Women, Gender, and Technology (review)

This book adds a series of essays to the burgeoning theoretical and empirical work on women, gender, and technology. Its intention is to "encourage, facilitate and bring to an interdisciplinary audience such a range of theory, research and applications on women, gender and technology" (viii). In her introduction, Deborah G. Johnson maintains that a "co-creation" model frames the book and that each chapter "explores how gender and technology work and are at work in a particular domain or expression such as in film narratives, reproductive technologies, the digital divide and the profession of engineering" (p.5). Each of the nine chapters covers a different topic.

The first chapter by Sue Rosser provides a perspective on different feminist theory. She contrasts a series of approaches in terms of the way in which they view the technology workforce, design, and use. Building on her earlier taxonomy of feminist analysis—liberal feminism, socialist feminism, African-American/womanist/racial/ethnic feminism, essentialist feminism, existentialist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, radical feminism, post-modern feminism, post-colonial feminism—she adds cyberfeminism to the mix. At times, the distinctions get fuzzy. For example, she combines existentialism and psychoanalytic approaches togetherwith respect to technology use. Some theories share common roots—for example, socialism, American/womanist/racial/ethnic feminism, radical, and post-colonial feminism focus on the deep structures that oppress. More precision regarding the epistemological distinctions would have been helpful. G. Burrell and G. Morgan's paradigmatic analysis, Sociological Paradigms in Organizational Analysis (1979), recently updated by Alison Konrad, Pushkala Prasag, and Judith Pringle, eds., Handbook of Workplace Diversity (2006) might be instructive. A strong articulation of underlying assumptions and theory is really important to advancing enquiry in this area and the editors missed an opportunity to use Rosser's chapter to frame and organize the book. Regrettably, few of the chapters make reference to the theory and/or situate themselves in any of her categories.

Two chapters deal with topical issues—the under-representation of women in engineering (Chapter 2) and in science, math, and computer science (Chapter 3) as well as ethnicity, gender, and the digital divide (Chapter 5). They are basically descriptive updates, adding little that is new.

In Chapter 4, Judy Wajcman asks: "To what extent are the older hierarchies of the gender order being destabilized in the digital economy?"(p. 81) and what are the impacts on women's work in the information society? She argues that the shift from the manufacturing to service economy has been a mixed blessing for women. Many of her observations are sound, particularly regarding the management stereotypes (consistent with Virginia Schein, R. Mueller, T. Lituschy, and J. Liu, "Think Management—Think Male: A Global Phenomenon?," Journal of Organizational Behavior 17 (1996): 33-41), trends towards increased feminization, and the impact of teleworking and trends towards global outsourcing on women's work. While her arguments are reasonably supported, much of the research she cites is very dated, much of it more than ten years old. Newer data suggests, for example, that the gender wage gap is narrowing, and that while the glass ceiling remains, progress in some sectors is dramatic (Catalyst, Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity (2004)).

The remaining chapters are interesting on their own, but a bit of a hodgepodge. Chapter 6 explores the impact of the gendered ideology that underlies genetics and then considers two contexts: reproduction and breast cancer. Rothman challenges the notion that these technologies empower women. Similarly, Chapter 7 examines reproductive and information technologies on the experience of pregnancy loss arguing that they are constructed in ways that further patriarchal ideology. Chapter 8 examines narrative representations in two films dealing with technology, and Chapter 9 looks at female representation in the emerging area of "multimedia technology for Christian worship".

The book was an ambitious undertaking—bringing together multidisciplinary, multiparadigmatic papers on a wide range of technologies, and exploring aspects of the labor force...