Although the `liberatory' approach to new communications technologies has been, for the most part, called into question by researchers in the humanities and social sciences, who now adopt a more critical relationship with technology, it continues to enjoy explanatory power in the popular press and in software design practices and cultures. According to the liberatory approach, freedom from sexism and other forms of oppression is brought about by something as simple and profound as a change in online handle - a practice known as `gender swapping' (Bruckman, 1993). Yet, as some language theorists have shown (e.g. Herring, 1996), communication in cyberspace also reinforces existing social hierarchies, including gender differences found in face-to-face contexts. Unlike traditional, human-centered studies of computermediated communication and gender, this article treats a series of talking software programs as important objects for studying how software design is also implicated in the construction of gender differences. In addition to the programs' databases of gendered utterances and internal models of communicative interaction, these differences are also reinforced and negotiated en route, in the ongoing process of talking about why and how a software program is gendered.
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