Doing IT: Women Working in Information Technology. Krista Scott-Dixon. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2004; 246 pages; ISBN 1-894549-37-6; $26.95 (paper).
Doing IT: Women Working in Information Technology provides a window into how women are doing in the new occupational niches created by information technologies. Throughout this five-chapter book, Scott-Dixon juxtaposes the heady claims which heralded the arrival of IT in the latter part of the twentieth century with how the work-life and careers of women in this sector have been unfolding in the "real" world. Her intellectual focus is on whether and how information technologies have disrupted vs. reconstructed vs. reinforced existing worker inequalities based on class, race and gender. She is also concerned about what the answer to this "whether and how" question should mean not only to academic debates about IT work but also to the attitudes and political perspectives of women who have taken up IT work, sometimes achieving a high degree of material and professional success without reflecting on their and other IT workers' experiences and situations.
Scott-Dixon skillfully works back and forth between examinations of the "structural" features of high-tech work and the rich narratives of women who

work in the IT field. Rather than painting a picture which either celebrates or condemns the high-tech revolution, her portrait is multi-coloured and multi-textured, as she reveals an unfolding process in which opportunities for both material and non-material advancement open and close, simultaneously or consecutively. Along with them, the hopes and dreams of IT workers rise, then fall and often rise again. She reveals an immense variety in the situations and experiences of these workers, not only because of the systemic influences of their gender, race and class location but also because of things such as geographical location, time of entry into the IT field, and the nature of their skills and how they acquired them.
Scott-Dixon thus undermines the simplistic predictions and ideological blind spots of human capital theory which, in spite of its intellectual failings, continues to strongly influence policy-making. She also challenges the views of scholars and activists whose political commitments to worker equality are closer to her own. In their also simplistic, often dystopic predictions, these critics of IT fail to take into account the enormous resourcefulness and political potential of people who are pulled into the gravity field of technological change. Workers who find themselves on high-tech's roller coaster ride make and execute plans according to the opportunities as well as obstacles they confront: they do not react in any simple way to the technological imperative.
One weakness of the book is that Scott-Dixon frequently accounts for certain conditions of, and approaches to, IT work in terms of women's distinctive situation and perspective. For example, she argues that women in IT (in contrast to men) don't like to think in a linear way and tend instead to favour non-linearity, interconnectedness and pragmatism (97-102). Yet she uses interviews with only women to support her case. Interviews with men working at comparable levels would have provided better ground for making this argument. Hopefully, Scott-Dixon will adopt a gender-comparative method in future research since it will help to clarify whether IT workers' situations and experiences are shaped more by existing gendered differences, as she tends to claim, than by distinctive features of this technology which, as is claimed by some other researchers and commentators, challenge gender patterns and open up possibilities for gender-bending.

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Doing IT is a valuable resource for challenging the technologically-determinist worldviews which are often uncritically presented in technical, policy-oriented and marketing discourses. To her credit, Scott-Dixon does not provide us with categorical answers to questions such as: Is work in the IT field a major advance to achieving equality in the work-place or does it continue or even worsen existing inequalities? Instead, she makes the case convincingly for seeing IT work as more fluid - a process unfolding and contingent - thus leaving open the possibility for political intervention by those who would use the opportunity to create a better future.
Janice Newson York University