Introduction

Shortly before my arrival at the unit, an incident had taken place during a training course that a male and a female technical worker, of equal experience and formal standing, had attended together. By the time the research started the story of the episode was on course for legendary status, and was gleefully related by several of the unit's members. In the words of one: ‘I guess what happened is that he kept checking that she was following the instructions, and I guess he must have done it once too often, just once too often, because she picked up the computer and threw it at him’ (Male, KBS, 32: 80%).

Depending on the narrator, this event was characterised either as the culminating moment of an unfortunate conflict of personalities which had little, if anything, to do with the gender of those concerned, or as a defining vignette which crystallised perfectly the ineffable and insurmountable differences between the position of men and women in computing cultures; differences which could only be explained with reference to a wider system of inequitable gender relations.