‘The hard hat problem’. Women traveling the world of computing

Gender and feminist STS studies have shown the benefits of using gender as an analytical category in order to problematize not only formal discriminations of women in technoscientific fields, but also gender biases encoded in technical knowledge and professional cultures. According to this view, gender and technoscience are mutually shaped, so that just as gendered beliefs and practices affect the construction of scientific knowledge, so too technoscientific organizations shape the relations between men and women. In the field of computing these processes have been scrutinized by recent studies that put under scrutiny those ‘unspoken ideas’ on gender that have shaped computing. Against this backdrop, this paper problematizes the experience of Italian women who travel the world of computing as practitioners and academics. The analysis is based on a set of in–depth interviews which aim at addressing the gender gap in computing by questioning the gender assumptions that shape the construction of disciplines, practices, and knowledge surrounding computer technologies. Therefore, rather than emphasizing those mechanisms that keep women outside or at the margins of computing, the paper examines the experience of those women who inhabit the computer world in order to question the alleged gender neutrality of the field.