Reflections: Empowering women, technology, and (feminist) institutional changes

Frontiers

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 168-180

  Fuller, Laurie ^a   Meiners, Erica ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 21144434804     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2005.0009     Document Type: Review

References (58)

1. For the last six years US News and World Report has ranked our university as the most diverse university in the Midwest. In addition, the university is a federally designated Hispanic-serving institution. In 2002 the enrollment was 10,898, and the undergraduate population (8,101) was composed of 14 percent African American, 13 percent Asian, and 28 percent Hispanic students and 64 percent women.
2. The 2000 report Falling through the Net: Toward Digital Inclusion states that, while gains have been made, a significant racial gap in access to personal computers and the Internet at home still remains. The report states that approximately one third of the total U.S. population uses the Internet at home, but only 18.9 percent of African Americans and 16.1 percent of Hispanics use the Internet at home.
3. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Falling through the Net: Toward Digital Inclusion (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000).
4. The class meets face-to-face but is also augmented through online components, including writing conferences for group work.
5. Susan T. Hill, "Science and Engineering Bachelor's Degrees Awarded to Women Increase Overall, but Decline in Several Fields," Data Brief, Division of Science Resources Studies, National Science Foundation, NSF (November 7, 1997): 97-326.
6. In 1998 the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation released a report, Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls, summarizing current research on single-sex education. According to this report, single-sex education has no benefits once adjustments have been made for differences in students' pre-enrollment ability, selectivity of the school, and other variables.
7. American Association of University Women, Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls (Washington, DC: American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, 1998).
8. Caitilyn Allen, "Supporting Female Undergraduate Science and Engineering Majors with a Residential Program," Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 5 (1999): 265-78;
9. Janice L. Streitmatter, For Girls Only: Making a Case for Single-Sex Schooling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999);
10. Richard Felder, Gary Fiedler, Meredith Mahoney, Charles Hamrick, and Jacqueline Dietz, "A Longitudinal Study of Engineering Student Performance and Retention: Gender Differences in Student Performance and Attitudes," Journal of Engineering Education 95, no. 2 (1995): 151-63;
11. Melissa Koch, "No Girls Allowed," TECHNOS: Quarterly for Education and Technology 3, no. 3 (1994), http://www.technos.net/tq_04/tq_03/ 3koch.htm (accessed November 16, 2004);
12. Debra Clingingsmith, "Engendering Equity: Fostering Computer Science Success Among Women and Minorities," U.S. Women Engineer: Magazine of the Society of Women Engineers (May/June 1993);
13. Committee on Women in Science and Engineering, Office of Scientific and Engineering Personnel, National Research Council, Women Scientists and Engineers Employed in Industry: Why So Few? (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1994);
14. Sheila Tobias, They're Not Dumb, They're Different: Stalking the Second Tier (Tucson: Research Corporation, 1990).
15. Research also suggests that technological experiences need to occur early in the students' academic career. If, in the first year of college, students opt not to continue in SMET fields, it becomes increasingly difficult to return and graduate with degrees in those fields (Allen, "Supporting Female Undergraduate Science and Engineering Majors with a Residential Program," Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 265-78;
16. Tobias, They're Not Dumb, They're Different.
17. "Women and minorities, the fastest growing segments of the workforce, are underrepresented in technical occupations. White males make up 42 percent of the workforce but 68 percent of the S & E workforce. By contrast, white women make up 35 percent of the workforce but only 15 percent of the S & E workforce, and Hispanics and blacks make up 20 percent of the workforce but only 3 percent of the S & E workforce. Efforts to boost participation by these groups in the S & E workforce are the single greatest opportunity to expand the nation's pool of technical talent." Deborah van Opstal, "The Skills Imperative: Talent and U.S. Competitiveness," Issues in Science and Technology 18, no. 1 (2001): 51-58.
18. For example, the 1991 AAUW report, Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, followed the same tenor of
19. A Nation At Risk (the educational document issued in 1983 under the Reagan administration).
20. American Association of University Women, Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America: Executive Summary (Washington, DC: American Association of University Women, 1991);
21. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html. (accessed November 16, 2004).
22. A clear question in the AAUW report is that since the jobs of the future require math and science, where will our nation be if girls, 50 percent of the workforce, cannot do math? This is also a theme in the 2000 report of the Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology Development, Land of Plenty: Diversity as America's Competitive Edge in Science, Engineering and Technology.
23. Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology Development, Land of Plenty: Diversity as America's Competitive Edge in Science, Engineering and Technology, 2000, http://www.nsf.gov/od/cawmset/report.htm (accessed November 16, 2004). Neither document focuses enough on how the epistemological, disciplinary, and professional boundaries and practices of SMET discriminate against people of color or white women and girls.
24. Although cyberfeminist literature gave us important tools to conceptualize this project, this body of scholarship could not provide much assistance with writing grant proposals or coping with the day-to-day realities of the grant, technology, and women's lives. See Dale Spender, Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (North Melbourne, AUS: Spinifex Press, 1995);
25. Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995);
26. Donna I. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991);
27. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan© Meets_OncoMouse;ot: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997)
28. Transnational feminist scholarship clearly illustrates that the material lives of poor women of color who assemble personal computers are not progressively affected by technology. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Women Workers and Capitalistic Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity," in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997).
29. Margaret A. Eisenhart and Elizabeth Finkel, with Linda Behm, Nancy Lawrence, and Karen Tonso, Women's Science: Learning and Succeeding From The Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
30. The Racial Privacy Initiative would prohibit collecting any "racial" data by public institutions (with a few exemptions) under the guise of "privacy." Of course unstated in this initiative is that this data often illuminates the "undisputed racial and ethnic disparities in every realm of American life," as Williams writes. Who does the "noncollection" of this data benefit? Patricia J. Williams, "Racial Privacy." Nation (June 17, 2002), http://www.thenation.com/ doc.mhtml?i=20020617&s=williams (accessed November 16, 2004).
31. It would have been useful to use the term people of color and to name why this was important in a footnote. We wanted to get the grant and not have our proposal seem condescending, interpreted as a lesson to the reader, or (most problematically) dismissed as irrelevant.
32. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991).
33. Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy," Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (1989): 297-324.
34. AAUW, Separated by Sex, 1998, 10.
35. James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
36. Judith Butler, "Performativity's Social Magic," in The Social and Political Body, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 29-47;
37. Alice Walker, "Becoming What We're Called," in Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 187-190. This may seem trivial, but language makes certain political positions possible and others impossible.
38. Patti Lather, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1991), xix. We rendered our most useful tools, our allegiances, and ourselves invisible.
39. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, eds., Race, Identity and Representation in Education (New York: Routledge, 1993).
40. Laurie Fuller and Erica Meiners, Empowering Women for Life-Long Success through Computer Expertise, FIPSE Programs, Congressional Priorities Projects: Grant P116D990377, 1999-2003, http://www.fipse.aed.org/grantshow.cfm? grantNumber=P116D990377 (accessed November 16, 2004).
41. Although wary of the push in postsecondary contexts to produce more technology-savvy students, we know many students attend college to learn skills and to attain "good" jobs. Our brochure appealed to those aspirations.
42. From interviews, it is clear that these women (and their family and friends) were troubled by the idea that they were doing something unnatural by taking a single-sex class. The students had to convince their friends and family that a women-only environment was "okay," because it was about becoming better prepared for the job market. The conception of the all-women environment as "unnatural" or "not normal" "not regular" arose in the interviews, an example of the ways interlocking forms of oppression manifest. There was a gap between "our" (lesbian, feminist, academic) understandings of the utility of a single-sex environment and how we could meaningfully translate this to students in our context. Misogyny and more centrally homophobia function as discrete but powerful barriers. Suzanne Pharr, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, Expanded edition (Berkeley, CA: Chardon Press. 1997).
43. The general open-access student computer labs on campus are not staffed with assistants to help students learn. If staff members are not busy or required to stay at a central desk they may assist students in a dire emergency, but their job is not to teach.
44. At the end of 2003, the institution absorbed the lab. The lab continues to exist but is funded by the university, not through an external grant. We retain the ability to hire the assistants and to oversee the lab, but the name will change to be more inclusive; it will be the Empowering Students Computer Lab.
45. By the end of year three, we had at least twenty faculty members who regularly directed students to seek assistance at our lab (data generated by referral information. and an online survey filled out when entering the lab).
46. Names have been changed to protect the confidentiality of the women.
47. We argued that those working in technology merited higher wages because of market competition.
48. Rose, interview, 2002.
49. The proximity of the lab to the women's studies office perhaps provided a sense of safety and legitimacy to these projects.
50. Marg, interview, 2002.
51. Lilly, interview, 2002.
52. William F. Hanks, foreword, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15.
53. The importance of informal educational sites in the acquisition of technological skills and expertise is supported by Mitchel Resnick, Natalie Rusk and Stina Cooke, founders of "computer clubhouses," community spaces set up to involve youth in technology (at present there are fifty sites funded by INTEL). Mitchel Resnick, Natalie Rusk and Stina Cooke, "The Computer Clubhouse: Technological Fluency in the Inner City," in High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology, ed. Donald A. Schön, Bish Sanyal, and William J. Mitchell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998): 266-86.
54. In a New York Times article Resnick argues that "access [to computers and technology] is not enough, access is just a starting point" in closing the digital divide and that fluency with technology is what is needed.
55. Michel Marriott, "Not Just Closing a Divide, but Leaping It," New York Times, July 18, 2002, late ed., sect. G.
56. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.
57. Ruth Gilmore, writing against the mass incarceration movement, also argues against static notions of power and resistance: "One works with what is at hand; the problem is not the 'master's tools' but the effective control of those 'tools.'"
58. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography," Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 23.