In modern Korean society, the very culture of the computer has been male dominated. Since the personal computer entered the Korean market in the early 1980s, it has been clearly demonstrated that the areas both of its production and consumption have been occupied mostly by men. This has contributed to de® ning the computer as a male domain, in terms not only of physical male dominance of those areas, but also of its social and cultural construction as a masculine technology. This can be understood in the sense of the ª genderingº of technology, which has been formed through historical and cultural processes. For that matter, Cynthia Cockburn has already con® rmed that ª gender is a social achievement. Technology tooº (1992: 39). As we shall also see, this gendering of technology itself plays a key role in forming women’s and men’s different attitudes toward the machine and in constructing different forms of gendered subjectivities. In other words, women’s alienation from technology can be explained in terms of the social and cultural construction of technology as an appropriate® eld for the masculine subject. In this article, I focus on how this particular relationship between gender and technology arises in a social context, especially in the domestic context. This article is based on conversational interviews with 20 families carried out in Seoul, Korea, which are intended to identify the ways in which these families use and appropriate the home computer. My research suggests that gender relations and the structure of power in the domestic context are central to shaping family use of the computer, constructing women’s and men’s different experiences of the computer, and in uencing their ideas of its meanings, values, and speci® c uses. My main argument is that, in order to understand this gender/technology relationship, the social context of computer use and the structure of gender relations in this context must be explored. Therefore, the following exploration of the relationship between gender and the computer will be based on how gender relations are implicated in the formation and transformation of the computer, and also on how the computer contributes to the construction of gender relations and the gender division of labour.