Table Of ContentGender, Ethics and Information Technology
Also by Alison Adam
ARTIFICIAL KNOWING: Gender and the Thinking Machine
VIRTUAL GENDER: Technology, Consumption and Identity
WOMEN IN COMPUTING
Gender, Ethics and
Information Technology
Alison Adam
© Alison Adam 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005978-1-349-51209-6
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Adam,Alison.
Gender,ethics and information technology / Alison Adam.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Gender and Information and Communications
Technologies – It’s not for Girls! 1
2 Feminist Political and Legal Theory: The Public/Private
Dichotomy 17
3 Feminist Ethics: Ethics in a Different Voice 37
4 The Rise of Computer Ethics: From Professionalism
to Legislative Failures 56
5 Gender and Computer Ethics – Contemporary Approaches
and Contemporary Problems 78
6 Internet Dating, Cyberstalking and Internet
Pornography: Gender and the Gaze 102
7 Hacking into Hacking: Gender and the
Hacker Phenomenon 128
8 Someone to Watch Over Me – Gender, Technologies,
Privacy and Surveillance 147
9 Epilogue: Feminist Cyberethics? 171
Bibliography 177
Index 188
v
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many colleagues and friends who have supported
me throughout the writing of this book, particularly colleagues from the
ISOS research group at the University of Salford, and especially Ben
Light, Elaine Ferneley, Frances Bell, Helen Richardson, Debra Howcroft
and Nathalie Audren for keeping me cheerful. I am indebted to the
‘invisible college’ of international gender and technology researchers
and the computer ethics community, especially those involved in CEPE
conferences where I have presented some of the ideas from this book.
Particular thanks are due to Paul Spedding, Marja Vehviläinen and the
two anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting on drafts of this
book. Naturally, any errors and omissions are entirely down to me.
Without the love and support of my family these projects are just not
possible. Thank you to Craig, Nicol and Sibyl for once more tolerating
the mad woman in the attic.
Earlier versions of some of the ideas in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 appeared in
Adam (2001a, 2001b, 2002) and in Adam and Ofori-Amanfo (2000). An
earlier version of Chapter 7 was presented at the CEPE 2003 conference.
vi
1
Gender and Information
and Communications
Technologies – It’s not for Girls!
Introduction: setting the scene
This book is about the intersection of two areas; first, gender and
information and communications technologies (ICTs) and second, com-
puter ethics. It is born from my long-standing interest in gender and
computer technologies, a more recent research and teaching interest in
the discipline which is often known as ‘computer ethics’ and my con-
cern that research on computer ethics problems should be brought to a
wider audience beyond the academy and information technology (IT)
profession, as so many of the issues involved have a substantial bearing
on aspects of our everyday lives, lived with ICTs.
The rationale for this book derives from my claim that many ethics
topics relating to information technologies, such as hacking, software
and electronic funds crime, online harassment and cyberstalking,
Internet pornography, computer-mediated communications, privacy
and online community and democracy, have a gender dimension
which, to date, has rarely been explored, and, where it has been tackled,
has generally not been subject to thorough theoretical analysis. Indeed
a web search of any news website (such as the BBC) for legal and ethi-
cal violations on the Internet throws up items such as sales of Internet
twins, hackers, Internet sales of vital organs, Internet paedophiles, and
so on. I argue that these are all concerns that cry out for extended
gender analyses against the backcloth of appropriate feminist theory.
I believe that there are (at least) four major reasons why such analy-
ses are not yet forthcoming. First, computer ethics, the academic disci-
pline that has formed round legal and ethical concerns over behaviour
1
A. Adam, Gender, Ethics and Information Technology
© Alison Adam 2005
2 Gender, Ethics and Information Technology
on the Internet, tends to be relatively traditional in theoretical terms.
This is described in Chapter 4. Second, on the other hand, writers from
within the rapidly growing domain of feminist ethics, and related areas,
rarely explore computer ethics issues. Third, academic science and tech-
nology studies have spent the last three decades working hard to achieve
epistemological neutrality. Effectively their project involves treating
‘true’ and ‘false’ knowledge in the same way in terms of explaining how
that knowledge came about. Epistemological neutrality has tended to
extend to ethical neutrality, so research in science and technology stud-
ies of the last two or more decades often appears to be avoiding politi-
cal comment. Only recently have we seen a ‘turn to the ethical’ with
renewed interest not only in biomedical issues, as in cloning and genet-
ically modified (GM) foods, but also computer and engineering related
concerns such as systems failures and Internet security. Finally, although
research on gender and technology thrives, mainstream feminism tends
to shy away from dealing with technology and science. The latter point
offers a further reason as to why the well-established literatures of fem-
inist ethics, legal studies and politics do not permeate into studies of
science and technology as much as they should do.
Taken together, all these elements suggest that there are a number of
feminist, and other, disciplines dealing with potentially related subject
matter, but which currently tend to pull in different directions. These
would benefit from a more integrated approach in terms of their treat-
ments of ethical issues in cyberspace. Nevertheless, the situation I char-
acterize should not necessarily be seen as a ‘problem’ consisting of
entirely negative aspects. Instead, such tensions offer all sorts of excit-
ing possibilities for creating interesting synergies and novel directions.
Indeed a gendered analysis of ethical issues involved in ICTs might be
one way of bringing together the various disciplines which I describe
above and which have hitherto developed largely separately. Ideally,
wemay hope to foster a two-way transfer of ideas from feminist ethicsto
computer ethics and vice versa. Importantly we need a transfer of ideas
out from both areas to reach the forum of wider public debate.
I suspect that many people working in the field of computing doubt
that gender issues and feminist analyses have much to do with their
subject, however, once one’s consciousness is raised, questions of gender
can be seen everywhere in computing. When I was a student in the 1970s
I had not developed much of a political consciousness, but this soon
changed when I entered the world of work in the data processing depart-
ment of a large chemical company. It was 1977 and a far cry from the
world of today’s ICTs. Large mainframe computers, batch processing and
It’s not for Girls! 3
decks of cards were the norm. Indeed, I once dropped a deck of cards and,
like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, I just couldnot get the
deck back together again, at least not in its original order.
Perhaps I should have taken more notice of the burgeoning women’s
movement developing in the mid-1970s but I did not. However, it was
commonplace remarks like the following, which turned me into a fem-
inist almost, overnight. One day, whilst I was working at a computer
screen, two male colleagues stood a short distance away, but well within
my earshot, discussing who would be a suitable candidate for a new, and
fairly senior post, which was being created in the data processing depart-
ment. They identified a male colleague, in his forties, who was not
generally noted for being particularly able or effective. However, he had
a certain gravitas, which often attaches to middle-aged men in the
workplace. Let us call him Fred Smith. ‘For this new post we need some-
one like Fred Smith. It’s not for little girls.’ ‘No’, agreed his colleague,
pointedly, ‘it’s not for little girls’.
This exchange demonstrates a number of interesting things. First, there
is the whole way that language is used to keep women junior and the
pejorative way that the term ‘girl’ is used. Think of ‘big girl’s blouses’ and
‘throwing like a girl’. My teenage son tells me that the term ‘girl’ can be
used as an insult to both females and males. In the UK a chocolate bar,
apparently aimed at the truck-driving market has as its advertising slogan
‘It’s not for girls.’ This is accompanied by a logo of a figure of a woman in
a skirt (the kind of symbol one often sees on the doors of public toilets)
holding a handbag. This figure is enclosed in a roundel with a diagonal
red stripe on top thus making it akin to a ‘no entry’ traffic sign and
underlining the chocolate bar’s relationship with the haulage industry.
My erstwhile colleagues might as well have attached this logo to the
office door of this new post. This serves to reinforce the way that women
often feel marginalized, excluded and belittled in working life. It could
be argued that my ‘little girls’ experience was part of the cut and thrust
of corporate industry of a bygone era. I hope that remarks such as the
one I report are no longer made. I also believe that I could just as well
have overheard the same remark in the marketing or finance depart-
ment as the data processing department so it is not peculiar to the IT
industry. Nevertheless, my experiences of working in the computing
industry and teaching and researching computing in universities has
convinced me of a strong and complex link between gender and
computing technologies.
A few definitions might be useful at this stage. I use the terms IT, ICT
and computing more or less interchangeably in this work. Definitions
