UNCORRECTED PROOF ARTICLE IN PRESS 1 ‘‘GIRLTALK’’: GENDER, EQUITY, AND 2 IDENTITY DISCOURSES IN A SCHOOL-BASED 3 COMPUTER CULTURE 4 Jennifer Jenson a , Suzanne de Castell b AND Mary Bryson c 5 a Pedagogy and Technology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M3J-1P3 6 b Simon Fraser University, Canada 7 c University of British Columbia, Canada 8 9 Synopsis — This article describes how a feminist intervention project in Canada focused on girls’ more 10 equitable access to and use of computers created significant opportunities for girls to develop and 11 experience new identities as technology ‘experts’ within their school. In addition to a significant increase 12 in participants’ own technological expertise, there was a marked shift in the ways in which they talked 13 about and negotiated their own gender identities with teachers and other students. Most significantly, the 14 participants in the project became increasingly vocal about what they saw as inequitable practices in the 15 daily operation of the school as well as those they were subject to by their teachers. This created, within 16 the otherwise resilient macro-culture of the school, a more supportive climate for the advancement of 17 gender equity well beyond the confines of its computer labs. We suggest that while equity-oriented 18 school-level change is notoriously difficult to sustain, its most enduring impact might rather be 19 participants’ initiation into a discourse to which they had not previously experienced school-sanctioned 20 access: a discourse in which to give voice to gender-specific inequities too long quieted by complacent 21 discourses of ‘‘equality for all.’’ D 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 22 23 24 25 INTRODUCTION: INCULPATORY 26 SUGGESTIONS 27 For more than two decades, researchers have docu- 28 mented consistent differences in computer use by 29 males and females (AAUW, 1998, 1999; Brosnan 30 1999; Collis, Kass, & Kieren, 1989; Dugdale, DeKo- 31 ven, & Ju, 1998; Littleton & Bannert, 1999; Littleton 32 & Hoyles, 2002; Light, 1997; Siann, Macleod, Glis- 33 sov, & Durndell, 1990; Sutton, 1991; Taylor & 34 Mounfield, 1994), and while administrators, teachers, 35 parents, students, and university-based researchers 36 alike have stressed the importance of the sciences 37 and information technologies for the educational and 38 vocational futures of all students, neither the number 39 of girls enrolling in these subjects, nor the number of 40 women who go on to work in them, has noticeably 41 increased (AAUW, 1998, 1999). If there is, in fact, 42 any increase to be noticed, it is in the opposite 48 direction, as girls’ and women’s participation in these 49 fields appears to be diminishing (Kramarae, 2001; 50 Stabiner, 2003). 51 While it has been argued that technologies are 52 gendered (Cockburn, 1992) as a result of the context 53 or culture of their production, they also embody 54 particular assumptions about social relations. Writers 55 such as Bryson and de Castell (1996), Cockburn 56 (1992), and Wajcman (1991) outline ways in which 57 women have not been alienated from technologies. 58 Instead, they have sought to challenge what counts as 59 ‘‘technology’’ and have pointed out that often, ‘‘tech- 60 nologies’’ are defined so as to exclude the technolo- 61 gies that women use such as cooking and household 62 appliances or to ‘‘forget’’ women’s contributions to 63 technological innovation (for example, Ada Love- 64 lace’s construction of the ‘‘Analytical Engine’’) or 65 both. 1 66 In particular, these writers explore how history 67 and culture have shaped and continue to shape con- 68 nections between masculinity and technology. For 69 Wajcman, women’s alienation from technology 70 resulted from a gendered division of labor with the 71 movement of manufacturing from private homes into 72 factories. This movement, according to Wajcman doi 10.1016/j.wsif.2003.09.010 This work was made possible through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and through the courage, effort, and commitment of the teachers and students at ‘‘Brookwood,’’ all to whom we are indebted. WSIF-00994; No of Pages 13 Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. xx, No. 1, pp. xxx–xxx, 2003 Copyright D 2003 Elsevier Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0277-5395/$ – see front matter 1