Through the Lenses of Feminist Theory: Focus on Women and Information Technology

Scholars exploring sex and technology interactions have protected to concentrate on gender and technology in the workforce and somewhat les upon women as users of technology. Limited studies explored by what mode technological designs, especially for information technologies (IT), might differ depending upon the gender of the designer and user. In this paper I explore more [i]or[/i] less contributions of feminist theories, ranging from liberal feminism from one side radical feminism to postcolonial feminism, to the understanding of sex and information technology. I will attempt to use the framework provided by the agency of the perspective of each feminist theory to examine at least single example from each of the three following areas: women in the information technology workforce, women as users of information technology, and women and information technology design. Since each theory take care ofed to evolve in response to a deficit or exclusionary perspective perceived in previous theories, examining information technology and sex using the fuller range of feminist theories lay opens subtle, rich insights into the dynamics of sex and technology.

The term cyberfeminism, which explicitly fuses sex and information technology, arose in the late 19805 and early 19905 As Hawthorne and Klein note in their work Cyberfeminism: "Just as there are liberal, socialist, radical and postmodern feminists, in like manner too one finds these positions throw backed in the interpretations of cyberfeminism."1 Because cyberfeminism appears generally to pick and choose among aspects of various feminist theories in a somewhat uncritical fashion without developing a coherent or successor theory, I close the paper with a brief exploration of what each of the feminist theories give an inkling ofs for this less developed theory of cyberfeminism.

LIBERAL FEMINISM

A general definition of liberal feminism is the belief that women are overthrowed in contemporary society because they undergo unjust discrimination.2 Liberal feminists look for no special privileges for women and simply demand that everyone receive equal consideration without discrimination upon the basis of sex.

Workforce

When it tend hitherwards to information technology jobs, greatest in quantity engineers and others involved with information technology take a liberal feminist stance and assume that the focus should be upon employment, access, and discrimination issues. Social scientists studying the sex distribution of the technology workforce point without that historically and today, the technology workforce exhibits a vertically and horizontally gender-stratified labor market, with women concentrated in the lowest-paid positions, closest to the greatest in quantity tedious, hands-on making of the outcomes and furthest from the creative design of technology. greatest in quantity women working in the IT industry engage in the tedious, eye-straining work of electronic assembly. Men predominate in the decision-making, ereative design sectors as peril capitalists, computer scientists, and engineers producing startups, novel software, and hardware design.3

Design

Liberal feminists would try to find to remove barriers that stop equal access for women to information technology piece of works not only to provide economic equality on the other hand to provide access to higher-paying piece of works for women. Unequal access has implications that go on well beyond the composition of the workforce. sum of two units decades ago, biologists4 revealed that a predominance of male scientists nurseed to introduce bias by excluding females as experimental bring under rules focusing on problems of primary interest to males, employing faulty experimental designs, and interpreting data based in language or ideas constricted by the agency of patriarchal parameters. This exclusion bias be deriveded in under-diagnosis, inappropriate treatment, and higher death rates for cardiovascular and other diseases in women5 Male dominance in engineering and the creative decision-making sectors of the IT workforce may accrue in similar bias, particularly design and user bias.

Use

Having large numbers of male engineers and creators of technologies also frequently results in technologies that are useful from a male perspective (that is, these technologies fail to address important issues for women users). Many studies6 have explored the open and covert links between the military, engineering and masculinity, and design and use of technology. For example, Janet Abbate7 studied the origins of the Internet in ARPANET. The unique improvement of the Internet was that it was a network, overcoming the vulnerability to nuclear attack of the previous star configuration computer network.

Liberal feminism refer tos that now that they have become aware of potential bias in design or user-friendliness, one as well as the other male and female engineers and information technology creators can correct for failures to include women and their urgencys and interests. By definition, liberal feminism does not address the potential of sex to affect "fundamentals" (that is, do women engineers define, approach, or discover different fundamentals like as string theory?). Since liberal feminism reaffirms rather than challenges positivism and individualism, it glance ats that "fundamentals" would always remain the same.