Alison Adam

Being an ‘it’ in IT: gendered identities in IT work

This paper reflects on aspects of gender and IT work. The core hypothesis is that, if technical skill and masculinity are fundamentally related, then women working in IT jobs who are, in effect, challenging masculine skills by gaining them themselves, must develop a number of strategies to cope with the challenge that they feel is being made to their own gender identities and those of the men with whom they work. One strategy is for women to distance themselves from IT work; a second strategy is for women to distance themselves from their identities as women. Our results are drawn from a set of semi-structured interviews. We adopt the approach of critical research that seeks to expose asymmetric power relations in the organization and to let silenced voices be heard. This is related to the literature on silence in organizations. Within the critical approach, we chose a feminist methodology that looks towards identifying practices that are problematic for women and that acknowledges our biases and interests as researchers. Additionally, we draw upon the theoretical constructs of the gender and technology literature to theorize the relationship between gender and technical skill and how this impacts conceptions of gender identity.

Computer ethics in a different voice

Abstract This paper argues that the potential of writing on computer ethics to contribute to a deeper understanding of inequalities surrounding the use of information and communications technologies is threatened by forms of technological determinism and liberalism. Such views are prevalent in professional and more popular literature, and even in policy documents, albeit expressed tacitly. Adopting this standpoint substantially reduces explanatory power in relation to certain computer ethics topics, especially equality and participation, particularly in relation to gender. Research on gender and information and communications technologies has analyzed inequalities between men and women both inside and outside the workplace, drawing heavily from feminist theory. The paper argues that feminist ethics, coupled with aspects of feminist legal and political theory, may offer a fruitful, novel direction for analyzing computer ethics problems, and certainly those that contain substantial differences, and therefore inequalities, in mens and womens experiences on-line. Furthermore, feminist ethics can offer a more collectivist approach toward computer ethics problems. Emerging themes in existing research on gender and computer ethics are discussed before exploring some of the outcomes of applying feminist theory to a problem of privacy in the extreme form of Internet-based harassment known as “cyberstalking”, where traditional liberal and determinist views have proved problematic.

Enabling or disabling technologies? A critical approach to web accessibility

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to analyse the continuing problem of web accessibility for disabled people as a critical information systems issue.Design/methodology/approach – The ways in which the web is used by disabled people, and problems that can arise, are described and related to the development of critical disability theory from older models of disability, including the medical and social models, noting that the social construction of disability model may tend to mask the embodied, lived experience of disability.Findings – The lack of interaction of the critical disability approach and dominant discourses of web accessibility and internet studies, particularly in relation to embodiment, is a major contributor to the continuance of an inaccessible Worldwide web.Research limitations/implications – The paper does not offer a comprehensive set of web accessibility issues, concentrating instead on the most common problems as exemplars.Practical implications – The paper raises awareness of web...

Gender and computer ethics

This paper reviews the relatively small body of work in computer ethics which looks at the question of whether gender makes any difference to ethical decisions. There are two strands of writing on gender and computer ethics. The first focuses on problems of womens access to computer technology; the second concentrates on whether there are differences between men and womens ethical decision making in relation to information and computing technologies (ICTs). I criticize the latter area, arguing that such studies survey student audiences, that they emphasize the result of an ethical decision over the process of arriving at the decision, that they are problematic in relation to research methodology and that they are undertheorized. Given that traditional ethical theories largely ignore gender, I offer a gender based ethics in terms of feminist ethics as the best place to look for theoretical substance. The paper concludes by considering how feminist ethics can be combined with empirical studies that emphasize observation and interviewing in order to move gender and computer ethics onward from statistical studies of mens and womens ethical decisions toward more substantially theorized studies of areas in computer ethics which have gender implications, such as privacy and power.

Virtue Ethics and Customer Relationship Management: Towards a More Holistic Approach for the Development of Best Practice

This paper focuses much-needed attention on the ethical nature of customer relationship management (CRM) strategies in organisations. The research uses an in-depth case study to reflect on the design, implementation and use of ‘best practice’ associated with CRM. We argue that conventional CRM philosophy is based on a fairly narrow construct that fails to consider ethical issues appropriately. We highlight why ethical considerations are important when organisations use CRM and how a more holistic approach incorporating some of Alasdair MacIntyres ideas on virtue ethics could be relevant.

On‐line leisure: Gender, and ICTs in the home

Abstract Research into office automation originally acted as a catalyst for research into gender perspectives on information technology. Whilst a fuller picture of womens use of ICTs is emerging, there has been little research on womens leisure use of ICTs, particularly within a domestic setting. Added to the way in which the leisure studies discipline has discovered gender as a variable, this is somewhat surprising. In this paper we argue that current debates on ‘virtual culture’ would be enriched by analysing the gender dimensions of the use of ICTs for leisure. In addressing personal agency we see women as active agents rather than passive victims of existing structures. The paper addresses negotiations around leisure and the use of technology in the home and how this illuminates the construction of gender identities. The ways in which work and leisure seep into one another are examined through a consideration of electronic mail and the World Wide Web. Although we conclude that womens leisure access...

Does gender matter in computer ethics

Computer ethics is a relatively young discipline,hence it needs time both for reflection and forexploring alternative ethical standpoints in buildingup its own theoretical framework. Feminist ethics isoffered as one such alternative particularly to informissues of equality and power. We argue that feministethics is not narrowly confined to ‘womens issues’ but is an approach with wider egalitarianapplications. The rise of feminist ethics in relationto feminist theory in general is described and withinthat the work of Gilligan and others on an ‘ethic of care’. We argue for the need to connect theory toempirical evidence. Empirical studies of gender andbusiness and computer ethics are reviewed. We noteconcerns with surveying a student audience, the issueof how far questionnaires and interviews can get tothe heart of ethical beliefs and problems ofperforming statistical analyses of quantitative data.Although we recognize them, our own small surveycannot avoid all these problems. Nevertheless byrefining our scenarios we are able to offer analternative reading of a hacking problem in terms ofan ethic of care thereby pointing a way forward forfuture research in computer ethics inspired byfeminist theory.

Disability and discourses of web accessibility.

Much of the World Wide Web remains inaccessible or difficult to access by people across a spectrum of disabilities and this may have serious implications for the potential use of the web for increasing social inclusion. We argue that the complexities of web accessibility are best analysed against a set of relevant discourses and that part of the reason for the obduracy of web inaccessibility lies in crucial gaps in engagement of these discourses, so that there is no clear avenue through which disabled people can engage effectively with the web accessibility issue to ensure their rights are met. We characterize the relevant discourses in terms of the digital divide discourse, the social construction of disability discourse, focusing on the historical relationship between disability and technology, the legal discourse where we briefly describe the burdens which disability discrimination demands of those who design websites and the web accessibility discourse, including a discussion of the development of web accessibility standards. We argue that there are crucial gaps in engagement of these discourses, signalling that important groups are not engaged with the dominant policy making agenda. Notably disability activists are not included in the standard making agenda of the web accessibility movement. Unless ways of including such groups can be found, we argue that the current state of web accessibility and hence the potential for social inclusion to be increased is unlikely to be ameliorated.

Absent Friends? The Gender Dimension in Information Systems Research

This paper argues that research on gender and information systems, from both quantitative and qualitative traditions, is problematic as the concept of gender continues to remain under-theorized. We discuss why this may have occurred given that an interest in gender has begun to permeate other disciplines. We elaborate an extensive critique of research which utilizes a statistical approach, discussing four recent papers with one MIS Quarterly paper taken as the cardinal example. We also include a shorter discussion of qualitative literature on gender and IS which reflects the paucity of published literature in this area. Here we see similar tendencies at work, where both gender and technology are taken to be fixed, “essential,” and even stereotypical categories and where authors have yet to grasp the nettle of solidly theorizing the concept of gender against the extensive gender and information technology literature which now exists.

Ethics for things

This paper considers the ways that Information Ethics (IE) treats things. A number of critics have focused on IE’s move away from anthropocentrism to include non-humans on an equal basis in moral thinking. I enlist Actor Network Theory, Dennett’s views on ‹as if’ intentionality and Magnani’s characterization of ‹moral mediators’. Although they demonstrate different philosophical pedigrees, I argue that these three theories can be pressed into service in defence of IE’s treatment of things. Indeed the support they lend to the extension of moral status to non-human objects can be seen as part of a trend towards the accommodation of non-humans into our moral and social networks. A number of parallels are drawn between philosophical arguments over artificial intelligence and information ethics.