Gender, power and technology

Gendering technology

   Wajcman resists the interpretation that women are inherently untech-nological. Instead, she argues that women are constructed, and construct themselves, as 'other' to men. In our society, 'technical competence is central to the dominant cultural ideal of masculinity, and its absence is a I key feature of stereotyped femininity'. Consequently, women's reluctance to be technological can be attributed to cultural structures which differentiate women from men. Hand in hand with this mythology of masculinity's association with new or high technology is something of a 'calculated ignorance' on the part off individual women to comprehend the detailed workings of certain technologies. This is in spite of the many pieces of technology which women use effectively. Thus one of my female interviewees (aged 40-54) and I commiserated with each other on our (late 1980s) lack of competence with computer technology:

   See, computers. They came in and we'd never seen one up here [remote Australia]. I still can't work a computer and I feel I've missed out and I'm too bloody old to learn now. They tell me, I'm not. I'm going to have to make the effort and learn it. Much as I really don't like them, I think my kids are going to, so for them to do it, I've got to know how to because they're not going to have a hope in hell with education, if they can't use a computer, are they?

   This interviewee gives support for her children as her rationale for learning the computer, and reinforces the gender divide by seeing that role as a service. Many 'technologies of service' are gendered as female, while technologies of power and choice are gendered as male. British researcher Ann Gray, looking at gender and technology, describes an experiment whereby different domestic technologies were coloured according to their usage in gender terms. Gray asked her female respondents to characterise domestic equipment as coloured either pink or blue to indicate female or male ownership: 'This produces almost uniformly pink irons and blue electric drills . . . but my research has shown me that we must break down the VCR into its different modes ... "record", "rewind" and "play" modes are usually lilac, but the timer switch is nearly always blue.' Gray concludes by noting that women tend to rely upon 'their male partners or their children to set the timer for them'.

   According to Gray, 'although women routinely operate extremely sophisticated pieces of domestic technology, they often feel alienated from operating the VCR'. Gray also rejects simplistic explanations of technological incompetence, choosing instead to address the structure of VCR programming in terms of the household service dynamic. Gray quotes Edna, one of her interviewees: 'Once I learned to put a plug on, now there's nobody else puts a plug on in this house but me', before continuing:

   It would seem that there are decisions made by women, either consciously or subconsciously, to remain in ignorance of the workings of the VCR, so that it is their husband or partner's job to set up the timer. This, of course, has the function of a 'service' for the household unit ... the more calculated ignorant women had perhaps recognised this latent servicing element and resisted it in view of their already heavily committed domestic servicing roles.

   This phenomenon - of women delegating the functioning of new technologies to others in the household, or declining to demonstrate competence-has received critical attention in recent years. Findings in one of my research projects resonate those of Gray. As one young (25-39) woman from a shared household in remote Australia remarked to me:

   Thursday nights we used to go to the movies. I always used to videotape [China Beach] and it never worked and I couldn't believe it because I never had it in my video machine. I never got it right. Well, I'd put the wrong video in ... or I'd put a two hour video in instead of a three hour because I couldn't set the time delay on it so I'd put on a three hour video so hopefully by the time I left and got back it would have taped the whole program, because I left two hours before it started and it just never worked out. It was a great program. The few I saw, it was pretty good.

   There is no reason, however, to assume that a reluctance to adopt-or experiment with-a new technology is entirely one-dimensional. It may also be that, at the time that this interviewee failed to program the video, the rewards of watching China Beach were never quite sufficient to invest the time and mental energy required to overcome the programming block. As Todd points out: 'Costs are always involved in adopting new technology.

   These include the obvious, such as equipment investment, incense costs and the like. Less obvious are the information and screening costs involved in seeking and assessing the alternatives, the cost of time spent learning how to use the new technology efficiently'.

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