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April 22, 2004
How do we avoid stereotyping gender?
I’m honoured to be asked to contribute to the discussion on Misbehaving.net, and to be honest, it’s a bit scary to post this first post. But here we go...
I want to bring up a question that I work with everyday in my research on gender and computers: how do we avoid stereotyping gender? I think this question is important in a lot of different contexts, and it’s definitely present in many of the posts and comments here on Misbehaving.net – like the comments to 'An invitation'.
I think most of us don’t really believe that all women are alike and all men are alike. But still it’s easy to use gender as such stereotypical categories.
Picking from the Norwegian press last week, we could read that a Norwegian travel agency found that 70% of the online users were women, and concluded that this information meant something for the design of their web site, because:
"We know that women are most interested in practical and functional pages - while men are more interested in gadgets and pop-ups."
Do we really know that? From where do we know that men want gadgets and pop-ups when they enter an online service? And if it’s true, what does a statement like this do with gender?
In this case, women are actually expected to be interested in the technology, but that is not always the case. For instance in IBM’s new campaign to sell more laptops to women: they want to sell colourful laptops to women, based on an assumption that IBM’s computers mostly have been bought by “business men”, because they have a black exterior. I’m not sure how to read this, but haven’t all laptops been either black or silver/grey? And what does this say about their view on women? Women don’t really care for the computer itself, only for it’s colourful exterior?
Another article writes about a new show about computer games in the Norwegian Broadcasting. The new host for this program is a hostess - a young girl who is called 'the new geek' in this TV channel. She got the job because she was best in explaining what a Playstation is to old ladies. This was one of the tests in the job interview, and it seems they wanted a girl and not a boy to do this job. In the news it is also emphasized that she cannot be compared to male geeks. She does not use 'that much time' playing games, she says. And her boss stresses that she is 'a player(ess)', but not as good as the 'extreme' players.
Reading between the lines, it seems like they want a 'communicative geek' - 'communication' apparently more important than 'geek' though - and that this wish was translated into ‘a girl’. I think it is fine that they have chosen a girl. However, the underlying assumption seems to be similar to one of the arguments we have seen in some of the biggest campaigns to motivate women to start on computer education. The messages in these campaigns have been something like:
- computing is not really about technology, but rather about communication and other non-tech. things,
- women have better communication skills than men.
And the underlying more-or-less explicit stated assumption:
- men's relation to computers is perhaps filled with technological knowledge, but is that really useful in real life?
Of course, slogans like these have not only been welcomed:
- not by female students who liked computers for the sake of computers,
- not by male employees and students, who was offended by the description of men,
- not by newly recruited students who really believed that computing was mostly about communication and other non-technological things,
- and not by researchers, warning against this use of gender as a dichotomy, making it difficult not to essentialise gender.
And this is one of the difficult questions I constantly work with in my own research - how do we deal with gender without (re)producing two exclusive and hierarchical categories?
I don’t have the answer, and I don’t even think that there is only one right answer. But I’d like to hear you opinion on this question.
In particular, I think this question is interesting in tech. design – how do we use knowledge about gender in the design of technology - without trying to sell to stereotypes?
Posted by Hilde Corneliussen at 10:02 AM | Permalink
Comments
Gender is perhaps the most obvious characteristic we stereotype, but it happens in many other contexts too. I think it comes from our desire to average, and, particularly in designing and marketing products, trying to simplify people into averages (or stereotypes) to avoid having to deal with all the messy complexities of individuals.
I think here of Volvo's new concept car -- designed by a team of women -- which has impractical gull-wing doors (ever tried using those in a crowded parking lot, or one with low ceilings?). Maybe there are individuals who will put up with that inconvenience for its stylishness and easy access to the interior, but, on average, real car drivers (whether men or women) would find it inconvenient. That wasn't a "womanly" design decision, but a "designy" one, from a small design team that happened to be made up of women -- sacrificing one kind of functionality for appearance and another kind of functionality, which is a mistake all-male or mixed-gender design teams also do. I wish it hasn't been identified as something women would collectively want. But those who might buy this kind of car might.
As the father of two young daughters, I'm conflicted on this issue. It's certainly seems that, on average, men and women want and like different things. But where does that leave the men who like "womanly" things and the women who like "manly" things? Or, more importantly, those who fit the stereotype in some aspects of our lives but not in others? How do we work with the averages without letting them blind us to those parts of our lives that don't fit them?
Posted by: Derek at Apr 22, 2004 12:43:29 PM
As a man I'm certainly a fan of pop-ups. I can't get enough. I want them all, and I want them now. It still boggles me why I use Mozilla FireFox with the block pop-up function on. Am I an abnormal male? Can somebody here help me?
Posted by: Tore at Apr 22, 2004 5:37:55 PM
Stereotyping Gender is a way of life. There is nothing bad about the typification since we see it a lot in our society!
Posted by: amanda at Apr 23, 2004 4:30:19 AM
I am not sure this is the right question to ask, because it seems that we all have a strong tendency to use grouping or stereotyping to help us in our daily lives. We use this both to try to identify others, but also to find a place for ourselves. To work against that is counter-productive.
I think a better question is how do we create *better* stereotypes and try to get out of the “stereotyping as marketing” model, where individuals are pegged based on their age, gender, address, race, family status, education and so on. An example of this is this article http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/04/12/single_women/index_np.html which talks about the Sex and the City voter – or how to get single women to vote for middle-aged white men.
In the case of the black laptop, I think the assumptions are wrong. First, -design sells. No matter what the product is – if it looks good, more people are going to want it. Second: Regarding the (ugly) IBM laptop – You state that businessmen like this laptop because it looks professional – I don’t think that is true, because in most cases business men don’t buy their own laptops. The companies they work for buys them for them.
A friend of mine is an I.T. manager for a big corporation. They have been going through the decision process of selecting what laptops to buy for all layers of management for the next 2-3 years. The decision? Buy IBM. Why? Because all the IBM laptops look the same, regardless of the specs, and thus nobody is going to know who has the best laptop. Thus IT gets away with giving people the laptops they *need*, not the laptops they *want*.
So basically IBM sold a thousand laptops because their laptops are ugly and prevent pissing contexts within corporations. When I have been meeting with individuals within the corporations, they envy me my old but cool Vaio. It’s purple and small and if they want one, they will have to buy it with their own money.
Who wants to go tell IBM that they should really spend some dollars on design? (Yes I saw the article on the colorful laptop, but according to the picture, they now have an ugly *red* laptop).
As for the rest of the stereotypes, I agree with you on those, but I think that in some cases, we as women in tech are a bit to blame for those. I think that in our eagerness to be visible, we have emphasized (or been used to represent) those parts of our jobs that are less technical, partly to get the attention of girls that are selecting a field to get into – but also because somebody had to do it, in order to enriching the field. I know I have done this, in presentations and articles I have done to present the field. Even if I have tried not to address women specifically I have certainly made sure to make them feel included and I hope that the fact that I am a woman is not lost on anybody! Based on this, it is probably easy to draw the conclusion that I as a woman is interested in the “softer” areas of the tech field, as the stereotypes you discussed; while in fact I am a rather hard-core technical person.
Yet I am a firm believer in visibility and rolemodels - I think they are the only way to replace the stereotypes we don't like with stereotypes that we like.
Posted by: helga at Apr 23, 2004 6:46:45 PM
Designing for one gender should be the same as designing for the other. If you can come up with something that the vast majority of women would not like, I'd wager that it wasn't a good idea in the first place. On the other hand, something that women like should also be viewed favorably by men.
Volvo's car for women had some very good design ideas in it that would do well in a more normal car. Removable seat cushions are much easier to wash, and my car is beginning to need one. Being able to choose the colors to suit your mood or style is icing on the cake. Storage space is ample, and everyone likes that.
On the other hand, assuming that no woman will ever want to get to the engine of the car is a bit nutty. It doesn't take much training to diagnose and replace a blown fuse, and the part costs maybe $1.00. It also makes the assumption that no woman wants to check her oil levels and the proper amount of various fluids. Assuming that only guys can or want to deal with the basic maintenance of their cars is patronising.
The big stereotype that I see is that women don't really care about the internals of what they work with, and men want it on display. Computers are one example, and as I mentioned earlier, so are cars. There's also this stereotype that I see alot in video games, which is what I program. Women want pink stuff and men want things that go boom. I really hope that the industry moves past that, and soon.
Posted by: psetzer at Apr 28, 2004 4:06:05 AM
One of the huge difficulties you all face is that, by the time your consumers get to the age where they're buying your products, they've been "trained" to shop in the pink or blue sections of the world. This seems to have gotten much worse than when I was a kid (I'm 45), even as there are more opportunities for girls and women now than there were then (title IX, anyone?). I'd be interested in seeing how a non-gendered marketing scheme worked out. (and, in fact, I'd argue that Apple hasn't been particularly gendered in its marketing for its products.) The other thing that just occurred to me is that, even if women want a product (e.g., a computer) because of what it can do, they may not necessarily display that aspect the same way that some men might; some men get tetchy as it is if women display any technological knowledge, and it's easier sometimes to just let it be. But not always. (I'm thinking here of My Cousin Vinny, however, and it's making me gigle.)
Posted by: carla at Apr 28, 2004 1:18:34 PM
