Even though Norway is a country with a strong sense and impression of gender equality and tops the World Economic Forum’s gender equality ranking, the labor market is still strongly divided by gender. More women than men attend higher education [1], but computer education is heavily male dominated. Observers in many countries are concerned about computers and computing causing a gender gap, in particular, in relation to computing education and the computing professions, where the number of women, never very high, has decreased during the last decade. These concerns are evident in Norway. In discussions about gender and ICT (information and communication technology) there are often underlying assumptions of gender as a stable structure and the result of “nature.” However, unless we believe that men really do have certain masculine qualities that make them more suitable than women in relation to computers, we need to examine the development of ideas about gender and computers. How was the image of men’s close relationship to computers, along with ideas about women’s indifference, constructed and maintained? How has the computer been perceived, and to whom and what was it considered helpful or necessary?

This chapter explores how the computer was culturally appropriated in Norway since the 1980s. We will explore how the relationship between gender and computers was perceived and presented in Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten. Aftenposten is Oslo based, but read by people in all regions of the country, and is Norway’s version of the New York Times, a mainstream newspaper of record that is widely respected. Thus, this is not “computer history” in a traditional sense. It is not the history about what “really” happened, but rather about how the development was perceived in the public sphere.

Gender researchers have shown how gender works as a social construction, providing formal and informal rules, social guidelines, and expectations and assumptions about the proper behaviors and roles of men and women [2]. Gender also gives meaning to other entities and social practices, such as technology. Technology is sometimes conceptualized as physical artifacts, but it also involves knowledge and skills, practices, symbols, and cultural meanings, all of which also express ideas about gender [3,4]. Notions about gender also shape the development and use of diverse technologies, such as bicycles, shavers, medical devices—and computers (see Chapters 1, 6, and 9 in this volume). A keyword in the analysis below is “discourse,” referring to socially constructed meanings around a limited area, such as the computer. Discourse theory provides a useful tool to understand and analyze how meanings are constructed, preserved, passed along to others, and, not the least, changed—in continual negotiation (this analysis is inspired by Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory (1985)). In this chapter we will investigate discourses about computing and gender as a cultural frame of reference. Discourses often appear to be fixed or stable, but when scrutinized we will find that they are unstable, socially constructed structures, continually changing over time and from place to place. The aim of this chapter is to analyze how the discourse of computer technology developed since the 1980s, focusing on the public sphere in Norway—that is, on debates that were available to and concerned “people in general.” The empirical material is gathered from Aftenposten [5,6] and focuses on 200 news articles that in some way discussed or examined computer technology and gender [7]. Below we will explore how these discussions of gender and computer technology helped construct the discourse about computers in a particular way, through a “discursive logic” that resulted in a homogeneous and hegemonic discourse in the period up until 2000, creating different expectations about men’s and women’s relations to the computer. Despite the seeming stability, there are notable discursive changes since the year 2000 that will be discussed in the second part of the chapter.

THE PERSONAL COMPUTER

Cheap computers became available on the Norwegian market beginning in the late 1970s. The newness of “personal computers” in this period was not primarily the technology, but the opportunity for “anyone” to acquire a computer, even though it was still not common to own one. In 1985 only 9% of the population between 9 and 79 years old had access to a home computer, and the computer-using population grew steadily to 50% in 1997. The Internet entered the scene in the 1990s, with access increasing rapidly from 13% in 1997 to 52% in 2000. By 2007, access to computers and the Internet had increased to 87% and 83%, respectively.

The computer entered Norwegian culture as a heterogeneous technology, at the intersections between work, home, school, and society at large, promising dramatic changes in all these fields. Claims about the computer entering homes at “full speed” were numerous in the 1980s, and 1995 was described as “the year we connected to the Internet.” Thus, the cultural importance of the new computer technology seems to have anticipated its actual diffusion. The early 1980s was envisioned as a time of change that would affect everything and everyone, from the nation to individuals, regardless of gender [8]. Labels like “computer,” “information,” and “technology” were used as futuristic prefixes to “society,” describing the entire society in light of the new technology, where computers made the difference [9]: “Our society is about to change—and the ‘driving force’ is the computer” [10]. The computer constituted “the language of the future,” it was claimed, and “those who do not learn the language of the computer today will be the illiterates of tomorrow.” In numerous media reports, women were explicitly included in these visions, assumed to be using the computer in the home for typical household tasks (Fig. 8.1) [11]. However, women were soon labeled at risk of becoming “the illiterates of tomorrow.”

DISCURSIVE LOGICS BEFORE 2000

A Pattern of Inclusion and Exclusion

The most common focus on girls and women in Aftenposten concerned their lack of interest, experience, and skills, while by contrast the dominant focus on boys and men was their fascination and extraordinary computer skills. This trend contributes to making computer skills both visible and invisible in a certain gendered discursive pattern.

Aftenposten writers anatomized women’s lack of interest in computers and their low level of participation at work, in education, in the private sphere, and in society in general. Statistics showed a gender gap in access and use, choice of education, as well as references to situations where girls and women were less engaged than boys and men (in the classroom, at computer parties, at home, in school, at work, on the Internet) or in general as a problem for society [12]. All pointed to women’s low level of participation. Boys and men were often mentioned in these entries, representing the “norm” against which girls and women were measured and found wanting [13]. These entries increased the visibility and discursive importance of female nonusers, and women’s low interest in computers had become “common knowledge” by the late 1990s [3,14]. Not merely the large number of such news reports but also the descriptions, comments, and evaluations in many of the reports focusing on women’s lack of interest increased the discursive importance of female nonusers. A typical entry was titled, bluntly, “Women do not give a toss about computer technology.” Norway was presented as unique since “nearly all Norwegian homes have a PC” (surely an exaggeration of the real situation) and since a larger proportion of the Norwegian population than in other countries had access to the Internet. However, a 1997 survey found that only 1% of women who had access to the Internet actually did use it, against 12% of men; and similarly, only 1 in 5 women against 1 in 3 men used the PC at home [15]. The survey obviously documented a lower level of use among women. This focus on the difference between men and women strengthened the impression of women as nonusers, not only by ignoring the female users, who—although not representing a large proportion at that time—still existed, but also by disregarding that a dominant majority of men also were nonusers, with two-thirds of men not using the PC and 88% not using the Internet at home. The male nonusers were simply not discussed at all—not in this or any other news report presenting statistics. Women were identified as the future losers, while a similar threat toward male nonusers was overlooked. But why would it be more interesting that women were lagging behind compared to male Internet users rather than the fact that the majority of men were also not users? And why would only female nonusers face the threat of becoming “the losers of the future”?

This episode illustrates how relations between gender and technology were made visible and invisible in a certain pattern. Women’s nonuse and men’s embrace of technology—even though it did not include a majority of men—were made visible. Simultaneously, male nonusers and female users were ignored or made discursively invisible, contributing to an overall homogenization of a masculine discourse of computers.

Not only were women labeled as indifferent to computers, but they were also associated with technophobia. A researcher who described technophobia as something that had always existed was asked by a journalist [16]: “Isn’t this [fear of technology] something that in particular applies to women?” The researcher answered the question without responding to the gender part. Although the question about women does not seem to have a meaningful part in the interview, the journalist decided to let the question—more precisely, the assumption about women—remain in the published text. Even though the question was not reflected in the following dialogue, it did create meaning in the text by connecting women and fear of technology, illustrating and reinforcing the readily available connection between women and technophobia. And, it was allowed to stay there unchallenged (imagine the journalist asking the same question about men and the interviewee not responding!). Thus, the reports focusing on women’s lack of interest in the computer greatly enhanced the impression of women as nonusers, making them the discursively visible ones, at the cost of female users, who remained discursively invisible.

In sharp contrast to the treatment of girls and women, the dominant focus on boys and men was rather their exceptional interest, extraordinary skills, and even love for the computer [17,18]. Two recurring themes operated side by side. First, the reports obviously admired the boys’ and young men’s skills. They were described as self-educated computer “wizards.” Young men in computer companies were “dragged out of the boy’s room,” to work in a business “where the geniuses are so young they barely escape the penal code against child labor.” They belonged to the “hacker generation” and their only education was what they had taught themselves in “the boy’s room” [19]. They “lived for their work” and had “the fiddling in their fingers and the computer technology in their heads,” talking in a technical language far beyond what even the friendliest mother could possibly understand. These young boys were the masters of the language of the future, as well as the future leaders of society (Fig. 8.2) [20].

The second recurring theme concerned the negative aspects of these male-dominated computer activities: illegal copying of computer programs, in particular, games, violence and sex in computer games, as well as negative effects of playing the games [21]. With the advent of the Internet, online activities generated further worries in the shape of computer viruses “starting as an innocent boy’s game,” online hacking of computer systems, and violence, sex, and pornography on the Internet [22]. Criticism of the boys’ activities did not, however, change their image as highly skilled computer wizards. In most of these reports “the boy’s room” was an important metaphor for the computer-skilled boys and young men—even in the computer industry, where offices resembled a boy’s room more than a working place [23]. The metaphor became so important as a norm for computer skills that one of the universities even offered a special “boy’s room competence course” [24] for female computer students, “in the things we assumed that the boys knew about computers before they attended the program” [25].

There are striking differences between the news reports focusing on women and those focusing on men. First, reports discussing women often involved a comparison of women with men, while entries about men most often remained focused on men alone. Second, women’s attitudes toward computers were often explained through analyzing them “as gender,” while gender rarely figured as an explanation in articles about men [26]. Third, the reports about women frequently encouraged female nonusers to acquire computer skills, while not a single report encouraged the same for male nonusers. Finally, while the focus on women’s lack of interest made female computer users invisible, the focus on computer-skilled males made unskilled boys and men invisible. The atypical self-made computer wizards from “the boy’s room” were deemed to represent the “typical” male relationship with the computer [27].

This discursive construction also seems to have made it easier to “remember,” and consequently to repeat, gender as a feature assumed to make a difference. Several news articles presented statistics showing a difference between users and nonusers related to gender, age, education, income, or geography. Sometimes all of these features were involved, sometimes only a few of them, and occasionally gender was explicitly mentioned not to be one of them [28]. However, gender and to some degree age are the only markers that were commonly discussed as important. Thus, the hegemonic discourse made certain meanings suitable and others unsuitable, and it was apparently easier to rely on gender as the primary difference rather than other social characteristics like class or education. An entry discussing use and nonuse of different media in Norway quoted a survey showing that “technophobia” was mostly found among women, the elderly, and the poorly educated. The (male) author added a postscript: “Age is not an important factor” [29]. The rejection of age as important illustrates a homogenization of the discourse by neglecting the “unsuitable” differences, making the remaining differences even more important.

The near exclusive focus on girls’ and women’s lack of interest compared to boys and men as highly skilled computer users produced a particular discursive effect. Male users and female nonusers were made visible and included as “self-evident” in the hegemonic discourse, whereas male nonusers and female users remained invisible and were in effect excluded from the discourse. This pattern of inclusion and exclusion—based on making computer skills and gender visible and invisible—is perhaps the most important construction in this discourse, and it also forms an important basis for the next discursive construction: the “intersection rhetoric.”

The “Intersection Rhetoric”

The dominant perspective assuming the computer would have revolutionary impact on all different societal spheres fostered a distinctive “intersection rhetoric.” It featured a tendency to use one context, such as home or work, to “explain” a completely different context. One example is found in a report discussing “computer phobia” in working life [30]. Although computer phobia was found among both men and women, it was more widespread among women, or so it was claimed, illustrated by a woman describing her difficulties in using a computer at work. This report went on to explain the differences between men’s and women’s relations to the computer by referring to a study of computers in Norwegian households, where many women seemingly resisted the computer because of their husbands’ intense and time-consuming use of it. Thus, women’s resistance was explained as a protest against men’s extensive use. However, in the context of this news report, research about women’s resistance to computers in the home was used to shed light on women’s computer phobia in working life. The computer’s position at an intersection between different fields of society developed into a particular “intersection rhetoric,” making observations or arguments from one sphere appear to be valid for another sphere.

Another example of this intersection rhetoric starts with an “expert” from a computer company who worried about women’s inability to keep up with the technological development. “Many women see the PC as a boy thing for men who are a bit childish,” he claimed, and too many women are spectators to, instead of participants in, the rapid development [31]. In consequence, women were facing the risk of becoming “the losers of the future” who would miss out on exciting jobs and might even “have to go back to the kitchen sink or low paid professions.” They would also “experience a greater distance to children’s everyday life because they do not understand what children are doing” [32]. The “intersection rhetoric” in this report involves education, working life, and the home, as well as different levels of computer skills. One university lecturer claimed that it was often “required that you can handle a PC when you apply for a job,” then moved on to talk about the small number of women in computer science, again illustrating the “intersection rhetoric” by conflating two fundamentally different types or levels of computer knowledge.

The fact that the computer entered the culture at an intersection between different spheres and different levels of users, from the hobby user to the secretary to the expert, apparently made it easy—and even natural—to use an “intersection rhetoric,” where arguments from one sphere or one group of users could be applied to another sphere or user group. (See Figure 8.3.)

Nonhegemonic Men and Women

The dominant or hegemonic discourse presented men as computer skilled and women as indifferent. However, there were also two other groups in this period— a group of female users and a group of male nonusers. How do these fit into the hegemonic discourse?

In several reports, women were actually portrayed as the “superusers” or the main user group for office computers, both in the private and the public sector (Fig. 8.4). “Secretaries have in many places become the companies’ racers in computing.” It was noted that “many female secretaries do the computing for their male leaders,” and many of them “are more competent than their superiors with regard to computers and technology” [33]. Thus, it appeared that the secretary was not “automated” out of a job. Instead, the secretary’s job was reevaluated, and the “punching lady” was transformed into a new, though still female, “office manager” with a more responsible job, higher wages, and higher status [34]. Together with observations about women being well represented or dominant in “low level” computer work, such as routine work and word processing [35], these reports acknowledge women as an important user group for office computers (see Chapter 9 in this volume). Nonetheless, despite the clear acknowledgment of their computer skills, these women office workers did not alter the hegemonic discourse about computer use, which remained focused on women nonusers. This important group of female computer users could in effect be ignored owing to the perceived difference in the 1980s between a secretary’s computer, deemed a mere “word processing machine,” and a “general” computer [36], together with how women’s use was limited to operating the technology. Using male-oriented computer expertise as the norm for “computer competence” would wipe this (female) group off the map. These women computer users were made visible as women, but in the hegemonic discourse their computer use did not count for much.

The hegemonic discourse also effectively ignored the male nonusers, or “the stone age leaders,” as they were called. In the computer magazine Datatid, this curious group was quite prominent throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but they were entirely invisible in Aftenposten until the mid-1990s. In 1995 Aftenposten profiled a number of “renowned” nonusers—all of them in high positions, and all of them men. One of them, apparently not so happy with being interviewed, stated that “I think of myself as smart enough to master this, but with so many computer competent people around me I do not want to spend time on it” [37]. This claim is in line with what Datatid found in 1985 among leaders in Norwegian computer companies, who appeared busy with other things and so left the computer to be handled by the secretary [6]. These male leaders presented their nonuse of computers as a deliberate choice. This choice was apparently accepted, at least through the end of the 1990s. A journalist writing in Aftenposten in 1999 acknowledged that he recently started using email after being rebuked by a business associate: “Do you live in the stone age!” This article made fun of leaders and people in high positions who did not use computers, especially those not using email. Another nonuser would tell people that he had a PC in his office, followed by a whisper: “But I don’t use it!” Another report claimed that the Internet revolution was awaiting the leaders to realize that the world was about to change. Many of these male leaders got a PC in their office in the early 1990s, it was claimed, because “it looked pretty,” but many of them still wrote by hand [38]. Apparently some of the male leaders acquired the status of the computer quite early without actually using it. The consequence of their nonuse was described as no more severe than the risk of receiving business communications on paper through “snail-mail,” as before, a far cry from the dire consequences described for women nonusers.

These prominent men were obviously not the only male nonusers in the 1980s and 1990s, but they were the only group made visible. Despite the leaders’ visibility as men, they were not discussed “as gender,” and their gender was not used as an argument or explanation for their behavior. They did not affect the general image of men as computer competent, but were instead excused based on a different discourse—the discourse of the busy business leader (Fig. 8.5).

CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE: RECONSTRUCTIONS AND NEW VOICES

So far we have seen how the hegemonic discourse was created through a systematic pattern of making female nonusers and male users visible, while simultaneously male nonusers and female users remained discursively invisible. The “intersection rhetoric” increased the visibility of women’s lack of knowledge by permitting the use of observations or arguments from one arena, group, or level of use to be valid explanations for another arena, group, or level of use. By this overemphasis of gender, a conception of gender as the primary difference was sustained, and differences within the genders as well as other differences, such as age or income, were made seemingly unimportant [39]. Even when the male nonusers entered the scene, they did not face the threat of being excluded from important activities. And when the hegemonic discourse was occasionally challenged, it was met with doubt, disregard, or even contradiction. These discursive logics all worked to homogenize the discourse through including meanings that supported the hegemonic discourse, while excluding meanings that threatened it. However, it is important to note that discourses do change, despite their seemingly stable and fixed qualities. In this section we will see attempts to rewrite the discourse before 2000 as well as the entry of new voices and new meanings after 2000.

How to Change Things if Gender Is a Primary Difference

One of the recurring questions following the worries about women’s low interest in computers, in particular, computer education, has been the question of how to include women. The trend in computer education in Norway has to a large degree followed the rest of the Western world: a low proportion of women students grew slowly across the early 1980s, but decreased markedly toward the mid-1990s [40]. Numerous initiatives to recruit and retain women had temporary and local effects in the late 1990s [25,41], but the numbers of women are once again decreasing and are today lower than in the late 1980s in the most technical computer education in faculties of technology and natural sciences [42].

I have analyzed elsewhere the discursive constructions in computer education and initiatives to recruit more women into this field, illustrating a “gender-blind,” a “masculine,” and “feminized” discourse of computing [25], and there are examples of each of these in Aftenposten. We find the gender-blind discourse blaming women for making the wrong choices, and the masculine discourse encouraging women to “think in new ways” or to “close the milk shop and pedicure and start in the computer business” [43]. We even find a more feminized version trying to rewrite the meaning of computing as less technical and more social—in accord with women’s supposed “social abilities.” While the first two discourses tried to change women, the last one is the most interesting in this context, as it definitely tried to change the discourse of computing to make room for women. This is the one we will focus on here.

Reports discussing women’s low participation in computing education and low interest in computers frequently tried to explain this fact, as well as how to change it, by conceptualizing men and women as essentially different. Men and women have different attitudes toward computer technology, it was claimed. It was assumed that men have a playful and exploring attitude while women are driven solely by need, not by enthusiasm or inquisitiveness [44]. Men get addicted, and they love the technology for itself, whereas women ask what they can use it for. Boys are interested in “finesses and technique” while girls are interested in “communication, email and information retrieval,” arguments well known also from earlier research [45–48]. Men and women were also described as having essentially different qualities, and several entries claimed that women in certain ways were better than men with regard to computing: “women are better in comprehending the users’ situation. Men have a tendency to lose themselves in exciting details” [49].

A contemporary campaign echoed these very arguments to recruit women to computing. Here women were lauded for their excellent communication abilities, while men were acknowledged as “the technical geniuses.” This description of men and women coincided with an attempt at redefining computing. One business representative claimed that many computer jobs were “not technical at all,” and another expert claimed that “the characteristics associated with girls … creativity and to be good at teamwork” would lead to success in the computer business [25,41]. The arguments were perhaps well intended in the way they made room for women and described computing as something women could manage as well as or, in some instances, better than men. However, the underlying argument was that computing was not really about technology, but about something else. Women were still not considered “technical geniuses.” Thus, women might study computing or work in the computer industry, but not for the same reasons as men.

Emphasis on the social aspects also surfaced in a rare description of a group of female computer engineers. They were described as experts, but as a negation of male computer experts: they did not talk incessantly about technology and they were certainly not nerds. “Instead they talk about weddings, children, men … about a lot of things that often occupy women in their late 20s and early 30s” [50]. The female computer engineers emphasized that they “worked with people”—just as they assumed other young women wanted to. Besides, computer companies did not always want the male computer geeks, it was claimed, but rather preferred women who could “listen to users and their needs.” Thus, the message was that the computer industry needed women because they were not like male experts. Still, it seems, they were not valued for their technical expertise.

As far as we can see, women confront a number of “double standards” in computing. They face difficulties in establishing an identity as “computer expert” in part because they lack ready-made images to identify with or role models [3,51]. The suggestion that computing is incompatible with femininity [52] creates an imbalance that may lead women to maintain a distance from male computer experts in attempts to restore the balance. Rewriting computing to be more in line with the assumed “female qualities” and preferences offers an alternate co-construction of gender and computers. However, not everyone is entirely happy with this attempt to write technology out of computing, nor with the negative image it creates of men [41]. And the alternative construction does not really include women in the technological aspects of computing.

New Voices After 2000

The hegemonic discourse seems rather stable through the late 1990s, while attempts to recast the discourse in this period occur primarily with concerns about the low proportion of women in computer education. After 2000, we find new discursive constructions alongside the dominant discourse. Different meanings can exist side by side, resulting in something like a polyphonic musical choir of different and seemingly contradictory voices [53]. After 2000 we can find this polyphonic choir with echoes of previous voices as well as new voices. The newspaper articles on gender and computing since 2000 can roughly be divided in four main topics: (1) criminal men, (2) computers for everything and everybody, (3) differences between computer users, and (4) women in IT education/business. The articles within these four topics also relate to gender in distinctive ways.

The articles about criminal men are all very brief, as though they were barely worth mentioning. Continuing from the earlier period, it is still men who are associated with criminal use of computers. Yet in this period the young male hacker, formerly the computer wizard of the 1990s, lost some of his status. His criminal deeds are now described as “boyish pranks,” and he is no longer celebrated for his arcane knowledge. Instead, his computer knowledge is “normalized,” since anyone can find recipes for hacking on the Internet [54]. Thus, the call to “forget the hacker” [55] is partly achieved—by redefining him away from being someone with exceptional computer skills to an “anybody” using commonly available information. The young male hackers or nerds have lost their hegemonic position as the celebrated computer wizards.

One of the most notable differences since 2000 is the embrace of computers as being everywhere, used by everyone, and for everything. The earlier period also saw similar claims, in particular, during the early 1980s, although mostly referring to the future. The more recent news articles seem to reflect practices already present and realized, and they construct the categories of “everywhere” and “everything” more actively, not as a vision but through stories of people’s actual use of computers. The category of “everybody” is actively constructed as a discursive group that includes many new users of computers. Thus, we meet young people, old people, men, women, grandmothers, people looking for a date, office workers, prisoners, and prostitutes as the new user groups; and they use computers for a broad spectrum of activities including work, hobbies, communicating in new ways with family and friends as well as with strangers on Internet services. The new “everybody” still confronts the image of the “original” computer experts, that is, the nerdy men. In challenging the “nerdy men,” the most “unlikely” users are called upon, such as, for instance, “your aunt,” “your mummy,” “women over 60”—images that clearly challenge the image of the “real” computer user as solely male [56]. These new images clearly counteract the invisibility of women computer users.

Some of the new computer users are presented as marginalized females, such as prostitutes and female prisoners. In their stories, computer technology has gained a vital position in making them able to participate in and become successfully integrated in society. Even though men per se still do not figure as either nonusers or new users, new male users are presented in this period, such as male craftsmen. Craftsmen did not consider computers important, but now they realize that running a business without computers is about to become impossible, or at least embarrassing.

The new spectrum of users challenges two of the most important discursive constructions from the earlier period: the dominant position held by primarily young males as the “real” computer users; and the image of women as nonusers along with the invisibility of female users. Thus, these new stories challenge the gendered inclusion/exclusion pattern of the earlier hegemonic discourse, creating discursive space for both male and female computer users.

This expansion of computer users clearly involves a number of different users with a number of different social features. The newspaper articles referred to above do not explicitly discuss in which ways they are different. This is, however, the topic in a series of other articles and in these, gender again is described as the main differentiating feature. The old, pre-2000 voices emphasize that girls have less technical skill than boys do, and that girls want to maintain distance from the nerd label, emphasizing the gender gap of the hegemonic discourse. In dramatic contrast, the new, post-2000 voices observe that the gender gap is about to close. Women have “invaded the internet,” with gender differences in access and use “surprisingly small” [57]. However, women turn out to use the Internet in different ways, since “contact with friends and acquaintances are more important than tangible results.” Men, on the other hand, “want action and results,” banking services, and “window-shopping,” and boys are “most eager to use the net for creating contacts.” Inconsistencies in descriptions of the various preferred activities seem to indicate that the descriptions of men’s and women’s online preferences involve gender expectations more than actual activities.

One “Internet expert” confidently claims that “everyone” who wants to use the Internet today can do so, and gender is no longer the most important difference. Several articles follow this pattern: a journalist trying to sketch a picture of gender as the main difference (i.e., following the previous hegemonic discourse) is contradicted by an “expert” pointing out that the situation has changed. One expert agrees that there are some differences between girls’ and boys’ interests, but “when entering working life, the computer knowledge of both genders is about equally good” [58]. Another expert claims that it is primarily “myths” about gender that create expectations of girls’ and women’s lack of skills: “In reality, boys and girls have a very equal level of knowledge” [59].

Another example of old gender gaps being closed, while new ones are opened, comes from a researcher commenting upon her own study showing that girls’ and boys’ uses of the computer are converging. “More boys are chatting … and more girls are playing PC games” [60]. But still, the differences are large “both in what they do and how much time they use,” and she continues: “I believe that it will always be like that, because it is based on fundamental differences in interests between the genders.” Despite the closing of old gaps, new ones appear, indicating the importance of gender in sorting the world, and also how easily this sorting mechanism can appear as a documentation of “nature,” an unchangeable and rigid structure.

These articles illustrate how the hegemonic discourse is no longer in harmony with the observable practices of people. It is continually being challenged and renegotiated in ways that seek to revalue girls’ and women’s relationship to computers in more positive terms, that is, as less different from the (male) norm. These articles also remind us that gender is not a purely biological feature, but it involves categories that include meaning, values, and expectations. While old gender gaps might be closing, new ones appear and reinstall gender as a main differentiating feature.

The fourth and final main topic since 2000 is the ongoing focus on girls’ and women’s low level of participation in computer education and the computing workforce. Here the “nerdy men” is still a repeated image (although not with such a celebratory tone), and we find echoes of the feminized discourse emphasizing computing as mostly about people and communication, which is assumed to interest women more than technical aspects. Women are also wanted in the IT business because “they think a little bit different and supply new perspectives” [61]. But the most interesting development in this discourse is new images of men fighting the image of the nerd/hacker/geek, which has been seen as one of the main problems for women in education and industry [41,52,62]. These new men are not isolated or asocial, nor do they have a “single-minded devotion to computers” [52]. Quite the contrary, they are active in various social activities and organizations, and “not engaged with the computer all the time.” The new men “talk about other things than their computer” and even “have a tan in the summer” [63]. The invitation to women is still not based on women being technically competent, but rather reflects a truism about women in professional contexts representing “something special” purely based on gender. Most notably, what is being reconstructed here is not so much women or computer education—but rather men. All the same, the hackers or “computer idiots” still exist and “we need them” [64].

A number of articles focus specifically on female leaders who make up around 4% to 5% of the IT industry in Norway. Female leaders are wanted for their “female competence” and to secure the “needs of half the users” [65], even if both of these observations remained rather vague and unspecified. Women, however, “don’t know the code” of the IT business, and in recognizing this, a mentoring project initiated by a network for women in IT identified male “agents” as mentors for female “talents.” One of the mentors could report that his (female) “talent” had become “more rational and less emotional” [66]. Thus, there is a desire to increase the number of women in leading positions, to create role models, and to help them learn the codes. This assistance is expressed by very rigid gender constructions, however, where women are marked as different from the male norm. Women can never win the competition with men’s culturally acquired professional competence based on their “nature” as women [67]. And paradoxically, women are invited for some special values they have as women, but to achieve the top positions they have to become less like women and more like men, for instance, in learning the codes of the (male) business.

The presentation above has focused on the new discursive constructions, although, it should be emphasized, the press also in this period continues to write about girls and women who have less interest, less experience, and less computer skill than boys and men. The most pronounced continuities are concerning the different computer users and the persisting low proportion of women in computing education and work. These are also the fields where gender seems to be most stubbornly reproduced, often in essentializing ways, making it appear as if it “will always be like that” owing to men’s and women’s “natures” [68]. We have also seen new discursive constructions, in which discursive continuities operate side by side with new voices. The new voices introduce new and more varied groups of computer users. They try to restore some kind of gender balance by claiming things have changed and by introducing the new social men (with a tan) who are assumed to make the IT world more attractive to women. The expansion and diversification in these accounts make women less evident as the nonusers of computers, even as the young teenage boys have lost some of their former status as computer wizards, softening the gendered pattern of visibility/invisibility of skills.

HOW CAN WE UNDERSTAND THE CHANGE?

In this chapter we have seen how perceptions of the relationship between gender and computer technology developed in popular discourse. Overall, the findings are perhaps not surprising, since the computer’s masculine associations as well as the low proportion of women in computing are well known [69–71]. This chapter’s focus on discourse reveals how and when this strong connection between masculinity and computers emerged, as well as suggesting how and why it has changed most recently.

Across the period from 1980 to today, we can see three main phases in the cultural appropriation of computers. First, in the early 1980s, before the dominant discourse took hold, the perceptions of gender were unclear and ambivalent, and they could even be distinctly hospitable to women. This was even more explicit in the Norwegian computer magazine Datatid. The magazine frequently suggested that the computer offered special opportunities to women by creating new jobs in or near the home for women with caregiver responsibilities [6]. This phase, expressed strongly in the professional literature, soon gave way to a flood of popular-culture accounts where computers and computing were clearly gender-typed as masculine. We have seen how men were increasingly perceived as active users while women were perceived as problematic nonusers. The explicit gender-typing and the pattern of visibility/invisibility were major driving forces in establishing the hegemonic discourse of the late 1990s. The third period, since 2000, was more expansive; the discursive changes were closely tied to the spread of computers throughout society, expanding the image of computer users in ways that challenged the previous pattern of visibility/invisibility.

These historical patterns raise at least three questions. First, why in the first phase did the computer appear as ambivalent or even gender neutral? Even though computers were not entirely new in the 1980s, computers in the home and in the office were new to most people. In the early 1980s office workers perceived the computer as novel and exciting, but their excitement disappeared within just a few years [72]. Also, early on, the computer was symbolically flexible enough to be associated with either the female office worker or the male office leader. Later, in the mid-1990s, Norwegian girls expressed a similar symbolic ambivalence about the Internet, making the researchers conclude that the Internet had not (yet) achieved the same strong associations to masculinity as the computer [48].

Although it has been claimed that young girls can “sense” the masculine character of computers, disposing females to reject them [73], this chapter indicates quite the opposite: computers did not enter culture with a ready-made masculine symbolism attached. Instead, personal computers began with an unclear, ambivalent, and somewhat confusing gender-typing. It is worth speculating why this might be so. While technology in general had connections to the heavy and noisy mechanical technology so deeply rooted in a working class masculinity, the personal computer was also linked to the secretary’s typewriter. Computer keyboards presented a challenge to male executives accustomed to dictating letters rather than typing them (see Chapter 9 in this volume). Judy Clapp, one of the female computer pioneers, related one male executive’s first computer experience: “He got his computer and called me to come up and see him using it. I walked in and he was leaning back on his desk with his secretary in front of the computer. He was dictating and she was typing!” [74].

Second, why and how did the computer become clearly masculine through the 1980s and 1990s? It would be naive to expect a definitive answer to such a complicated question. In the accounts presented in this chapter, at least, gender was used not merely to mark differences between men and women, but also as an ordering structure that made men’s and women’s actions visible and invisible in a certain pattern. Because of this ordering structure, what was made discursively visible is not necessarily the “true” story (recall the invisible legions of male nonusers), but rather a partial story filtered through gendered cultural expectations. When men—or rather a distinct minority of computer-savvy men—were taken to represent the norm of active computer use, women appeared as deviants while men not conforming to the norm became invisible. The obsessive focus on gender as the main difference, even when reporting about a closing gender gap, suggests that gender is the fundamental category we use to structure our perception of society and, accordingly, our expectations about computers. The persistent focus on gender differences also makes it difficult to see commonalities and similarities in men’s and women’s experiences with computers [68].

Third, why do we find such discursive variation since 2000, perhaps even indications of change in the dominant discourse? The gender ambivalence of the early 1980s might be ascribed to the newness of the computer, a difference in kind. Since 2000 there has been an important difference in degree, and “more is different” [75, p. 149]. The use of computers and the Internet grew rapidly between 1994 and 2000, at which point 71% of the Norwegian population (between 9 and 79) had access to a home computer and 52% had access to the Internet. By 2007 computing technology had become as pervasive as radio and television: fully 87% of the population had access to a computer and 83% to the Internet. Now, the main difference in access and use is no longer between men and women, but between young and old (respectively, 83% in age groups 45 and below and 28% in age groups 65 and above). It seems new technology becomes most interesting when it’s become trivial and available for everyone to use [75, p. 105]. Despite the massive growth during the 1980s and 1990s, it is primarily in the period after 2000 that computers and the Internet reach this phase of pervasiveness. Thus, the image of the user changes from young male enthusiasts to “everyone” using it for “everything.” Not only are more people using computer technology, but also there is a new way of perceiving computer technology. “[T]he generic concept of ICT is less meaningful to young people. They prefer to talk about specific activities that they perform using ICT. … The issue is no longer whether or not to use ICT, but what activities you need ICT to do” [56]. In the 1990s, “access” was a keyword in discussions about gender and ICT, with an underlying assumption that “access to the technology and information about its brilliance will make the women ‘change side’ ” [76]. The dominant concern about the gender gap is no longer in access and use, but rather women’s continuously low participation in computer science [77]. Increased access and use has not resulted in more women so far choosing computer education. However, the developments since 2000—the “difference in degree” and trivialization of the computer—might also be important for this to be realized. In this chapter we have seen not only spurs to change and variation, but also how discourses can suppress variation by persistently steering our vision toward male enthusiasts and female reservation. What we have seen here is something like a Bakhtinian choir, illustrating how discourses, even when they appear to be stable, should be seen as temporary fixed structures that will always be in motion, moved—although slowly—by our choices, statements, interpretations, actions, and research.

REFERENCES

1. Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics Norway]; available at www.ssb.no/utniv/ (accessed 20 March 2009).

2. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

3. Hilde Corneliussen, Diskursens makt— individets frihet [The power of discourse—the freedom of individuals] (Ph.D. thesis, Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, 2003).

4. Merete Lie, “Gender and ICT,” in Merete Lie, ed., He, She and IT Revisited (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2003), pp. 9–33.

5. This work is part of a larger research project, and analysis of the computer magazine Datatid also contributes to this chapter.

6. See Hilde Corneliussen, “Gender in Norwegian Computer History,” in Eileen M. Trauth, ed., Ency­clopedia of Gender and Information Technology (Hershey, PA: Idea Group Reference, 2006), pp. 630–635.

7. About 340 news entries from Aftenposten between 1981 and 2007 were retrieved. Not all of them appeared to be relevant; about 200 of these news entries are included in the empirical material analyzed in this chapter. Articles from Aftenposten since 1984 are available at www.retriever-info.com/en/, a subscription archive for Scandinavian media.

8. 9 July 1995 (“year we connected to the Inter­net”). Unless another source is named, all dates given in this format refer to Aftenposten. All quotes from Norwegian newspapers are translated by the author; 14 January 1983, 11 November 1983 (1980s as time of change).

9. Merete Lie, “Gender in the Image of Technology,” in Merete Lie and Knut H. Sørensen, eds., Making Technology Our Own? Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996), pp. 201–223.

10. 31 January 1984 (driving force).

11. 13 December 1982 (“language of the future”, “illiterates of tomorrow”); 7 November 1981 (“typical household tasks”).

12. 12 January 1996, 5 October 1997, 7 March 1999 (access and use); 22 February 1985, 24 December 1985, 11 July 1986, 17 March 1987 (choice of education); 17 October 1996, 11 March 1999 (the classroom); 30 March 1994 (computer parties); 29 August 1997 (home); 5 August 1982, 11 March 1983, 5 February 1986, 24 September 1999, 3 October 1999 (school); 10 February 1987 (work); 7 January 1996, 29 May 1998 (Internet); 23 October 1985, 5 March 1987, 22 May 1989, 5 February 1997, 5 October 1997 (problem for society).

13. 16 December 1987, 16 October 1994, 5 September 1997, 7 March 1999 (low level of participation).

14. 29 August 1997, 11 March 1999.

15. 5 October 1997 (“Women do not give a toss,” Norwegian population).

16. 8 June 1997 (technophobia).

17. 5 March 1988 (extraordinary skills); 16 October 1994 (love for the computer).

18. This focus is also highly present within research on men’s relationship to computers: for example, Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Com­puters and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984); Leslie Haddon, “Researching Gender and Home Computers,” in Knut H. Sørensen and Anne-Jorun Berg, eds., Technologies and Everyday Life: Trajectories and Transformations (Oslo: Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities, 1991; Report No. 5); Jörgen Nissen, Pojkarna vid datorn 89 (Stockholm: Symposion Graduale, 1993); Ulf Mellström, Män och deras maskiner (Nora, Sweden: Bokförlaget Nya Doxa, 1999); Tine Kleif and Wendy Faulkner, “ ‘I’m No Athlete [but] I Can Make This Thing Dance!’ ” Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring 2003): 296–325.

19. 26 November 1988 (“wizards”); 15 December 1996 (“dragged out of the boy’s room,” young geniuses, “hacker generation”); 15 February 1986, 26 November 1988 (“the boy’s room”).

20. 28 July 1994 (“lived for their work”); 2 May 1995 (technical language); 13 December 1982 (lan­guage of the future); 2 May 1995 (leaders of society).

21. 26 November 1988, 12 November 1996, 27 January 2000 (illegal copying); 30 June 1991, 25 June 1994, 1 November 1994 (violence and sex in computer games); 23 November 1995 (negative effects of games).

22. 29 February 1992, 29 September 1993 (computer viruses); 24 May 1985, 11 April 1987, 26 January 2000 (hacking of computer systems); 5 February 1992, 25 June 1994, 16 March 1995, 27 January 2000, 18 May 2000 (violence and sex on the Internet).

23. 15 December 1996 (offices resembled a boy’s room).

24. 4 October 1998 (“boy’s room competence course”).

25. Hilde Corneliussen, “Konstruksjoner av kjønn ved høyere IKT-utdanning i Norge,” Kvinnefor­skning, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2003): 31–50.

26. Wendy Faulkner, “The Power and Pleasure?” Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2000): 87–119.

27. Knut H. Sørensen, “Love, Duty and the S- Curve,” Strategies of Inclusion (SIGIS, 2002). Available at www.rcss.ed.ac.uk/sigis/public/documents/SIGIS_D02_Part1.pdf (accessed 30 June 2009).

28. 12 June 1993.

29. 25 September 1993.

30. 26 March 1995 (computer phobia).

31. 5 October 1997 (women are spectators).

32. 5 October 1997 (“losers of the future”).

33. 17 December 1985, 16 October 1994, 4 August 1996 (“super users”); 16 October 1994 (“racers in computing”); 4 August 1996 (female secretaries computing for male leaders); 14 August 1996 (more competent).

34. 2 December 1985 (not “automated” out of a job); 8 September 1989, 14 August 1996 (office manager). This was, however, not supported by research from the late 1980s. See Bente Rasmussen, “Datateknologi—en trussel eller nye muligheter,” in Merete Lie et al., eds., I menns bilde (Trondheim: Tapir forlag, 1988), pp. 73–87.

35. 17 December 1985, 15 May 1986, 17 March 1987 (“low-level” computer work).

36. See Merete Lie, Anne-Jorunn Berg, Hjørdis Kaul, Elin Kvande, Bente Rasmussen, and Knut H. Sørensen, “Har teknologi noe med kvinner å gjøre?” Sosiolog i dag, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1984): 23–39.

37. 26 March 1995 (“renowned” nonusers).

38. 22 November 1999 (“stone age”, “But I don’t use it!”); 11 April 2000 (“it looked pretty”).

39. See Knut H. Sørensen and Hege Nordli, “Mobil moral og kjønn i endring?” Kvinneforskning, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2005): 57–72.

40. See Maria Charles and Karen Bradley, “A Matter of Degrees: Female Underrepresentation in Computer Science Programs Cross Nationally,” in J. McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray, eds., Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 183–203, for a cross-national comparison of the gender composition of computer science programs in Norway and 20 other industrial countries.

41. Vivian Anette Lagesen, “Advertising Computer Science to Women (or Was It the Other Way Around?)” in Merete Lie, ed., He, She and IT Revisited (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2003), pp. 69–102.

42. Computerworld, available at www.idg.no/computerworld/article103648.ece (accessed 25 March 2009).

43. 10 February 1987 (gender-blind discourse); 24 December 1985 (masculine discourse—“think in new ways”); 11 July 1986 (masculine discourse— “close the milk shop”).

44. 16 December 1987, 16 October 1994, 4 August 1996 (driven solely by need).

45. 9 May 1997 (communication).

46. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).

47. Margrethe Aune, “The Computer in Everyday Life,” in Merete Lie and Knut H. Sørensen, eds., Making Technology Our Own? Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996), pp. 91–120.

48. Tove Håpnes and Bente Rasmussen, “Gen­dering Technology,” in Merete Lie, ed., He, She and IT Revisited (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2003), pp. 173–197.

49. 5 October 1997 (“comprehending users’ situation”).

50. 16 March 1997 (“wedding, children, men”).

51. Hilde Corneliussen, “ ‘I Don’t Understand Computer Programming Because I’m a Woman!’ Negotiating Gendered Positions in a Norwegian Discourse of Computing,” in Konrad Morgan et al., eds., Human Perspectives in the Internet Society: Culture, Psychology and Gender (Boston: WIT Press, 2004), pp. 173–182.

52. Sherry Turkle, “Computational Reticence: Why Women Fear the Intimate Machine” in Cheris Kramarae, ed., Technology and Women’s Voices: Keeping in Touch (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), pp. 41–61.

53. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, eds., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 60–102.

54. 25 January 2001, 16 November 2001. There are no examples of girls being associated with computer criminality, and there is not a linguistic equivalent to “boyish pranks” about girls; 7 October 2001 (computer knowledge “normalized”).

55. Helen Jøsok Gansmo, Vivian Anette Lagesen, and Knut H. Sørensen, “Forget the Hacker?” in Merete Lie, ed., He, She and IT Revisited (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2003), pp. 34–68.

56. Helen Jøsok Gansmo, Vivian Anette Lagesen, and Knut H. Sørensen, “Out of the Boy’s Room?” NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2003): 132.

57. 28 March 2006 (“invaded the internet”).

58. 11 April 2001.

59. 14 March 2005.

60. 4 June 2004.

61. 4 June 2004 (“new perspectives”).

62. Bente Rasmussen and Tove Håpnes, “Exclud­ing Women from the Technologies of the Future?” Futures, Vol. 23 (December 1991): 1107–1119.

63. 22 March 2004 (not computing all the time); 23 July 2006 (summer tan).

64. 23 July 2006 (“computer idiots”).

65. 12 September 2004 (“female competence”).

66. 2 November 2003 (“less emotional”).

67. Ruth Woodfield, Women, Work and Comput­ing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

68. Robert W. Connell, Gender (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), p. 68.

69. Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

70. Merete Lie, ed., He, She and IT revisited (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2003).

71. J. McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray, eds., Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

72. Merete Lie, “Computer Dialogues,” Skriftserie / Senter for kvinneforskning, No. 2 (Trondheim: Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, NTNU, Senter for kvinneforskning, 1998).

73. Jörgen Nissen, “Det är klart att det är grabbar som håller på med datorer!” in Elisabeth Sundin and Boel Berner, eds., Från symaskin till cyborg (Stockholm: Nerenius & Santerus Förlag, 1996), pp. 141–161.

74. Denise Gürer, “Women in Computing History,” Inroads—SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Special Issue on Women and Computing, 2002): 116–120.

75. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

76. Helen Jøsok Gansmo, “Towards a Happy Ending for Girls and Computing?” (Trondheim: Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Faculty of Arts, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2004), p. 87. [Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Ph.D. thesis in Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies].

77. J. McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray. “A Critical Review of the Research on Women’s Participation in Postsecondary Computing Education,” in J. McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray, eds., Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 137–180; Mara H. Wasburn and Susan G. Miller, “Still a Chilly Climate for Women Students in Technology: A Case Study,” in Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser, eds., Women, Gender, and Technology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 60–79.