Women on the Net Routing Around the Power Structure

Women today are using the Net to route around the power structure, transcend traditional and historic barriers and , finally, liberate themselves by talking and networking with each other. Increasingly, women are realizing that access to the Internet is access to knowledge and power. Networking with each other is the catalyst that can put that power to use in furthering their careers. Strong parallels exist between access to knowledge, access to levers of power, and the ability to enter and advance in the workplace. Nattering on the Net, Women, Power and Cyberspace, by Dale Spender makes a compelling case for women seizing the moment and gaining equity in cyberspace as a key to their future equity in the world community.

Spender traces for us the historic barriers to knowledge for women which strongly parallel barriers in the workplace since knowledge is required to gain entry to any profession or occupation except the most menial. Throughout history, there has been a wholesale denial of knowledge to women. Revolutions which have advanced men and brought them increasing power and equality have often left women worse off than before.

Spender writes of the Middle Ages where nunneries served as centers of women's traditional knowledge and values. Women had a safe haven where they could study and produce important writings on medicine, history and philosophy, or become playwrights and poets. The Reformation shut down these learning centers and cut off women from their only secure source of knowledge. The revenues and lands of the nunneries were transferred to male colleges. Men could take advantage of the revolution of the printing press, expanding their knowledge beyond the church, studying new innovations in science, but "women were stopped at the door."

During the scientific revolution, women by the tens of thousands who displayed suspect knowledge were burned as witches, losing all their properties, lands and money. From the invention of the printing press," the history of the past 500 years has been the extension of information access and power to more and more members of the community." But only in the late 1980's, with women's presses, books and women's studies courses, did women begin to regain an equal footing in the world of knowledge access.

Now , more than a decade later, we, as women, are at another cross roads: the future of Cyberspace places the issue of gender equity squarely before us. When computerization first entered our lives, women were not excluded but were it's handmaidens-- the key punch operators and word processing agents. It was only when a new generation took over that men realized having a terminal on one's desk did not mean giving up power, losing the perk of having a stenographer. It meant having access to knowledge, information, connections, networking. It meant tapping into a larger world of perks, power perks, access perks, from Hong Kong to Paris, from Finland to Caracas. It may have been at this moment that male dominance of the computer world began in earnest.

Just as there is a gap for women in the workplace, there is an increasing gap between the information rich and the information poor. This disparity of information resources is determined in part by one's access to computers, the wealth of information which resides on them in the form of news, research, information exchange, debate, communication and the intellectual growth and stimulation which interaction with new technology brings. Literacy and in many cases today, computer literacy and access to the Internet " is a necessary condition of community participation." One computer guru," Nicholas Nigroponte, says: "Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living."

New technologies generate wealth and power. Cyberspace is not only where the future of commerce, entertainment and education are headed, it is where new communities are being formed which will shape the future in each of those areas. Women need to get on the net and lead the charge, not wait to be invited.

As Spender points out a broad range of issues are at the center of the computer revolution; everything" from sexual harassment to questions of distribution of wealth and power" will be put into play and ultimately settled on the Internet. It is vital for women to realize they must seize this opportunity, while the Web is in its formative stages to participate in writing the rules of the SuperInfoHwy.

Women are already on the Net and gaining in numbers and power each day. Some have realized and on others it is just dawning, that they no longer have to wait for the patriarchies and the power structures to give them access to the media, or even mention them in the media, where they are relegated to the women's or society pages instead of the news and headlines.

Women no longer have to go through book publishers or the media or wait for the media to notice them. They can talk to each other. And when they do, it is as independent working women, striving to achieve their goals, not as extensions of their husbands or children or consumers of "women's products". Women in the workplace do buy computers, business books, plane tickets. It is time women shed the bonds of the traditional stereotypes and be whoever they are and want to be. The power of the Net and the catalyst of networking with each other is allowing that to finally happen. Women are no longer asking men if they can join the game. The Net has allowed them to route around men and start their own game.

Gretchen Glasscock, Web Publisher
Advancing Women

(Nattering on the Net, Women, Power and Cyberspace, Dale Spender, Spinifex Press, Australia, ISBN 1 875559 09 4)