Technology and Gender versus Technology and Work: Social Work and Computers

Abstract

Recently, computers have been introduced within the field of social work, which is a female-dominated profession. A direct relationship is often assumed between gender and attitudes to technology. However, when people are introduced to computers at work they have already acquired a specific way of reasoning through their training. A way to understand the specific attitudes to computers among social workers is therefore to focus on the nature of the problems they are supposed to solve and the way of reasoning acquired through their training. There is much overlap between the skills of this profession and those generally attributed to the female gender. Thus one can hardly discern between the professionally related and the gender related in attitudes to a new technology; rather the case-study reveals how gender is embedded within jobs and tasks. Social work belongs to the 'soft' professions, with care and human communication as its main tasks. Thus the study also reveals some incongruence between computer systems and human communication.