Gender and Information Technology: Perspectives from Human Cognitive Development

This paper extends feminist critiques of information technology (IT) by examining the development of children's processing of information; for example, the development of the representation, manipulation, and use of information. My goal is to construct a theoretical framework to guide feminist research in computer science and cognitive science. This framework reflects a feminist focus on connections rather than an androcentric focus on separation and distance. I apply this framework to the interface of children's thinking and their experiences on the Internet. Thus, this paper will go beyond feminist critiques of current IT by outlining a fruitful direction that a feminist theory of IT informed by developmental perspectives might take.

Research on children has not been integrated well into feminist scholarship. Women's studies scholars address intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation across a range of topics, including information technology. However, age typically is ignored, even though these intersections have a different effect on, and different issues for, babies, children, adolescents, young adults, and aging adults.¹ This is true also in the case of gender and IT. Most of the work in this area focuses on and privileges the perspectives and issues of young and middle-aged adults. Any work including children tends to focus on topics such as the effectiveness of educational software in schools and gender differences in computer practices. However, as I will attempt to demonstrate, the implications of IT for development during childhood are much broader and more revolutionary than this narrow set of topics would suggest.

The outline of this paper is as follows. I first critique the traditional use of the computer as a metaphor of human thinking, including cognitive development. This metaphor has emphasized objectivity, separation, and decontextualized knowledge and thus has tended to ignore connections, a concept central to feminist thought. I then consider possibilities for a feminist transformation of this metaphor and suggest applications to the Internet, Web site design, and artificial intelligence (AI). That is, this feminist transformation of computer information-processing models can suggest different designs in computer science, different AI systems, and different models of human-computer interactions. I present a feminist model that focuses on connections among information, connections between the knower and the phenomenon thought about, and nonlinear complex thinking.² As it happens, these characteristics describe the sort of thinking and acquisition of knowledge that seem to occur when people use the Internet.³ Thus, by focusing on a topic compatible to feminism, the Internet, feminist models of thinking potentially could offer interesting new directions for studying human thought and designing AI systems in cognitive science. In other words, the Internet, already an important topic in cognitive science, may serve as a fruitful project for the further development of a feminist cognitive science.

I illustrate this argument with respect to children and the Internet, to show how connections-based thinking might develop. Specifically, I suggest that the structure and functioning of the Internet might encourage cognitive structures and processes in children that focus on connections. In short, feminist models of cognitive science could capitalize on the connected nature of information on the Internet to a) explore an underexamined aspect of thinking and cognitive development, specifically, connections, and b) suggest Web site and Internet designs that encourage connected thinking even further. Finally, by examining the socialization of children's thinking I attempt to show that a developmental perspective can shed light on the societal implications of IT by examining the social construction of human cognition.

By taking a feminist focus on connections in this paper, I hope to stimulate the construction of a more complete theory of cognitive science that integrates the traditional emphasis on separation and linearity with the feminist emphasis on connections and networks of information. That is, I focus on connections, not as a type of thinking separated from more traditional sorts of thinking, but as a step toward a broader and more adequate theory of cognition. Although it has been suggested that women may tend to think in connected ways more than do men,⁴ I give little attention to this...