Book Detail

Gender and Computers: Understanding the Digital Divide
Joel Cooper & Kimberlee D. Weaver
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2003
QA76.9 .W65 C66 2003

Educating children in modern society requires skill and comfort with technology. Gender and Computers: Understanding the Digital Divide presents evidence that shows that girls and young women are being left behind on the road to information technology. This book not only documents the digital divide - that is, the unequal opportunity and unequal attention that disenfranchises girls from the technological revolution - but also provides guideposts to overcoming it. Social psychological theories and data are brought to bear on understanding the social and environmental roots of the divide. Remedies ranging from family dynamics to teacher-student interactions to the controversial question of gender organization of schools and school systems are proposed.

Gender and Computers: Understanding the Digital Divide:

• Considers original research conducted by the authors especially for this volume as well as recently published work by other leading scholars in information technology.
• Documents that girls are at a marked disadvantage in their ability to learn about and profit from information technology in our educational system.
• Sets the problem of computer anxiety in a rich context of social psychological theories, including stereotype threat, self-fulfilling prophecy, social comparison, and attribution theory.
• Offers suggestions that parents, teachers, school systems, and software publishers can implement to overcome the digital divide.

The book is intended to appeal to students and researchers in the social and behavioral sciences, education, human factors, and computer science interested in gender differences in general, and in human computer interaction, in particular. The authors' goal is to stimulate social scientists and educators to further research this topic to generate solutions to the problem.

Quoted from dust jacket.