Research Seminar - October 15, 1999

Abstract

While architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier were redefining the spatial characteristics of the room through modernist design, Virginia Woolf asserted the need for a room of one's own. She desired a space in which to contemplate, live and work, free of the societal constraints that would smother women. Ada Byron a century earlier as a teenager had encountered such a space. Amid the intricate gears and systems of Charles Babbages' Difference engine she perceived a device that would enable people to soar further into the unexpected. For Ada and many after her the computer became a room, a sanctuary with algorithmic walls. These walls could protect a developing intellect yet they could also exclude.

In cyberspace the individual is excluded from space. Electronic rooms are culturally constructed. The myriad rooms that unfold across the expanse of the Internet are also gendered. Computers exhibit the cultural attributes attached to either sex. Why is this? What inequalities and opportunities exist? Who are the people who have transcended these artificial barriers?

This seminar will discuss aspects of gender in relation to computing. It will recognise that computers carry the cultural baggage of a society that is still struggling with issues of equality and access in relation to a person's sex. Despite this situation, the seminar will assert that computers offer a unique environment in which to shed some of the less useful aspects of the gendered cultural baggage. It will also argue that computers can provide windows of access to those who have felt most the inequity of a gendered culture - women.