HISTORY: FOUR DOMINANT THEMES
As I have argued elsewhere (DeVoss, 2007; DeVoss, 2008), situating the current relationship users have with digital tools, technologies, and spaces requires that we attend to the past relationships users have had with technology. Admittedly, tracing these complex historical and contemporary choreographies of adoption, resistance, use, and more is fantastically complex. This is a complexity, however, that both feminist scholars and rhetoric and composition scholars typically embrace and thrive within; in fact, embracing complexities is what allows these fields to speak well to one another.
While looking back at the past in order to imagine potential futures, and, specifically for the purposes here, to preface Stanley’s (1995) points and why they’re compelling for us to consider in the current digital-intellectual-creative feminist new media landscape, I want to describe four themes that are readily identifiable if we review the past forty years of work on women and technology:
- Women are marginalized due to the language and practices embedded within technologies and suffer under the reinforcement and reproduction of historical patriarchal lines of authority embedded within technologies.
- Women are situated as low-level users or technology workers and face segregation in technology work due to their status as users and workers.
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Women are excluded from the design processes of most technologies, even those designed specifically for “women’s” work.
- Women’s technology-related contributions are deliberately excluded from history due to traditional definitions of technology in terms of male activities.
First, one theme that emerges is that women are marginalized due to the language and practices embedded within technologies and the existence and reproduction of certain lines of authority embedded within technologies.
If we think about what counts as a technology, we can see that much women’s work is excluded. And if we think about how users are positioned alongside technology, we can see the ways in which women are relegated to certain status levels.
For instance, in 2000, Mattel launched kids’ PCs: a Barbie PC and a Hot Wheels PC. Interestingly, in August 1999 when Mattel announced the new line of kids’ computers, a company spokesperson noted that "both [computers] will have similar educational titles" (Miles, 1999, n.p.). But when the computers finally shipped in early 2000, the Barbie PC had about half the educational software as the Hot Wheels PC. Although the Hot Wheels PC offered logic and anatomy programs, the Barbie PC offered software focused on fashion and coordinating one’s wardrobe.
Later in 2001, Dell Computers launched a new ad campaign for its Dell4Me initiative. A Dell CEO noted, "We've captured the essence of 'Dell4me' in our new advertising by highlighting the fact that Dell delivers exactly what each consumer wants and needs in a PC" ("Dell Launches," 1999, n.p.) The one woman featured in the corresponding TV ad apparently shared Barbie’s mentality, noting “it’s pure economics. An affordable computer means more black shoes” ("Dell Computers," 2001, n.p.).
Second, women are excluded from the design processes of most technologies, even those designed specifically for “women’s” domestic work.
Danielle Chabaud-Rychter (1995) studied a team of product engineers working on food processor units—a technology that has changed little since 1960, save for the addition of new accessories and speeds—and noted that their initial user testing involved the engineers imagining themselves as the end users. As they pretended to be users, they situated the user role as “screwing up” or potentially breaking the machine. Assuming that end users, by default, are idiots doesn't give them much credit. And, in the case and at this time, those users were presumed to primarily be women.
Cynthia Cockburn and Ruža Fürst-Dilić (1994) also reported on this type of product development, and called it the user-deficit model, a model that results in engineer and designer habits and practices built into the technologies. What types of technologies result when designers’ assumptions are that users are dumb, clumsy, unwieldy, and unable to understand directions?
Third, women are situated as low-level users or technology workers, and face segregation in technology work. Women are often situated as consumers and as passive participants rather than as active agents.
This is an absolutely critical point for us to analyze in light of today’s digital spaces. Are women situated as and adopting roles of passive consumers? Mere users? Or are women crafting digital spaces, producing work, and distributing that work across today’s networks? The paradigm for the web today is too often point and click, browse and shop, look but not produce—especially for women.
Howard Besser (2001) wrote of the next digital divide and noted that the crucial digital divide—as more and more computers enter homes and high-speed internet access spreads—is the divide between those who merely use digital spaces and those who produce, those who have the rhetorical and technical agency to not only consume digital media, but produce, share, and publish digital media. How individuals come by such rhetorical and technical agency is often linked to their gender.
Finally, women’s technology-related contributions are deliberately excluded from history due to traditional definitions of technology in terms of male activities and male domination of women and nature.
Women’s technology-related contributions are deliberately excluded from the legacy and lineages of technology development. So, historically, female-dominated fields such as horticulture, midwifery and fertility practices, weaving, cooking, etc., are trivialized and relegated to servile status.
When work traditionally done by women is usurped by men, women are typically forced out and the work becomes higher status and also receives higher pay after their absence. There are many, many examples of this in agriculture and farming.
R. Giordano (1988), in “From the Frontier to the Border,” studied and situated computer programming, noting that this work was labeled a pink-collar clerical job until men took over programming duties and the role was redefined as a skilled professional job.
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The ways in which these histories converge, commingle, and combine to shape the work women do today with digital tools and technologies are, certainly, debatable. Often they are invisible. In terms of the history of the web, the work of women in technology in the mid-to-late twentieth century perhaps feels quite distant. However, in terms of the history of women’s work with technology over the decades and centuries, this history is quite recent, and leaves behind traces and trappings within the spaces in which women create today.
index | introduction | history | stanley | digital(creation) |
digital(dangers) | ip resistance | conclusions | bibliography
dànielle nicole devoss | devossda@msu.edu