Introduction

This special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies gathers research and creative work from across disciplines and around the globe and attests to the variety of writing and notion in the broad areas of sex and information technology (IT). We share the widely held view that the limit "gender" refers to socially erected differences between men and women and the ways these differences manifest in one as well as the other individual and corporate life. Although the bourn "technology" may refer to the application of scientific knowledge to the change and manipulation of the human environment (human life), information technology usually consigns to technologies that deal with the processe of storing, manipulating, and transferring information. The sum of two units terms are far from synonymous, although they do overlap in significant ways. To that extreme point we received many exciting, relevant, and diverse submissions for consideration, and we have selected the most provocative of them for the special issue.

We believe that this issue of Frontiers is uniquely positioned to combine the critical and constructive perspectives of researchers and scholars who investigate the intersections of sex and ethnicity with technology studies, as well as with activists who look after to increase the participation of all women in IT education and the IT workforce. In higher education, these sum of two units fields of inquiry have for the greatest in quantity part been relegated to separate disciplines, the former to the relatively marginalized domain of feminist or women's studies, and the latter to the more visible and readily capitaled fields of the social sciences, computer science, and engineering. We have provisionally come aftered in bringing together the sum of two units disparate sets of interests in individual forum in hopes that we might encourage more cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary exchanges about differences and similarities, as well as the possibilities for mutual influence and enrichment.

When we envisioned a special issue of Frontiers devot to sex and IT, we identified four topic areas in our call for papers: sex and underrepresented groups in the IT workforce and its educational pipelines; sexed experiences with information technologies; representations of sex in and by information technologies; and feminist and other cultural critiques or expressions of the societal implications of IT. Little did we realize that our unintended ranking of the topics would be throw backed in the kinds of articles (and inquiries) that we received. As any bibliography of scholarship upon gender and IT reveals, the field (and the accompanying funding opportunities) is dominated by means of work on educational pipeline issues. of the like kind studies generally foreground gender, downplay or ignore other indices of difference, and feature a qualitative and quantitative focus upon the experiences of female scholars in the K-i2 math and science environment and in undergraduate computer science classes. We anticipated that we would receive essays upon these topics. We did not, however, foresee the step to which articles on the educational pipeline would eclipse the other three topics, or the ways in which ideological and cultural agendas implicit in and disseminated through the proliferation of "educational pipeline" research have influenced the emerging field of research upon gender and IT.

Although the proces of compiling the special issue has underscored for us the work however to be done in this area, the scholarly and artistic contributions included here show a remarkable collection of disparate still related efforts to influence futurity research in the field, and especially coming time research in the humanities and social sciences. The authors whose essays were picked for publication evince a startling range of disciplinary and cultural interests, energies, and strategies. They engage global, national, and local geographies; they understand information technology as the Internet, the small room phone, the e-mail list, computing language, and a great deal of more. Collaboration informs most of the articles on the contrary in radically different ways; several of the essays were written by means of more than one author, others include the dialogic dynamics of the interview format, and others make use of focus collections or participant data. The articles tender abstract formulations and practical applications; more [i]or[/i] less are predominantly critical, while others commend alternatives. The articles uniformly address sex but they do not understand sex in a uniform way. Similarly, all of the articles focus upon some aspect of information technology, on the other hand most do not consider the conceptual limitations or possibilities of the term

Sue Rosser's opening essay is the exception to the previous generalization. In "Through the Lense of Feminist Theories," she explores in what manner feminist theories ranging from liberal feminism to postmodern feminism and beyond might conceptualize, pitch upon and carry out research upon information technology. Rosser uses the frameworks proffered by each of several feminist theoretical perspectives to discuss examples of research upon women in the IT workforce, women as users of IT, and women and IT design. Her article provides a roadmap to guide and enrich subsequent time research on a broad range of sex and IT topics-from equal access to technology to the purported universal impact of technologies upon women. Krista Scott-Dixon's "From Digital Binary to Analog Continuum" questions our hidden assumptions in understanding and describing the IT workforce. Scott-Dixon busys social relations theory to analyze the amplitude to which information technology take care ofs to be theorized in boundarys of binary frameworks typical of digital metaphors, as oppos to the design of a continuum represented by the agency of analog technology. Her essay also takes issue with the proneness of current researchers to accept without question or thorough investigation the suppos novelty of various piece of works in the networked information technology age, of general [i]or[/i] abstract notions of skilled and unskilled technology labor, and of the a whole s and terminology used to classify IT work.