The first wave: the computer as indeterminate object

The first significant wave of optimism concerning the computer's potential for changing gender relations was fuelled by the assumption that the machine itself was an object of indeterminate gender identity. By the late 1970s, women's progress and participation in the more traditional scientific and technical fields, such as physics and engineering, was recognised as being increasingly problematic, with many feminist commentators concluding that these areas had developed an unshakeably masculine bias. A consensus emerged which held that science and technology – the knowledge which constituted their epistemological fields, the people who inhabited the fields, the artefacts they produced and the cultures that they engendered – had become, in a whole variety of ways, more determined by, and more reflective of, the interests of men than those of women. Although clearly rooted in the domains of both science and technology, the advent of the computer challenged this perspective. It was considered by many to be a relatively novel type of artefact, a machine which was the subject of its own newly created disciplinary field: “Computer Science” (Poster 1990: 147). The fact that it was not quite subsumed within either of its parent realms led commentators to argue that the computer was also somewhat ambiguously positioned in relation to their identity as quintessentially masculine.