as an English class, though I’ve taken one or two others that felt to me like English classes. Last semester I took the English/Film class Women and Cinema, so I suppose I’m on a roll with the relation of “division or sorting” and “skilled craft or medium” (ie Women/Gender and Cinema/Technology) as Anne defined the two words comprising the title for this course. From my vantage point as a Computer Science major, though, when I read the title my first thoughts on the class were that we’d be discussing the leaky pipeline of women in computer science. If you haven’t heard of that term, it’s an analogy for the lack of retention of women in the field (and science fields in general). Many women quit being interested in the subject for one reason or another and leave the major. In other words they seem to be seeping out of the pipeline that’s taking students to higher and higher levels of computer science education. One of the things I want to explore in this class is the leaky pipeline issue. Why are women leaving computer science? Why are fewer of them attracted to it than men in the first place? What is our cultural context for women working with technology? Like Guinevere said, why are men often the ones working with technology in the home space? In the work space?

Professor Maria Klawe, the President of Harvey Mudd college, a fascinating speaker and inspiring woman, visited Haverford college last year to talk about women’s involvement in the field of computer science (she herself has a PhD in both math and computer science). She described an experiment designed to give girls and boys the opportunity to use a computer at a center for learning (I don’t recall where). While the girls expressed interest in using the computer, the boys generally scrambled ahead to get access to it, leaving the girls to amuse themselves elsewhere. The foundation ended up setting up certain hours where only girls were allowed to use the computer, and in that context the girls enjoyed using it. I find it interesting that at a young age, girls are being pushed away – and accepting this push away – from technology. Why? What about girls or how girls are raised is leading to this push away? What is happening when kids are young and throughout their development? How can we give girls and women interest in the field? Should we be trying to give girls and women interest in the field? What do women have to offer to the field? How can they specifically give it a different spin?

On a different theme, the intersection of sex and the technology of sex changes raises interesting questions, too, as Rebecca discussed. How does technology make possible manifestations of people’s mental image of themselves in the physical world? How does this affect how transsexuals interact with the world? Or what about women with breast cancer who get their breasts removed – how does this change their interaction with the world and conception of self?

I expect and hope that in this class we will be exploring the relation and intersection between gender and technology in a number of different ways – ways that I have mentioned, that others in this forum have mentioned (for instance, gender online) and a lot that we haven’t. How can we relate these various intersections of gender and technology together? How does a person with a sex change have something to do with a girl fighting for her right to use the household computer?