Women and Technology. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 1997  by Nanette Fondas,  Gerardine DeSanctis

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This book is the fourth volume of the series, Technological Innovation and Human Resources, which aims to provide a cross-disciplinary synthesis of research on technological innovation and human resources that informs scholarship, policy, and practice. Volume 4 contains theoretical and empirical chapters on the subject of women and technology-mediated work. The series editor, Urs E. Gattiker notes that several factors justified the inclusion of this subject in the series: women's rising participation in the paid labor force, the wage gap, stereotypes about why women work, and the assumption that research on men's experience with technology-mediated work is generalizable to both men and women.

The editor introduces each of the book's three sections with a summary of the subsequent chapters' main findings. Section 1, "Technology-mediated Work," contains three chapters that examine women's and men's feelings and attitudes about the impact of technology on their work. In chapter 1, Dunkle et al. examine differences between 3,400 female and male government workers' assessments of the impact of computing on their work. They found that women are more likely than men to feel positively about the impact of computing on their acquisition of information, interpersonal relations, work effectiveness, and work environment. The authors also found little support for the claim that information technology generates more negative impacts on the work of women (for example, more deskilling) than that of men in white-collar jobs.

In chapter 2, Parry and Wharton question whether sex differences in the use of computer network technology would persist if differences in men's and women's socialization, training, occupational background, and experience with technology were considered. When they controlled for such background factors in a study of 208 university faculty, they found no sex differences in network technology use or attitudes toward adopting the technology. An implication is that organizational decision makers need to realize the importance of continuous training and education to a pool of information technology workers that is increasingly feminized.

Though women may have the same attitude as men about the adoption of technology, they are less likely to be involved in the adoption decision, a finding Murray reports (chapter 3) from a study of 167 women and men in 10 laboratory-based science occupations. She also found that women are more likely than men to perceive new technology introduction as sudden and that the training they receive is inadequate. Both male and female lab workers maintained that their control over their work was unchanged following the technology introduction, primarily because superiors had little knowledge of how the devices worked. Women were less likely than men, however, to perceive that their level of responsibility and required job skills increased as a consequence of the technology change. Murray concludes that many of these differential impacts of technology on women are the result of women's presence in a disproportionate number of low-status positions, such as lab assistant and technician, in contrast to men, who are found in higher-status research scientist and managerial jobs.

Section 2, "Careers and Work Roles," opens with a paper (chapter 4) by Pazy on differences in men's and women's experiences combating professional obsolescence in technical careers. Based on a survey of 544 engineers and scientists in three high-technology companies, Pazy reports that women experience themselves as more obsolete than men do. Women in her survey felt up to date with respect to the knowledge requirements of their jobs but not with respect to the wider scope of their profession or specialty. The women also engaged in less updating of their knowledge bases: They attended fewer seminars and conferences than men and spent less time reading professional journals during off-work hours. This difference was attributed to women's heavier involvement in family responsibilities and to their location in lower organizational ranks, with fewer resources allocated to updating.

In perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book, Calabrese (chapter 5) presents a critical appraisal of the growing home-based telework movement. He presents a Marxian critique, arguing that the promise that information technology's home working potential would erase the distinction and inequity between public man and private woman has not been achieved. Instead, he points to a pattern of female exploitation in the history of industrial home work that is being reproduced by the emergence of telework. This exploitation is seen in the absence of women's participation in the design of conditions of work at home, piece-work compensation, temporary contracts, no labor organization, and no accommodation for child care. Because women are often forced into home work because child-rearing demands fall disproportionately on them, they are at greater risk than men of becoming occupationally marginalized, isolated, and part of corporations' "reserve army" of part-time, powerless, insecure workers.