CAREER: Towards HCI Theory for Technical and Gender Identity

PI的长期目标是创造理论，为HCI设计实践提供信息，以确保生产反映所有用户价值的平等设计。特别是，她的目标是为HCI创造女权主义理论，她希望这将缩小女性参与计算的差距。此前，PI已经表明，从女权主义理论的角度来看，为女性设计的方法是有问题的。女权主义学者认为，计算机领域缺乏女性进一步阻碍了女性追求与编程相关的职业，而且女性被排除在外的另一个原因是，男性创造的技术更能满足男性的需求。PI认为，问题不仅在于谁被排除在外，还在于设计过程本身就疏远了女性。她的方法是通过连接以前不相关的学习科学、人机交互和性别科学技术研究来解决这个问题，这将与一项多年的民族志研究的结果相结合，以深入了解女孩如何共同构建她们的性别和技术身份，技术如何与一种性别或另一种性别相关联，以及这如何影响女孩的职业选择。这些结果将作为参与设计的基础，与女孩一起创造符合其性别认同的技术。在此过程中，PI希望了解女孩的需求，使她能够制定对性别敏感的设计的最佳做法，确保公平获得技术。通过连接以前互不相关的文献，该项目将把计算机科学中的性别平等问题从一个管道问题重新定义为一个需要改进HCI设计和评估实践的问题。这项为期多年的人种学研究将在学校和课后项目中进行，将提供对年轻女性如何共同构建性别和技术身份的纵向理解，技术职业对她们的吸引力，以及技术人工制品获得象征性性别的过程。参与式设计将允许理论应用于了解在技术设计过程中对女孩的吸引力。虽然该项目本身并不是一项教育干预，但通过建立经验和理论贡献，本研究将探索如何利用设计实践本身来增加女性对计算机的参与。更广泛的影响：这项研究将直接影响女性在计算机方面的培训，并导致设计过程的变化，使女性更具包容性。该项目将建立关于性别和技术身份的基础理论，为参与式设计提供信息，从而使人们能够确定软件开发过程中所需的变化，从而产生更多使年轻妇女能够使用技术的技术。因此，合格的计算机科学家队伍最终将扩大，包括更多的女性，从长远来看，这将增加劳动力，从而使美国在商业上更具全球竞争力，更有能力追求科学的国家安全努力。此外，该项目将直接惠及参与人种学研究的年轻女性群体，通过教授她们软件设计、人机交互、编程技能和计算思维基础，增加她们在技术方面的实践经验。通过参与式设计，该项目还将使初中和高中教师接触到无处不在的计算技术，提供教师发展。

The PI's long-term goal is to create theory to inform HCI design practices, to ensure the production of egalitarian designs that reflect all users' values. In particular, she aims to create feminist theory for HCI , which she hopes will close the gap in women's participation in computing. Previously, the PI has shown how approaches to designing for women are questionable when viewed in light of feminist theory. Feminist scholars argue that the lack of women in computing further discourages women from pursuing programming-related careers, and that women are also excluded because technologies created by men better address male needs. The PI believes the problem lies not only in who is excluded but in that the design processes inherently alienate women. Her approach is to address the problem by bridging previously unrelated aspects of the learning sciences, human-computer interaction, and the science and technology studies of gender, which will be combined with findings from a multi-year ethnographic study to acquire a deep understanding of how girls co-construct their gender and technical identities, how technologies come to be associated with one gender or the other, and how this affects girls' career choices. These results will be used as the basis for participatory design with the girls to create technologies in keeping with their gender identity. In doing so the PI expects to learn about girls' needs, enabling her to develop best practices for gender-sensitive design ensuring equitable access to technology. By bridging previously unconnected literatures, the project will reframe the problem of gender-equity in computer science from a pipeline issue to one requiring improved design and evaluation practices in HCI. The multi-year ethnographic study, to be conducted both in school and at after school programs, will provide a longitudinal understanding of how young women co-construct their gender and technical identities, what appeals to them about technical careers, and the process by which technology artifacts acquire symbolic gender. Participatory design will allow theory to be applied to understand what appeals to girls in the technology design process. While the project is not itself an education intervention, by building on both the empirical and theoretical contributions this research will explore how design practices themselves can be used to increase female participation in computing.Broader Impacts: This research will directly impact women's training in computing, as well as lead to changes in the design process to be more inclusive for women. The project will create grounded theory on gender and technical identity that will inform participatory design, which in turn will allow the identification of needed changes to the software development process so that it results in more technologies that empower young women to use technology. As a consequence, the pool of qualified computer scientists will ultimately expand to include more women, which in the long turn will increase workforce thereby making the United States more globally competitive in business and more able to pursue scientific national security efforts. Furthermore, the project will directly benefit the group of young women involved in the ethnographic study, increasing their practical experiences with technology by teaching them software design, HCI, programming skills, and a foundation in computational thinking. Through participatory design the project will also expose middle and high school teachers to ubiquitous computing technologies, providing teacher development.