Gender, work and technology in the information workplace from Remington to the ATM

Boyer, Kate and England, Kim (2008) Gender, work and technology in the information workplace from Remington to the ATM. Social & Cultural Geography, 9 (3), 241-256. (doi:10.1080/14649360801990462).

Record type: Article

Abstract

We consider the relations between gender and technology in the workplace, focusing on
clerical work in the information workplace, especially the finance and insurance sector.
Our goal is to excavate a ‘hidden history’ of how clerical work and the artifacts which
sustain it have been understood and deployed under different cultural and economic
circumstances. We employ an analysis of technosocial relations developed in Science and
Technology Studies in which meanings about ‘technology’ and ‘society’ are mutually
constitutive, changeable, and in need of maintenance in order to sustain their conceptual
coherence. By drawing on examples from the USA and Canada, we argue that at various
points over the twentieth century particular office technologies became ‘feminized’, or
associated with characteristics coded as feminine, as a means of shaping spatial practice
and social relations in the workplace.

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