Gender, power and technology
There is a vision, peddled by the marketing and advertising arms of hi-tech companies, that the right technology at the right time can solve most of the difficulties of modern society. From bionic implants to replace or enhance impaired biological function through to online voting which allows full-scale participatory democracy, technological solutions promise new answers to old problems.
Technology is presented as easy to use and accessible. (Both the marketers and manufacturers persuade us to see it like that.) Any incompetence lies in a fault of the user, rather than the technology per se, yet technology is rarely transparent to the point where it can be used simply, and repeatedly, across a range of applications without support. Complexity of use sets up a dynamic where the many who need help to realise the potential of the technology feel somehow inadequate in wanting this help. Fear of technology is learned, and much of this learned fear of technology is constructed through gender, and through age.
A decade or so ago, Judy Wajcman wrote an influential book, Feminism Confronts Technology, which examines the interrelationship of gender with technology, and argues that western societies construct technological competence as a masculine culture.
Knitting, cooking and gardening, for example, all have technological elements-as do many other traditionally female skills-but these are not acceptable as 'technologies' in our culture partly because they are all feminine pursuits. (Men who develop professional gardening skills tend to see themselves as horticulturists, landscape architects, land managers and farmers.) Further, technologies that become integrated within the female realm-cars, microwaves, washing machines-are used successfully by women, but women gain no general sense of technological competence through their use. Instead, technological competence is associated with the technology's (mainly masculine) maintenance.
At the extreme, the 'latest technology' can be characterised as urban, white, middle-class, masculine and American. In the early years, this was an accurate description of Internet technoculture, although by the turn of the millennium female participation rates had risen to approximately 40 per cent.Traditionally-as with cars and microwaves-the democratisation and feminisation of leading-edge technologies goes hand-in-hand with the technology becoming less leading-edge than it was. Becoming more widespread, the once-leading-edge is replaced as an object of scarcity by newer and more powerful technologies, which offer further challenges of knowledge, access and equity, and which are biased by design to support the elites who sponsor them.
Most 'pink'/'women's' technologies (see next section) are well established in the domestic realm. When competence is being gauged and discussed, however, there is a disproportionate emphasis given to new technology-technology which is most jealously guarded, most difficult to find out about, and hardest to get to use. Wajcman sums up her position thus: 'In our culture, to be in charge of the very latest technology signifies being involved in directing the future and so it is a highly valued and mythologised activity'. Such activity is quintessentially a masculine one, and particularly associated with young, educated, western men.