1st Edition
Ungendering Technology Women Retooling the Masculine Sphere
This book offers fresh insight into women’s mastery of technologies commonly associated with men, with important implications for institutional efforts to identify and support technical proficiency among girls and women.
The work is structured across five original case studies featuring: breast cancer survivors in Newfoundland who constructed a wooden dragon boat using hand and power tools; Egyptian women who used information and communication technologies for political action during the Revolution of 2011; pioneer female audio engineers in the United States working in live concert and studio venues; U.S. female commercial airline pilots who mastered the complexity of flying large aircraft; and a university-educated woman working in sewer maintenance and repair for the City of Detroit in the 1970s. The case studies capture women’s own voices and present a range of historical and geographic locations.
A major contribution of this volume is the multidisciplinary analytical framework used to explain women’s motivation to engage with non-traditional technologies, the role of peer and political support in encouraging persistence, and informal as well as formal knowledge and skill acquisition. Above all, it is a story of women's empowerment - individually and collectively.
This is a unique book suitable for undergraduates and graduates in the fields of Women's and Gender Studies; Science, Technology and Society (STS) Studies; Engineering Education; and Adult Education.
Forward and Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Built for Life: The Story of the Avalon Dragon Boat Builders
2 Digital Megaphone: Egyptian Women’s Cyberactivism in the Revolution and Beyond
3 Sound Sisters: Engineering Women’s Music
4 Woman in Underground Detroit: The Non-Traditional Early Occupation of a University Graduate
5 Reaching for the Sky: Women Pilots at Major Commercial Airlines
6 Toward a Women-and-Technology Paradigm of Empowerment
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biography
Carol J. Haddad is Professor Emerita, Eastern Michigan University. She served as a Professor in the School of Technology and Professional Services Management for 22 years, and also as a faculty affiliate in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, which she headed on an interim basis. She has published on gender and voice in the virtual classroom, and has presented conference papers on student learning outcomes in the Women and Technology and Green Technology courses she developed and taught online.
Dr. Haddad is recognized internationally for her scholarship on the management of technological change, which generated funded research projects culminating in her 2002 book Managing Technological Change: A Strategic Partnership Approach (Sage Publications). She was elected to the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi in 2013. Prior to arriving at EMU in 1993, she was a tenured faculty member in labor studies at Michigan State University, and held senior research management positions in the private sector.
She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in higher and adult continuing education, and an M.S. in labor studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
