By Dr. Justine Cassell and Dr. Valerie Barr
Dr. Justine Cassell is a former associate professor at MIT’s Media Laboratory. She is an expert in verbal and non-verbal aspects of human communication and has brought that knowledge to designing computer systems. Dr. Cassell’s design theories pay particular attention to populations whose voices have not been heard in mainstream Western culture, such as girls and children in developing nations. Dr Valerie Barr is an associate professor of computer science at Hofstra University. She is an expert in software testing applied to intelligent systems. Dr. Barr is currently assembling a web-based resource to support the development of gender and technology courses. Here Justine and Valerie talk about how the work of the Anita Borg Institute.s work helps to change the relationship between women and technology.
We know that the relationship between women and technology must change, for the sake of women, and for the sake of technology. Information technology (IT) has reflected the limitations of the group that builds it (largely first-world men). Bringing women into IT will change the kind of technological design that gets done, and will increase the number of women in a high-paying field that has traditionally been off-limits to them.
But, given that IT and the fields that design and implement IT are still seen as largely the dominion of men, what’s the best way to make that change happen? Even once we are aware that there’s a problem, the path to change is not straightforward. Today we’re in a place where IT professionals may realize that “women need to be taken into account.” But it’s still often a case of men designing technology “for women” or “for girls” according to their own beliefs and stereotypes of what they think women and girls want.
For example, for a long time girls were not taken into account by designers of computer games, who were, for the most part, young men developing games based on their own tastes and cultural assumptions, which they considered “normal.” The resulting games featured girls in the role of damsel in distress but not in the role of kick-butt rescuer. Girls were not drawn to these games and ended up playing fewer computer games than did boys.
Why was this a problem? One primary reason: The National Science Foundation has predicted that by 2010 one in four jobs in America will require computational literacy, and the higher paying the job, the more technical fluency will be required. Computer games constitute the most frequent use of computers for children aged 2 to 18 years, and these games bootstrap computer literacy. So if girls were playing fewer computer games, they might also be getting less technical fluency than boys. Boys, then, were streamlined (quite unintentionally) into the higher-paid jobs that require this fluency, and girls weren’t.
About five years ago, when fewer than 25 percent of game purchasers were girls, some feminist entrepreneurs and some established gaming companies saw both an under-exploited market and a way to correct a problem, and they began to build computer games for girls. Barbie Fashion Designer, which allows players to design clothes for a virtual Barbie doll, sold a half-million copies in its first two months on the market, more than any other children’s software title in history.
Another game from the same era was called Let’s Talk About Me. Players can read their horoscope, answer quizzes about romance, watch video interviews with potential role models who talk about how they mix family and work, and test out clothing mixes and matches. The software also has a space for the girl to keep a diary. Let’s Talk about Me is a good example of the software put out during this initial phase of the “girls game movement” in that it was designed for “the girl,” demonstrating a rather one-dimensional and stereotypical view of girlhood and girls’ interests. Of course, software designers defend this view. “Barbie may not be your favorite role model,” they say, “but this is what girls want.”
However, desires are manufactured by the toy industry itself long before researchers get a chance to talk with girls and find out what they really want from technology. The designers’ statement may be true for many girls, but it’s not true for all girls (nor is it untrue of all boys). And it certainly doesn’t accurately depict “girlness” and “boyness,” which are dependent on context and vary by historical period and culture.
One response to “girl technology” of this sort is the philosophy of underdetermined design, allowing users to create or perform themselves through using technology. Underdetermined design sees users, adults or children, as an essential part of the design team. But it also sees the very use of technology as being a kind of design of that technology, as users appropriate the technology to fit their needs and use technology to re-envision whom they might become. In this way, underdetermined design brings users into the design phase of new technology and keeps them involved through implementation and use of the system itself.
This kind of design philosophy has two goals: 1) to interest women in technology by bringing them in at every stage of the design and implementation process, and 2) to encourage women to have a different view of what their lives can be like, to imagine how technology can help bring that about, and to not be satisfied with having technology better support the lives they already have.
Getting your hands dirty with technology is key to underdetermined design, and that’s what ABI is advocating and practicing. In the Innovation Workshops that it stages annually at its Virtual Development Center campus sites, ABI invites women from all sectors-old women, elementary- and middle-school-aged girls, rural and urban residents, and others-to engage in brainstorming new information technologies that could be useful to themselves, their families, and their communities. Women studying engineering and computer science then research the best ideas and later design and prototype the products, continuing to involve the workshop participants throughout the process.
ABI’s work makes central women who have been underrepresented in the IT design process. However, rather than ghettoizing women as a group that has special needs, and therefore needs special technological devices, we see this as a step toward making diversity of all kinds a central part of the IT design process. There is a dialectical relationship between who works in the industry and who has input, and as the IT industry increasingly reflects the full diversity of the user population, the products developed will also more fully reflect the needs of a diverse user population as well.