Women, Gender, and Technology (review)

The postscript to this book (p. 193) states that it "initiates what we anticipate will be a series of books on intellectually stimulating, challenging, and ever-expanding areas of theory and research on women, gender and technology." These nine brief essays are apparently intended to introduce readers to a broad range of topics related to women and technology. They fall into three general categories: explorations of the meaning of technology for women; reports on women's participation in particular fields, especially engineering and physical science; and arguments that reproductive technologies are at best a mixed blessing for women.

Deborah Johnson's introduction to the book asserts that "Until a decade ago, questions about the gender-technology relationship rarely received attention" (p. 1), a remark which seems to dismiss rather glibly at least thirty years of diligent scholarship in history, anthropology, and sociology. Johnson, like most of the authors in this volume, has little to say about how women and men have shaped technology as users and consumers, focusing mainly on somewhat narrowly defined questions of invention, production, and control. Technology as techne does not seem to be in the conceptual vocabulary of any of the authors—Johnson, for example, does not consider cooking and housecleaning to be technological tasks.

The first essay, Sue Rosser's "Using the Lenses of Feminist Theories to Focus on Women and Technology" is essentially an annotated list of feminist theories—"liberal feminism," "socialist feminism," "essentialist feminism," and so forth—with interpretations of how these theories illuminate or ought to illuminate issues of technology and gender. In the second essay, "Women, Men and Engineering," Mary Frank Fox briefly summarizes the current (as of 2001) underrepresentation of women in the profession of engineering and in engineering education. Statistical tables carry most of the point. In "Still a Chilly Climate for Women Students in Technology: A Case Study," Mara H. Wasburn and Susan G. Miller report on Purdue University's efforts to reduce the gender imbalance in its colleges of engineering and technology between 1997 and 2001, in which women represented, respectively, 18 percent and 15 percent of undergraduate students. Questionnaires were used to determine what factors prevented women from choosing these majors; the image of both fields as masculine and "not about helping society" seemed to be a significant factor.

One of the more interesting statistics revealed in the questionnaires goes unremarked in the text: table 3:3 shows the proportion of women undergraduates in each of Purdue's eleven colleges, with engineering and technology at the bottom, and veterinary medicine at the top, at 99 percent. The question of why women now dominate this field, when as recently as 1980 women were only 8 percent of U.S. veterinarians, is not addressed, nor is any hypothesis offered for the contrast with engineering.

Judy Wajcman's essay on "The Feminization of Work in the Information Age" is an overview of how different aspects of computer technology affect women positively or negatively in the context of "wider power relations" (p. 81). Like most of the other essays, the research appears to have been completed no later than 2001. While Wajcman provides a good overview of developments in the 1990s, it is unclear from her account whether or how the impacts of information technology on women differ from its impacts on men. The fifth chapter is a historical and statistical summary by Cheryl B. Leggon of how computer and internet use among African Americans, Hispanic, and other ethnic minorities differ from that of other users, followed by an opinion piece by Barbara Katz Rothman on "Genetic Technology and Women" arguing that this technology empowers not women but "genetics laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, scientists, [and] researchers" (p. 120).

After that come essays by Linda L. Layne on "Some Unintended Consequences of New Reproductive and Information Technologies on the Experience of Pregnancy Loss," and by Carol Colatrella on "Feminist Narratives of Science and Technology: Artificial Life and True Love in Eve...