Negotiating a Hegemonic Discourse of Computing

Abstract

The number of women within computer sciences is low in Norway, as in other Western countries (Camp & Gürer, 2002). Research projects have documented that girls and women use the computer less and in other ways than boys and men (Håpnes & Rasmussen, 2003). Even though variations between women and between men also have been documented through research, a dualistic image of gender and ICT has dominated throughout the 1990s (Corneliussen, 2003b). Worries about the “gender gap” related to computers have resulted in a number of initiatives to include girls and women in the “information society,” but in order to do this in a successful manner we need knowledge about what it means to be a man or a woman with a relation to computers. How do men and women construct their own relations to computing?