Introduction to Women and Computers

In the last few years, the Internet, an outgrowth of a Defense Department computer network, has boomed in popularity, becoming an entertaining and informative resource in both the public and private sector. As the Internet's users have increased in number and diversity, the mainstream press has deluged the American public with articles examining the politics and pleasures of e-mail, newsgroups, and the World Wide Web. Little academic study has been done on the sociological implications of the Internet, however, so much of the information presented by the media has been anecdotal. Though issues of gender and the Internet have recently gained national attention, particularly in light of publicized cases of sexual harassment and threats of sexual violence over the Internet, the mainstream press has distilled the discussion of why so few women are on the Internet to disturbingly simplistic and often dubious generalizations about gender.

In this paper, I plan to examine some of the larger obstacles to women joining and actively participating in on-line computer services and the Internet. Issues of gender and the "`net" are both abundant and so far largely unexplored. Though I know that I can not hope to fully explore or even adequately give an overview of all the gender issues that the popularity of the Internet raises (particularly the very important and pervasive issue of pornography), I hope to encourage others to write papers examining issues of women, computers, and the Internet and link their papers to this one. In this paper, I shall first give a brief overview of new theories emerging from current academic studies on the differences in how men and women both approach and are taught to approach computers. I will then discuss the problem of alienation of women who are on-line and their harassment by their male peers. Finally, I will discuss how women have, in fact, blazed the cyberspace frontier and created alternate feminine dialogues on-line. Now taht this paper has entered hypertext form, I have created links to provocative sites where both men and women may enter the web of gender information and discussion.