Many women and women's organizations are therefore eager to access and appropriate this technology. Nonetheless... obstacles include: less access to resources (financial and technological), reduced access to training and technical assistance or non-gender sensitive methodologies, social and cultural barriers for women and girls to access technology, educational short-comings, misconceptions about technology and its use, language barriers, etc.

This strikes me as a very important statement to make. If true, there's some deep cultural trends that I don't understand and which, I hazard, no one understands.

What is it about technology that is so inequitable? Isn't it liberating individuals and diversifying discourse, now that anyone can publish, for $5/mo. and the price of an HTML handbook? There's more to say about this topic, which the general reader is hereby spared, unless s/he choses to read on. TBD: link to the extended entry.

Many women and women's organizations are therefore eager to access and appropriate this technology. Nonetheless... obstacles include: less access to resources (financial and technological), reduced access to training and technical assistance or non-gender sensitive methodologies, social and cultural barriers for women and girls to access technology, educational short-comings, misconceptions about technology and its use, language barriers, etc.

This strikes me as a very important statement to make. If true, there's some deep cultural trends that I don't understand and which, I hazard, no one understands.

What is it about technology that is so inequitable? Isn't it liberating individuals and diversifying discourse, now that anyone can publish, for $5/mo. and the price of an HTML handbook?

The first of the causes above—access to financial resources—is evident but not specific to technology. Another example, gender-sensitivity in technical training, could be an impediment, but no more so than, say, gender-sensitivity in financial training or for that matter in culinary training.

The quote cites "social and cultural barriers" to the access itself (as opposed to the training) and it's easy to imagine what some of those might be. There are certainly cultural barriers between the male-dominated old-guard of computer geeks (who traditionally know "how to program the VCR," as it were). But hasn't that culture profoundly changed over the last ten years? Once everyone started plugging in, it seems the hard-geek culture lost control of the playing field. Open standards and increasing interest in usable human interfaces have made computers less "technical" and more uniform. Perhaps there are lingering cultural differences that discourage girls and women from approaching computers, but the nature of this barrier mystifies me. An ethnography of geek culture might be apropos.

A friend of mine recently noted that all the computers in the world have been designed by men.

The question, then, is: How would computers be different if they had all been designed by women?

Women's and citizens' groups do not have a voice in the negotiations which will influence national and international legislation and therefore their access to technological and information resources.

Needless to say, women deserve equal representation in legislative bodies and, for that matter, design committees. But I wonder whether and how the structures of information and of computation might be gendered—would journalling file systems have appeared sooner with women at the helm? On the other hand, would women have no use for them? Would compression algorithms be more efficient, or simpler to operate? Could it be that functional programming is more fluid and thus more feminine than the blunt-edged broadsword of the procedural methodology? Would relational databases be obviated in favor of the object-oriented variety? Are women or men more fond of emacs, and which group prefers vi?

In pursuit of these answers, suppose we unburden the question a bit, and unleash imaginative speculation upon it. I'm not clever or experienced enough (as a woman) to answer this question, but perhaps some novelist, playwright, or poet is—imagine that the United Nations takes a special budget and arranges for 2000 women to live on an island for a period of, say, five, ten years, plentiful resources, and with goal of devising one very significant scientific result, unknown to the rest of the world, and without revealing it. How would they proceed, organize themselves? What might they discover?