Central Message

Why are women reluctant to enter the fields of computing, science, and engineering? Surprisingly, there isn't an invariable relationship between gender and reluctance. Rather, there's a correlation between gender and epistemology. It's the difference between the "hard", typically masculine, analytic approach toward knowledge and the "soft", typically feminine approach that values everyday thinking. The hard approach is characterized by an abstract, structured, plan-oriented, rule-driven style. The soft approach relies on situated cognition, bottom-up thinking, and the "revaluation of the concrete". It's illustrated by two subjects in this study who prefer to play with the elements of a computer program and move them around as if they were material objects. It starts in childhood, where children form either a close or distant relationship to the objects that surround them. The tendency to use abstract/analytic or concrete/negotiational style develops later.

Application

While a structured programmer starts with a clear plan defined in abstract terms, children who use the soft approach, like Alex and Anne, prefer to let the product emerge through a negotiation between themselves and their material. "The computer is an expressive medium that different people can make their own in their own way" (p. 165, sentence in italics). As the Logo language enabled these children to program in the styles that best fit their thinking, so the persistence of the Macintosh computer itself, in spite of tremendous market pressures, enables those computer users who prefer the soft approach to choose a machine that fits their thinking. Conversely, those who prefer the hard approach feel that the IBM affords a thinking environment that fits. And so, the heated Mac vs. IBM argument persists, pitting those who prefer desktops and icons against those who prefer the hierarachical structure of trees and subdirectories. From the authors' perspective, "what is important is that the iconic victories are part of a larger cultural shift towards an acceptance of concrete, relational ways of thinking" (p. 187).

Value

A computer that can bring the abstract down to the concrete makes a dramatic statement for pluralism. It can be an expressive medium for personal styles, and a carrier for pluralistic ideas. Human-Computer Interface (HCI) designers must be on guard against the resistance of our intellectual culture to the soft approach, and facilitate them both--else we will continue to support the notion of an epistemological elite.