Challenging Canon: the Gender Question in Computer Science

The gender question in computer science is often presented as: “Why are there sofew women in computer science and what can be done about that?” This questionusually focuses on women. Sometimes ‘men’ or ‘gender’ enter the discussions.However, it is not common that the second part of the sentence computer scienceis considered. The papers in this thesis challenge, in different ways, how the gender question isusually perceived and discussed within the community of computer scientists, andwhere solutions are looked for. The approach taken is to move focus from women/gender to the discipline ofcomputer science itself. This means the question is raised towards a more generallevel, towards “the science question”, discussing the discipline, its paradigms andknowledge processes. Theories and methodologies from gender research, used within computer science,offer new possibilities to develop broader and more complex understandings of “thegender question in computer science”.