Gender and Technology in the Making

This innovative book demonstrates the making of gender and technology as comparable social processes, one helping shape the other. The authors take as an example the microwave oven, a recent innovation in domestic technology that neatly encapsulates the technology/gender relation. In the microwave, masculine engineering encounters an age old woman's technology: cooking.

The authors 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 white goods, and eventually settles into the kitchen alongside other humble feminine appliances; unlike the old cooker, however, the microwave retains just a whiff of aftershave. The authors show how technology relations contribute to the disadvantage of women. This book breaks new ground by building 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.