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- From: KATHY MCCLOSKEY <KMCCLOSKEY@FALCON.AAMRL.WPAFB.AF.MIL>
- Newsgroups: soc.feminism
- Subject: on-line discrimination
- Date: 20 Nov 1992 18:52:00 GMT
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- Date: 18 Nov 1992 20:53:16 U
- From: "Harrison-Pepper Sally" <harrison-pepper_sally@msmail.muohio.edu>
- >Subject: Online Discrimination
- _______________________________________________________________________
- To: Wolfe Chris; Harrison-Pepper Sally; janer@sfu.ca
- From: huff@stolaf.edu on Wed, Nov 18, 1992 6:20 PM
- >Subject: Re: FW: online discrimination?
-
- ********************** Important notice. Please read.********************
- This paper has been archived at Lewis and Clark College for the
- _Electronic Salon: Feminism meets Infotech_ in connection with the
- 11th Annual Gender Studies Symposium. This paper may be electronically
- reproduced or stored in cyberspace for the duration of _The Electronic
- Salon_ only. When citing this paper after _The Electronic Salon_, the
- author's name, the work's title and date and this notice must be
- included.
- ***************************************************************************
-
- Gender and the Cultural Construction of Computing
-
- adapted from
- "From 'Impact' to Social Process:
- Case Studies of Computers in Politics, Society, and Culture"
- Chapter IV-A, Handbook of Science and Technology Studies
- (Beverly Hills: Sage Press, forthcoming)
-
- Paul N. Edwards
- From: PJTJ@CORNELLA.cit.cornell.edu
- Dept. of Science and Technology Studies
- Cornell University
- March 30, 1992
-
- Computer work is stratified in an almost linear way along an axis
- defined by gender. Women are overwhelmingly dominant in the
- lowest-skill, lowest-status, and lowest-paid areas, such as microchip
- manufacture and computer assembly (especially in "offshore" factories)
- and data entry, where women account for up to 95 percent of the
- workforce. While statistical evidence in this area is problematic, a
- general trend is unmistakable: numbers of women begin to decline as
- skill levels rise, with somewhere on the order of 65 percent of
- American computer operators, 30-40 percent of programmers, and 25-30
- percent of systems analysts being female. Gender imbalances in
- European countries are, in general, more dramatic (Frenkel 1990;
- Gerver 1985).
-
- A similar pattern exists in education, in a way that closely parallels
- gender differentiation in mathematics. Girls and boys display roughly
- equal interest and skill in the primary grades, but starting around
- age 11 or 12 girls begin gradually to stop enrolling in computer
- courses. By high school boys outnumber girls in such courses roughly
- two to one. During the 1980s roughly this same ratio of men to women
- persisted through undergraduate college, with about 35 percent of
- bachelor's degrees in computer science awarded to women. But there is
- some evidence that this ratio has declined substantially, perhaps to
- as little as 20 percent, in the last two or three years, without a
- corresponding drop in other technical majors.
-
- By the Ph.D. level the situation is much more dramatic: the percentage
- of computer science Ph.D.'s awarded to women has remained steady at
- 10-12 percent since 1978. The situation in engineering is worse, with
- women receiving only 8 percent of Ph.D.'s, though the numbers there
- have been rising. For comparison, note that the percentage in the
- physical sciences and mathematics is now about 17 percent and rising.
-
- The imbalance is most severe at the level of faculty employment. Only
- 6.5 percent of tenure-track faculty in computer science departments
- are female (7 percent in computer science and 3 percent in electrical
- engineering). One-third of Ph.D.-granting departments have no women
- faculty at all.
-
- A. Sexism in educational settings
-
- One possible version of this story relies for an explanation on bias
- and systematic oppression. High-school age boys have frequently been
- observed to harass girls and demean their skills, sometimes
- deliberately in order to keep enrollments in computer classes lower.
- Illustrations in computer science textbooks typically show a ten-to-
- one ratio of men to women, and computer advertising is strongly
- male-oriented. Women students at all levels have reported oppression
- in many forms, ranging from overt statements by senior professors that
- women do not belong in graduate school to more subtle and probably
- unconscious mistreatment, such as seeing their own ideas ignored or
- patronized in the classroom while similar ideas of their male
- colleagues receive praise. The following quotations from students and
- research staff illustrate the sometimes very direct nature of this
- sexism.
-
- "While I was teaching a recitation section, a male graduate student
- burst in and asked for my telephone number. Men often interrupt me
- during technical discussions to ask personal questions or make
- inappropriate remarks about nonprofessional matters."
-
- "I was told by a secretary planning a summer technical meeting at an
- estate owned by MIT that the host of the meeting would prefer that
- female attendees wear two-piece bathing suits for swimming."
-
- "I was told by a male faculty member that women do not make good
- enigneers because of early childhood experience... little boys build
- things, little girls play with dolls, boys develop a strong
- competitive instinct, while girls nurture..." (cited in Frenkel 1990,
- pp. 36-7).
-
- Such factors as the lack of female role models and the so-called
- "impostor" phenomenon, in which minorities feel themselves not to be
- "real" members of the dominant group, distrusting their own skills and
- avoiding public display so as not to be caught out "impersonating" a
- "real" computer scientist, are among the other ways gender
- stratification perpetuates itself (Leveson 1989; Pearl and others
- 1990; Weinberg 1990).
-
- These are real and important mechanisms in creating gender imbalance.
- At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that in the computer
- industry, far from a systematic exclusion, many companies have made
- active efforts to recruit more women, and that compared with other,
- older industries, computing has been a more favorable environment for
- women. In academia, the very scarcity of women Ph.D.'s makes finding
- qualified candidates difficult despite sincere equal-opportunity
- commitments. So while more subtle bias persists, direct discrimination
- against women is probably somewhat less of a factor in computing than
- in other careers (Leveson 1989).
-
- B. Cultural construction and gendered tools
-
- But another approach to the issue of gender differences is to ask the
- question of whether or not computers, as tools, are gender-neutral. I
- will argue that they are not: in fact, computers are culturally
- constructed in such a way as to stamp them with a gender and make them
- resistant to the efforts of women to "make friends" with them (Edwards
- 1990; Edwards forthcoming; Perry and Greber 1990; Sanders and Stone
- 1986).
-
- Scientists tend to think of computers abstractly as Turing machines,
- universal machines capable of doing anything from controlling a
- spaceship to balancing a checkbook. But people always encounter
- technology in a particular context and develop their understanding
- >from there. If they first meet computers in a course, they are likely
- to be introduced to them in a theoretical mode that emphasizes their
- abstract properties and their electronic functioning. If they meet
- computers in an office they may understand them as word processors or
- spreadsheet calculators. In every context computers will be surrounded
- by a sort of envelope of other people's talk, writing, attitudes,
- images, and feelings about them _ the formal content of a course, or a
- training session, or a conversation with another user is only part of
- what is communicated.
-
- Many investigators have suggested that computer avoidance in girls is
- connected with differences between what can be loosely termed the
- "cultures" of men and women. (Of course there is great variability
- within the generalizations I am about to describe.) Men learn to value
- independence _ the ability to do things on their own, without help.
- They are most comfortable in a social hierarchy in which their
- position is relatively clear. They are trained early on for roles as
- competitors and combatants, and they value victory and power. Abstract
- reasoning is, for men, an important value, partly because of its
- connection with power. Carol Gilligan's well-known study of men's and
- women's morality, In a Different Voice, revealed that men tend to see
- the highest form of morality as one based on a reasoned adherence to
- an overarching moral law that treats all actors as equals (Gilligan
- 1982).
-
- Women, by contrast, tend to prefer interdependence. Reliance on others
- is valued because it continually maintains a social fabric or network,
- seen as more important than individual self-sufficiency. Instead of
- hierarchy, women's culture practices social "levelling," in which an
- underlying goal of conversations or games is to keep everyone at the
- same level of status. Similarly, competition and winning are less
- important than keeping a game or conversation going (Tannen 1990).
- Practical skills rather than abstract reasoning tend to be primary
- values, and this goes along with a morality that perceives particular
- relationships as superseding abstract rules _ people are treated
- differently depending on their needs and relationships to other
- actors, rather than similarly based on an abstract moral equivalence.
-
- In her observations of children learning to program in the LOGO
- language at a private school, Sherry Turkle saw two basic approaches
- to computer programming. Students she calls "hard masters" employed a
- planned, structured, technical style, while "soft masters" relied on a
- more amorphous system of gradual evolution, interactive play, and
- intuitive leap. In her words, "hard mastery is the imposition of will
- over the machine through the implementation of a plan. A program is
- the instrument for premeditated control. Getting the program to work
- is more like getting 'to say one's piece' than allowing ideas to
- emerge in the give-and-take of conversation. ...[T]he goal is always
- getting the program to realize the plan.
-
- Soft mastery is more interactive... the mastery of the artist: try
- this, wait for a response, try something else, let the overall shape
- emerge from an interaction with the medium. It is more like a
- conversation than a monologue (Turkle 1984, pp. 104-5).
-
- Note the similarity of these two modes with the two cultures I have
- described. In fact, Turkle found, the majority of hard masters were
- boys, and the majority of soft masters were girls. But both styles
- produced some consummate programmers.
-
- Both Turkle's hard and soft mastery and my descriptions of men's and
- women's cultures are, of course, caricatures of immensely flexible and
- complicated processes rather than hard-and-fast rules. A culture is
- not a program, but a subtle set of nudges in particular directions
- which not everyone receives to the same degree or responds to in the
- same way. Many men are more at home in what I have described as
- "women's" culture, and vice versa. Some learn to be equally at home in
- both modes. And it is important that excellent programs can be written
- by people of both sexes using both methods, something Turkle saw in
- men and women of all ages (Turkle 1984; Turkle and Papert 1990).
-
- Nevertheless, these two dichotomies are suggestive.
-
- Consider, for example, the fact that many if not most video games
- emphasize violence, often with a military metaphor. The first video
- game was "Space War," written by MIT hackers during the early 1960s
- (Levy 1984). (But the first commercial game was the benign "Pong," and
- one of today's most popular games is the equally unmilitaristic
- Tetris.) Still, the great bulk of the games that led the video arcade
- craze of the early 1980s (Galaxians, Defender, Asteroids, Missile
- Command, etc.) were combative in nature, and it was partly as a
- belated response to the potential market among adolescent girls that
- less-violent alternatives such as Frogger and Pac-Man were introduced.
-
- Hacker culture, to give another example, is strongly male-oriented.
- Hackers frequently work in independent isolation. Many say their
- fascination with hacking is related to the sense of control and power,
- an elation in their ability to make the machine do anything. While the
- so-called "hacker ethic" described by Steven Levy theoretically values
- programming skill above all else including physical appearance and
- gender, in practice hackers frequently avoid women and exclude them
- >from their social circles (Levy 1984; Turkle 1984).
-
- Turkle's ethnographic study of MIT hackers revealed a powerful
- competitive side in such phenomena as "sport death," the practice of
- staying at one's terminal until one drops, achieving fame through a
- kind of monumental physical self-denial. In the 1960s and 1970s, and
- to some extent still today, hackers played an important unofficial
- role in the development of system software. So their conceptions of
- the nature of computing were, in a sense, embodied in machines.
-
- Another source of gender differentiation may be the nature of computer
- instruction in schools and colleges. Computer science, with its
- marginal disciplinary position between mathematics, cognitive
- psychology, and engineering, has to a certain extent relied for
- institutional survival on laying a claim to mathematic-scientific
- purity, and one place this claim is expressed (and students are weeded
- for correct skills and orientations) is introductory computer science
- courses. Traditional programming courses, partly for this reason, are
- taught in a highly theoretical mode which emphasizes abstract
- properties of logic, computation, and electronics rather than
- practical uses. Girls report disinterest and frustration in classes
- with this orientation and get better grades in courses with a more
- practical bent.
-
- In a major 1989 debate in the pages of the main computer science
- journal, Communications of the ACM, University of Texas at Austin
- computer scientists Edsger Dijkstra proposed that introductory
- computer science be taught in an even more formal model, emphasizing
- its fundamentally mathematical core (Dijkstra 1989). Rather than use
- real computers, students in Dijkstra's program would have to write
- programs in unimplemented languages and prove their validity logically
- (instead of debugging them by trial and error methods). Many of his
- colleagues objected to this excessively formalistic view _ but it
- unquestionably reflects one important strand of thought about computer
- learning. To the extent that this teaching strategy holds sway, it
- tends to inhibit women's entry into the field (Frenkel 1990).
-
- These last three examples _ video games, hacking, and computer
- instruction _ all show the process of cultural construction in action.
- Interaction with combative video games constructs the computer as a
- site of conflict and competition, a game where winning is a matter of
- metaphorical life and death. Hacking uses the computer as a medium for
- a social process of self-construction in which young men compete with
- each other and with the machine and achieve independence and power.
- The computer, as the site of this self-construction, receives a gender
- association. Computer instruction that emphasizes abstract rationality
- is more appealing for boys and facilitates the association of
- computers with men. Thus computers have frequently been culturally
- constructed as male-gendered objects.
-
- All of these elements, I am arguing, should be seen as parts of the
- social process of understanding computers. The tendency is to think of
- these cultural factors, because they are so flexible and variable, as
- separate from and independent of design. But people encounter them in
- their experience of computing as necessary presences which structure
- the computer they perceive. Social "context" and design
- interpenetrate; no element is purely essential and no others purely
- accidental.
-
- References
-
- Dijkstra, Edsger. "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science
- (with replies)." Communications of the ACM 32 (12 1989): 1398-1414.
-
- Edwards, Paul N. "The Army and the Microworld: Computers and the
- Militarized Politics of Gender." Signs 16 (1 1990): 102-127.
-
- Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse.
- Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming.
-
- Frenkel, Karen A. "Women & Computing." Communications of the ACM 33 (11
- 1990): 34-46.
-
- Gerver, Elisabeth. Humanizing Technology. New York: Plenum Press, 1985.
-
- Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
- Press, 1982.
-
- Leveson, Nancy. Women in Computer Science. National Science Foundation,
- 1989.
-
- Levy, Steven. Hackers. New York: Anchor Press, 1984.
-
- Pearl, Amy, Martha E. Pollack, Eve Riskin, Becky Thomas, Elizabeth
- Wolf, and Alice Wu. "Becoming a Computer Scientist: A Report by the
- ACM Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Science."
- Communications of the ACM 33 (11 1990): 48-57.
-
- Perry, Ruth and Lisa Greber. "Women and Computers: An Introduction."
- Signs 16 (1 1990): 74-101.
-
- Sanders, Jo Schuchat and Antonia Stone. The Neuter Computer: Computers
- for Girls and Boys. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 1986.
-
- Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in
- Conversation. New York: Morrow, 1990.
-
- Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New
- York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
-
- Turkle, Sherry and Seymour Papert. "Epistemological Pluralism: Styles
- and Voices Within the Computer Culture." Signs 16 (1 1990): 128-157.
-
- Weinberg, Sandy. "Expanding Access to Technology: Computer Equity for
- Women." In Technology and the Future, ed. Albert H. Teich. 277-287.
- New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.
-
- (END) :+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+: Gender Hotline :+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:
-
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