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Despite the assertion that higher education is becoming increasingly ‘feminised’ and that male students are the relative losers, gendered meanings continue to permeate higher education in ways that mean that the recognition of women's experiences are frequently marginalised. Our paper reports on research designed to explore student participation in extra-curricular activity from a perspective informed by a broader conceptualisation of the extra-curricular as a site of gendered, raced, and class practices intimately tied to the development of an employable self. We found that women frequently undervalue their participation and are more likely to be dismissive of extra-curricular activity as of value to their employability than men and that they rarely consider caring to be a form of capital which can be utilised or invested in to support their future employment. We argue that higher education institutions need to support students, in particular women, to recognise the value of their participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the theoretical resources offered by feminist scholarship to enquire into the discourse of the intellectual and how women do being an academic. My starting points are threefold: Val Hey's interrogation of Butler's work and her emphasis on the importance of sociality; Carrie Paechter's exploration of the available personal sets of masculinities and femininities that modify the 'person who is me'; and my own attempts to draw on other traditions in theorising agency and a sense of self. Drawing on these resources I re-read some data on academic identities to explore the potentialities of academic personhood and the discourses associated with the idea of the intellectual as a site of gendered personhood. The position of woman as intellectual is analysed in terms of Beauvoir's assertion 'I am a woman' and the paradox of a universal voice and the female sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, members from the London Feminist Salon Collective reflected on the vexed problem of agency in poststructuralist theory and asked, ‘as feminist educational researchers, where do we go from here?’ The issue remains pressing as agency, both individual and collective, is at the heart of the feminist, and indeed, all radical political projects. The attractions of poststructuralist theorizing for many feminists has been its decisive break with logocentrism. However, from the 1980s onwards, feminists were pointing to the problems poststructuralism presented in theorizing the nature of agency. In this paper I will argue that we should adopt a different theoretical starting point. Drawing heavily on the work of Margaret Archer, I will argue that critical realism has much to offer theories of political action. While acknowledging the enormous contribution of feminist scholars working within a poststructuralist paradigm, I will argue that the epistemological and ontological assumptions at the heart of poststructuralist theory render it incapable of providing a framework for what Archer calls the enchantment of being human. This enchantment, and the rich resources of a conceptualization of agency based on the primacy of practice, provides a stronger basis for theorizing feminist research, practice and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a theoretical overview of the relationship between gender, education and computing. It explores the role of education in the continued reproduction of computing, and latterly information communications technology, as masculine domains. Gendered social relations are inscribed into the development of computing technology and the ideological separation of the 'expert' from end-users. The article offers a critique of the strong sociology of science and postmodernist analyses of technology for reducing technology to the social, and of technological determinism. It argues instead that we need to understand how computing is constituted historically and the ways computing can be understood as a concrete science. The article brings together perspectives on technology derived from a critical realist perspective with some aspects of the feminist standpoint paradigm. The author examines three key educational locales in the reproduction of gender ideologies of the machine. These are schools, universities, and the multiple sites of lifelong learning. The article concludes that the gendering of computing as a masculine discourse continues, and that the analysis of technology and the sociology of education needs to reconnect within a broader critique of society if women's continuing marginalisation in the dominant discourse is to be understood and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the ways in which gender continues to influence the pattern of recruitment onto both information technology (IT) and design courses. Fewer women are attracted to product and industrial design, and there has been a decline in the proportion of women on IT courses. While there has been work that has looked at gender inequalities in single discipline areas, little work has looked across subjects. We propose a theoretical reformulation away from an equal opportunities approach which identifies women as the 'problem. The article attempts to characterise the discourses of design and computing, and in particular, gendered notions of technology. We report on data from a small-scale case study in one higher education institution where new students were interviewed about their choices of course. These data provided rich descriptions of how both male and female students viewed both design and IT. There was a widespread commitment to individual creativity on the part of both women and men in design, while computing was not experienced in this way. On both courses it was clear that technical competency was still defined in highly gendered terms. In design the hammer and the workshop are still experienced by women as naturalised male tools and spaces. Computing space and skills are also gendered. Our interviews suggest that instrumental reasons for choosing courses are balanced by intrinsic satisfaction, but that pleasure was more to the fore in design. We conclude by arguing that both design and IT are gendered discourses, and that a case study approach can provide insights into the ways these discourses are perceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is continuing evidence of gender bias in the use of computers in schools. Boys' greater access and confidence is multidetermined; however, one factor is the nature of the packages themselves and the imagery they deploy. Unlike the computer games sector where images remain crudely sexist, educational software providers have developed software which use 'androgynous' humanoid figures where gender-stereotypical features are absent. There is, however, no social or cultural warrant for human representations which are non-gendered. We hypothesised that children would have no notion of genderless persons and would assign gender to the figures, reverting to male as norm, but that girls would be more likely than boys to identify androgynous computer characters as female. In our study we asked primary school children to talk about the images, making up names and describing them. Content analysis of the data was used and a gender constancy test was included as a check for validity. A small pilot study supported our hypothesis and the results from a larger scale study confirm that children identify neutral characters as male, but that girls are more willing to see them as female. We conclude that more research should be undertaken into the ways teachers can influence the child's perception of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]