Exceptional women? Gender and technology in U.K. higher education

It is now commonplace to say that technology is more readily associated with boys and men than with girls and women. In popular representations, even where girls are ostensibly included, they tend to be presented as "other" to technology or their relationship to technology is trivialized. "Real technology" the message seems to be, is not for women and girls. The author reflects on research she has carried out over the last 10-15 years (to 1999) and, in particular, two projects which examined women's experiences in technological courses in UK tertiary education in the mid 1980s and the early 1990s. What struck her in her reflections was the extraordinary similarity in some central themes in both projects. In particular, the author reflects upon the prevalence of very limited, and therefore limiting, understandings of the gender-technology relationship within conventional technology curricula and the possibility for challenging the understandings that are offered by more progressive and innovative curricula in information technology based education.