Introduction

This special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies gathers research and creative work from across disciplines and around the globe and attests to the variety of writing and thought in the broad areas of gender and information technology (IT). We share the widely held view that the term "gender" refers to socially constructed differences between men and women and the ways these differences manifest in both individual and corporate life. Although the term "technology" may refer to the application of scientific knowledge to the change and manipulation of the human environment (human life), information technology usually refers to technologies that deal with the processes of storing, manipulating, and transferring information. The two terms are far from synonymous, although they do overlap in significant ways. To that end, we received many exciting, relevant, and diverse submissions for consideration, and we have culled the most provocative of them for the special issue.

We believe that this issue of Frontiers is uniquely positioned to connect the critical and constructive perspectives of researchers and scholars who investigate the intersections of gender and ethnicity with technology studies, as well as with activists who seek to increase the participation of all women in IT education and the IT workforce. In higher education, these two fields of inquiry have for the most part been relegated to separate disciplines, the former to the relatively marginalized domain of feminist or women's studies, and the latter to the more visible and readily funded fields of the social sciences, computer science, and engineering. We have provisionally succeeded in bringing together the two disparate sets of interests in one forum in hopes that we might encourage more cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary exchanges about differences and similarities, as well as the possibilities for mutual influence and enrichment.When we envisioned a special issue of Frontiers devoted to gender and IT, we identified four topic areas in our call for papers: gender and underrepresented groups in the IT workforce and its educational pipelines; gendered experiences with information technologies; representations of gender in and by information technologies; and feminist and other cultural critiques or expressions of the societal implications of IT. Little did we realize that our unintended ranking of the topics would be reflected in the kinds of articles (and inquiries) that we received. As any bibliography of scholarship on gender and IT reveals, the field (and the accompanying funding opportunities) is dominated by work on educational pipeline issues. Such studies generally foreground gender, downplay or ignore other indices of difference, and feature a qualitative and quantitative focus on the experiences of female students in the K-i2 math and science environment and in undergraduate computer science classes. We anticipated that we would receive essays on these topics. We did not, however, foresee the degree to which articles on the educational pipeline would eclipse the other three topics, or the ways in which ideological and cultural agendas implicit in and disseminated by the proliferation of "educational pipeline" research have influenced the emerging field of research on gender and IT.

Although the process of compiling the special issue has underscored for us the work yet to be done in this area, the scholarly and artistic contributions included here represent a remarkable collection of disparate yet related efforts to influence future research in the field, and especially future research in the humanities and social sciences. The authors whose essays were selected for publication evince a startling range of disciplinary and cultural interests, energies, and strategies. They engage global, national, and local geographies; they understand information technology as the Internet, the cell phone, the e-mail list, computing language, and much more. Collaboration informs most of the articles but in radically different ways; several of the essays were written by more than one author, others include the dialogic dynamics of the interview format, and others make use of focus groups or participant data. The articles offer abstract formulations and practical applications; some are predominantly critical, while others recommend alternatives. The articles uniformly address gender, but they do not understand gender in a uniform way. Similarly, all of the articles focus on some aspect of information technology, but most do not consider the conceptual limitations or possibilities of the term.