UCLA Center for the Study of Women

I scope my analysis of gender related issues specifically to the domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), a field that concerns itself with the design and use of technology. The topic of gender is not new to HCI and has been addressed through multiple discourses such as domestic technology, product design, virtual online environments, and software engineering to name a few. The quality, concerns, motives and impacts of these works can be best characterized as varied. These existing works stress the importance of considering the importance of gender issues in the process of design, and provide thought-provoking insights and implications for design. Yet, these works ten to remain marginal in the field of HCI. Research interests regarding gender are viewed as niched. The relevance of these works remains contained to a small body of knowledge, and the insights that are garnered through them are often treated as one-off. My work is an attempt to understand what hinders the profession of this discourse from achieving its potential.