Gender and Technology in the Making

What relationship exists between gender and technology? Does technology contribute to the disadvantage of women? In this innovative, ground-breaking volume, the authors take as an example the microwave oven, a recent innovation in domestic technology that neatly encapsulates the technology/gender relationship. In the microwave, argue the authors, "masculine" engineering encounters an age-old "women's" technology-cooking. Cockburn and Ormrod show how the microwave begins as a state-of-the-art "masculine" technology, is translated in the retail trade into a "family" commodity (one of a range of domestic goods), and eventually settles into the kitchen alongside other humble "feminine" appliances. Demonstrating how technology relations work to the disadvantage of women, the authors build theory out of meticulous observation of lived relations--both comic and painful--between real men and women and the machines they make and sell, buy and use.