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This issue casts light on the gender aspects of the new technologies. The concept of technology has a comparatively short history (it gained popular currency only after World War II) and it has traditionally been associated predominantly with men (Oldenziel, 1999, p. 14). The very first reference to technology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica occurred as late as 1978, but it was already defined as ‘the exclusive knowledge of domain engineers, best embodied by machines as the measure of men’and ‘any means or activity by which man seeks to change or manipulate his environment’(Oldenziel, 1999, p. 15). As can be seen from this definition, technology and engineering were usually assumed to be men’s work (Cockburn, 1983, 1985), and definitions like this continue to reflect and reinforce a masculine ideology (Grint and Gill, 1995; Wajcman, 1991).

In the organizational context gender and technology remain in a …