Gender, Technology, and the History of Technical Communication

In her article “Gender, Technology, and the History of Technical Communication,” Katherine Durack examines the history of the female role in the technical communication field. She begins her discussion by noting the absence of women in the recorded disciplinary past. One possible reason is that “women have contributed only very rarely to technical and scientific work” (36). If this is true, and scientific inquiry and technological innovation have been primarily the work of men, then the contributions of women may have been consequently lost, subsumed, or overlooked. Another possibility is that the absence of women may have been due to historians and not actual historical reality.

A “Peculiar Set of Cultural Blinders”
Although those in the field of technical communication have yet to agree on a single definition, technical writing often contains either or both of two key characteristics: a close relationship to technology, and an understanding that technical writing is associated with work and workplace (36). It follows then that what is understood as technical writing comes from what is considered technology, work and workplace. The assumption is that these terms are gender-neutral, and that addressing the matter of gender and the history of technical communication is as easy as searching for women who have distinguished themselves in scientific, medical and technical fields (37). However, this view is often contested because of its simplistic view that inadequately addresses biases from our past and future.

History and Women’s Work
History, including the history of technical communication, primarily focuses on the works of great men and the great works of men (37). In both of these cases, there is a need to establish significance, which usually involves prerequisite location in the public sphere. This public sphere is male dominated, while the private sphere is generally the realm of women. The activities of women have typically been omitted because history focuses on public and political activities and innovations. To include women’s work in the history of technical communication, “we [must] contest two assumptions that lead to their exclusion from our disciplinary story: First, (the assumption of agency) that women are not significant originators of technical, scientific, or medical achievement; second, (the assumption of technological significance) that women’s tools are not sufficiently technical, nor their work sufficiently important, to warrant study of their supporting texts” (37).

Women as Significant Contributors to Science and Technology
To overcome the first assumption, women need to be identified who have contributed significantly to science, technology and medicine. Then, their written works must be fit into technical communication history. The main difficulty facing the historian is the apparent lack of women’s contribution to these fields. Women, like men have undoubtedly sought means for improving their work processes, but their significance may be obscured by having been misclassified, trivialized, or attributed to men (37). Women’s inventions may have been under-reported because they weren’t ‘real’ inventions of technology such as weapons and machines.
Often, when women did invent ‘real’ inventions, they were left off the patent record. Some reasons for this include: women’s lack of disposable income and time, married women in the United States and Britain could not own their inventions or patents until the Married Women’s Property Acts passed, the necessary technical and mathematical training necessary to build models of inventions and patent them was not available to women, cultural stereotypes discouraged women from taking credit for their achievements, and these same stereotypes encouraged women to be generous, thus sharing ideas instead of profiting from them (38). Technologies that pertain specifically to women’s biological functions and social roles, including the baby bottle and sewing machine, have essentially been ignored by historians (38).

Women as Significant Users of Technology
Addressing the second assumption involves a different strategy: departing from conventional history to challenge existing definition, seeking a “a new narrative” that focuses “on the casual role played by women in their history and on the qualities of women’s experience (39). The industrial revolution brought about great technological innovation and increasing differences about appropriate work roles for men and women. Women are often seen running machinery, but it is rare to see them actually knowing what goes on inside the machine. During World War II, women were expected to help out, but as soon as the men came home, they needed to return to their homes. Even when a woman is skilled at a job, such as sewing, they are often underpaid because it is a ‘woman’s job.’ Men remain predominantly the makers, repairers, designers, and uses of what we typically consider technology, while women hold household jobs, which are unrecognized and generally unpaid (39).

“The periodic submittal (and rejection) of texts such as cookbooks to the Society of Technical Communication’s annual publications competition demonstrates the difficulty we have with considering as ‘work’ a productive activity that is typically assigned to women and accomplished within individual households without benefit of financial compensation” (40). Durack adds that when a man tinkers in his garage it is considered a significant invention, but when a kitchen doubles as a chemistry lab it is often discounted as technological.

The Household as a Setting of Consequence
The current focus of workplace writing as a definition of technical writing fails to recognize the household as either a workplace or a setting of consequence. Writers in organizations are more easily studied and compared, therefore individual household are often excluded. However, there are significant instances of technical writing and use of technical documentation that occur in the household since many products are geared toward home use (40). These include computer hardware, lawn mowers, blenders and credit card agreements. There are many instances in which private individuals must interact by text with organizations (41). Also, many people are starting to move the traditional workplace into their household.

Toward Inclusive Definitions
Durack concludes by writing that “if we are to include the accomplishments of women in the history of technical communication, we must first challenge the dualistic thinking that serves public and private, household and industry, and masculine and feminine labor” (41). She notes that she doesn’t know if it is possible to construct a single definition of technical communication that can accommodate both past and future changes in the meaning and significance of work, workplace and technology, but she offers the following observations.

• Technical writing exists within government and industry, as well as in the intersection between private and public spheres.
• Technical writing has a close relationship to technology.
  
• Technical writing often seeks to make tacit knowledge explicit.
  

She concludes her essay by stating “as we construct the history, a major challenge will be to examine why we deem certain artifacts technology, their attendant activities work, their place of conduct the workplace, and therefore find reason to include associated writings within the corpus history of technical writing” (42).