Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1950s and 1960s, that they also constructed a gender identity. Masculinity
was just one of many resources that they drew on to distance their pro-
fession from its low-status origins in clerical data processing. The ques-
tion of “who made for a good programmer” increasingly involved in its
answer the qualifi er “male.” The stereotype of the antisocial program-
mer, wearing sandals and a beard, was not simply a product of the
pseudoscientifi c personality profi les used for recruitment in this period;
over time, it became a deliberate self-construction embraced by the com-
munity. Yesterday's “computer boys” are today's “IT guys.” The moniker
may have changed, but the gender (and status) connotations remain.
To suggest that a discipline has been made masculine, however, is not
to claim that all of its practitioners are male but rather that the ideals
of the discipline are seen as masculine ideals. It is entirely possible, for
example, to talk about science being gendered male without arguing that
there are no female scientists. To the degree that women succeed in
masculinized disciplines, however, it is by suppressing their femininity:
to act female in such contexts is to act “unprofessionally.”
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There is a
large literature on the ways in which women in such fi elds are forced to
accommodate themselves to the dominant gender dynamics of the disci-
pline. The masculinization of a profession erects barriers to female par-
ticipation, but it does not eliminate it altogether.
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From Crisis to Opportunity
The continued existence of a four-decades-long crisis in one of the largest
and fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy suggests an interesting
dichotomy: on the one hand, software is the technological success story
of the past half century; on the other hand, its reputation and identity
continue to be marked by perceptions of crisis and failure. What can we
make of these strange contradictions and the remarkable persistence of
a crisis mentality? More important, how can understanding this duality
contribute to advancing the art and science of software development?
There seem to be at least three crucial lessons to be learned from the
history of the software crisis:
The fi rst is a simple and obvious observation: just as software is about
more than just computer code, the software crisis is about more than
just software. Software is what links the powerful technology of digital
computing to larger human actions, agendas, and interactions. As such,
it cannot be isolated from its social, economic, and political context. User
dissatisfaction with software often has less to do with technical failure
