‘Getting Our Hands on It’: Gendered Inequality in Access to Information and Communications Technologies

Abstract

The time of writing this chapter — Autumn 1999 — is an interesting one for anyone trying to understand the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially global networked ICTs, and gender. After clear evidence that the internet has been a happy home for ‘boys’ of the white, high-income, mainly English-speaking variety, women (and others) appear to be getting their hands on it at last. The launch of a number of UK Web sites targeted specifically at women — http://www.handbag.com; http://www.zoom.co.uk; http://www.planetgrrl.com — has stimulated newspaper articles which argue: ‘A year ago, there were almost no British Web sites for women. Now they are everywhere’ (Kinnes 1999: 56). In the same week the British pop music star Gary Glitter received a four-month prison sentence for being in possession of a library of child pornography that he downloaded from the internet. For women: shopping for cosmetics and clothes, for men: shopping for pornography and sex. Is the internet showing itself to be simply another technology of Irigaray’s ‘specular economy’ (Irigaray 1985), where trade in women’s (and children’s) bodies, virtual as well as corporeal, takes place? Are women (and others) really getting their hands on this technology, or simply being positioned as consumers as well as the consumed? Is the internet challenging either the material, or symbolic, gendered order?