2009.11.11 | Marianne Dammand Iversen

Title: Understanding Gender in Technology Use: An ethnographic study of domestic security practices.

Everyday life experiences are increasingly oriented around interactions with technology, and as new ubiquitous computing technologies are developed this becomes even more salient. As a consequence, the relationships between our social lives, our identity and technology itself are intensifying as they interact in unprecedented ways. In this talk I will discuss an ethnographic investigation of gendered patterns of use in programming domestic appliances. I study the home as it is a critical environment in which children learn socially approved attitudes towards gender and technology. I describe the masculine bias in present usability and design processes. I examine the problematic relationship between femininity and technical mastery, which I identify as a source of Gender Inauthencity for women who wish to participate in technology. My work seeks to understand this tension. I outline gendered usage patterns in everyday use of domestic technology. I draw from anthropology, gender studies, STS, design research, ubiquitous computing, and social informatics.

My work reframes the discussion of the role of gender in technology from something that merely needs to be controlled for, to something with inherent power imbalances that is socially constructed, and organizes everyday life. I argue technology is an object around which individuals negotiate their Gender and Technical Identities.

In future research, I will continue to explore the co-construction of gender and technical identity. First, I will continue to conduct ethnographic work to build understanding and descriptive models of how technology is gendered, with a specific focus on extreme cases. Understanding extreme cases will help us tease out a rich understanding of how diversity can be realized in scientific and technological disciplines. Second, I will build and study prototypes of new systems, which aim to address gender insufficiency. Through this work I will develop design guidelines for gender-sensitive design, and develop a theory of feminist embodiment to guide technology design.
SK: 5211