Reading Outline 4/16/07: Lee, Shireen. The New Girls Network: Women, Technology, and Feminism

Description: Lee describes how technology has benefited women’s organizations by increasing communication. Prior to the internet age women’s activist groups rarely communicated with one another on a global scale so even if one group had knowledge that would help another group, the second group would have to figure it for themselves. With the Internet as an asset, knowledge can flow quickly and easily so a network of women activist groups is created. Lee also describes that there is very little, if any, gender awareness within the technology industry.

Analysis: Lee says that this lack of gender awareness comes from a lack of gender diversity within the industry. Since mostly men create technology, most technology is created with men in mind. So even though technology is helping women it could probably be even more helpful for women if women created it themselves.

Vision: Lee envisions a technological industry that is full of women. She wants women to be creating technology just as much as they are using it. Then technology will benefit women even more because it was created with women in mind.

Strategy: Lee says that more women need to be educated in engineering and computer science and that we need to find ways to get them into the workplace working on creating technology. Once this starts to happen we’ll be on our way to have a technology industry that has equal representation of men and women.