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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:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+: Gender Hotline :+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:

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This paper has been archived at Lewis and Clark College for the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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