Computer Users Do Gender: The Co-Production of Gender and Communications Technology

The so-called "digital gender divide" has encouraged studies attempting to demonstrate the co-production of gender and information technology. Vivian Lagesen has criticized many of these attempts for failing to provide fully symmetrical accounts. Here we describe and analyze beliefs and practices concerning computers, gender, and technology evinced by managers in a network of public sites (Community Access Centers) created to provide community access to digital technology in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. From those results, we argue, among other conclusions, that distinguishing more carefully between the gendered uses of new technologies and the gendered forms of attraction associated with them produces a more fully realized and more perfectly symmetric understanding of how gender and communications technologies are co-produced. We show that the concepts of actor-network theory facilitate that analysis, and so interpret the study as supporting and extending Lagesen's program.