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By globalistgirl, on February 6th, 2008

How the impact of stereotypes about gender and technology depend on where you are

The two classes I’m auditing intersected in an interesting way recently. In Judy Wajcman’s book Feminism Confronts Technology, there is a chapter on technology as masculine culture. One of the subsections is on engineering. Wajcman argues that

“central to the social construction of the engineer is the polarity between science and sensuality, the hard and the soft, things and people. (…) the complementary values of hard/soft are also used to legitimate female exclusion from the world of engineering.” (p.145-146)

Another sentence from the book made opened up my eyes to its validity during class discussion:

“It is evident that men identify with technology and through their identification with technology men form bonds with one another.” (p.141)

At first, I disagreed with the idea that only men do this. I identify with technology and bonded with most of my male friends through technology (and paper roleplaying games and computer games.) But then I realized that this is exactly how I’ve mainly been excluded in my research group. My male colleagues bonded with each other very quickly over the vacuum chamber in a completely different way than they approached me. They never shared information other than what is strictly necessary to operate the chamber spontaneously. But those two conflicting experiences beg the question of why such bonding through technology was possible in some cases, but not this one.

The answer might have come from my psychology of culture class. In Social Psychology of Culture, Chiu and Hong summarize research done with a global approach (using the mean behavior as indicative of the culture as a whole) measuring culture differences between many countries. The list of five countries that scored the highest on feminity (p. 32) are Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland. The men I bonded with through technology were Swedish. My collagues are from countries with significantly less gender egalitarianism. This could also explain why I know so many women engineers from my childhood – they were Swedish women. I think culture moderates the impact of gender stereotypes in science and engineering to a very strong degree. The same stereotypes may be found all over the world (has someone checked?) but even if they are, their real, everyday impact on women can be worlds apart.

References
Wajcman, Judy. (1991). Feminism Confronts Technology.University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Chiu, C.-Y.; Hong, Y.-Y. (2006). Social Psychology of Culture. New York, NY: Psychology Press.

February 6th, 2008 | Tags: , , | Category: Feminism, Global Culture, Politics | 1738 comments

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