Layered Meanings and Differences Within

Abstract

Throughout this book we have explored gender-technology relations, with a special focus on how men’s and women’s relationships to computer technology are discursively described, perceived and dealt with in real life. Chapters 2 to 5 all focus on the same topic, but in different contexts and through different empirical material: Chapter 2 explores discourses in a newspaper and a computer magazine, Chapter 3 analyses discursive developments in higher computer education, and Chapter 4 is based on interviews and observations among computer students, and analyses their perceptions of the discourse and their own identity constructions involving gender and a gendered field of study. Finally, in Chapter 5 we explored women’s fascination for and pleasure in computing. We have seen a number of examples of how gender and technology are woven together, in many ways, on many levels, in discourses and in lived life. However, there are still many questions to answer, such as, what does it mean that women have to give up part of their femininity to engage with computers? Or could that perhaps be an example of an academic ‘truism’, similar to the truism of the ‘cultural association between masculinity and technology’ pointed out by Grint and Gill (1995, p. 3)? Why, instead, do women not introduce femininity? And what does the discursive ignorance of women’s contributions in computer related contexts mean? What kind of gender are women ‘doing’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987) in computing? And what is being ‘undone’ (Butler, 2004)? What makes a difference, and what matters to gender-technology relations?