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GENDER and SKILL in HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

Ellen Balka

Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's, Newfoundland Canada
phone: (709) 754-3362 fax: (709) 737-4000
e-mail: ebalka@kean.ucs.mun.ca

Keywords

Gender, skill, design approaches, design strategies.

Summary

As system designers, we make many implicit assumptions about gender and skill in our work. For example, we may assume that if we are designing a system to be used by telephone operators, that users are likely to be women, and that the work telephone operators do is 'unskilled' work, rather than skilled knowledge work, as suggested by Mueller et.al. [6]. As Pain, Owen, Franklin and Green [7] point out, generally "the main responsibility for system design rests with those labeled as 'experts' in technical or computing knowledge" (p. 13). The group of experts we rely on for system design are generally white, middle-class men, with educational backgrounds in science. User relations-- where designers typically encounter more women-- are increasingly being paid attention as part of the process of designing and implementing computer based interactions. Language- that is, the language of expertise (tech-talk) has been identified as a constraint to user-participation in design processes [1,2]. Typically linguistic competence in technical domains parallels the gendered division of labour in workplaces, and indeed the design process itself. Building on this idea, di Cindio and Simone [5] have developed a tool for analyzing dimensions of work and computerization that derives from capturing linguistic differences in how workers describe their work. Clearly, language plays an important part in the gendered nature of design processes, and is an important demarcation of technical skill that separates designers from users of workplace computing systems. Cultural stereotypes about the nature of work (e.g., that clerical work is unskilled work, that telephone operators only have to look up phone numbers) often mask the complexity of tasks and skill requirements that are part of jobs typically allocated to women in our gender-stratified labour force. Thus, notions of skill are often tied to notions of gender (see for example Cockburn's work [3,4] for a discussion).

Issues

As HCI designers, we rely on notions of both gender and skill that often are not explicit in our work. When we bring gender and skill to the foreground of our work, several issues emerge, including: * How does gender come to bear on the dynamics of system design? * Are system users primarily men or women? * If system users are women, are there any physical or social factors that come to bear on their system use? * What are the implicit definitions of skill in use by designers? * Are definitions of skill tied to gender stereotypes? * If so, how might different conceptions of skill come to bear on system design?

Goals

The goals of this SIG are to bring HCI designers together to discuss gender and skill as factors in the design process, to allow HCI designers interested in questions related to gender and skill to share information, successes and failures related to gender and skill in HCI work.

References

  1. Balka, E. Participatory Design in Women's Organizations: The Social World of Organizational Structure and the Gendered Nature of Expertise. Gender, Work and Organizations. In press.
  2. Balka, E. Spinsters on the Web: The Use of Computer Networks by Women's Organizations. Ottawa: CRIAW. 1996.
  3. Cockburn, C. and Ormond, S. Gender and Technology in the Making. Sage: London. 1993.
  4. Cockburn, C. Brothers: Male dominance and technological change. London: Pluto, 1983.
  5. de Cindio, F. and Simone, C. The universes of discourse for Education and Action/Research. In E. Green, J. Owen and D. Pain (Eds.) Gendered by design? Information Technology and Office Systems. London: Taylor & Francis, 1993, pp. 173-193.
  6. Mueller, M.J., Carr, R., Ashworth, C., Diekmann, B., Wharton, C., Eickstaedt, C. and Clonts, J. Telephone Operators as Knowledge Workers: Consultants Who Meet Customer Needs. SIGCHI '95 (Denver, Colorado, May 7-11, 1995). In Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings. Annual Conference Series, 1995, ACM SIGCHI, pp. 130-137.
  7. Pain, D., Owen, J., Franklin, I. and Green, E. Human-Centered Systems Design: A Review of Trends within the Broader Systems Development Context. In E. Green, J. Owen and D. Pain (Eds.) Gendered by design? Information Technology and Office Systems. London: Taylor & Francis, 1993, pp. 11-30.