Bringing Gender Issues to Technology Design
Tone Bratteteig · VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften eBooks · 2002
This chapter discusses gender issues in design of information technology: are there gender issues, and what could they be? It is relatively easy to apply a gender perspective to the result of design: the artifact. Artifacts are designed to communicate with gender stereotypes in contemporary society (including stereotypes of work). Applying gender perspectives to artifacts is not very different from other kinds of social analysis of use activities or artifacts in context. Applying a gender perspective to the design process is more difficult. Some aspects of design can, however, benefit from such analysis: the ideas and visions that guide the design process come from someone who has gender. I do not claim that women software designers always design different software from their male colleagues. However, the design process will benefit from having different sets of experiences as a basis for ideas and visions. These ideas were presented in a plenary lecture at ifu . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.