Gendering on the Internet

Gendering of the internet

Professor Merez opens up her lecture with the term incredible shrinking pipeline. It means that there is decreasing percentage of women in computer science fields. She presents the statement with the graph that states that from 1970s till 1986 women slowly were applying themselves more and more in the field of computer sciences and then, from the year of 1986 the interest of women in the computer science field starts to decrease. Professor Merez raises the question to “why is this happening?” The reasoning behind these statistics can be endless.

One of the reasons behind this statistics can be because the way we are raised in

today’s society. From the day that we are born, our parents start to slowly teach us gender specific roles. Also, according to our gender, we are given gender appropriate clothing (often colors that are associated to represent masculinity or femininity. As a boy you are most likely given soldier toys, little toy cars; and as girl, you are given cloths (that are often colors that are socially accepted as feminine colors), as well as gender appropriate toys like; barbie dolls, baking ovens, tea cups etc.

It appears that at very young age we are being steered towards what is socially

expected for a boy to be doing and playing with, and the same thing goes for girls. So at

the very young age we are thought to understand gender roles (which is culturally developed over time and it is something that we accept as being valid. At the young age

we are thought to understand to what biological sex is (male or female), as well as what are psychological characteristics (femininity, masculinity) means. And often times we create attitudes about the sexes according to how we were raised to understand gender roles and we accept them as societal norms.

Proffesor Merez then moves into speaking about presentation of gender in computer games today. The example she gave us is the game called “Dinner dash” . The main character in the game is a girl, and her responsibility is to seat customers, serve customers, and by passing each level, she accumulates money which the character can use to upgrade the restaurant with numerous amenities that would contribute to running a successful restaurant. It appears to be very discriminatory towards women because the game only offers female characters and their job is to cook, clean, serve and tend to customers. It represents women as if they are only capable of doing house work and nothing else.

 According to professor Merez, boy oriented games include shooting, fighting, running which is often associated by society to what boys should do as well as what boys should aspire to be. But, I would like to take this to different direction and present the proof that the society as we know it is changing in the way they genders are presented in today’s computer games.

There are also games that are slowly changing perspectives and views on women. Samus Aran game is presented to be a positive role model for women in a video game. She is a bounty hunter working for the Galactic Federation presented in the game wearing a mechanical armor and having plenty of weapons (beams and missiles). Her job in the game is to hunt down the space pirates and their leader. The game represents women as leaders and fighters which gives a completely different outlook on women in today’s society.

The other example of a game that empowers women is called Lara Croft. In this game the character is presented to be beautiful, intelligent, and athletic. She explores ancient tombs and ruins all over the world (inspired by the movie Tomb rider).So we can see the gender roles in today’s society are slowly changing in how women and men are presented. There is still a lot of room for improvements but there is a positive future on the horizon.

           

So we can see that the gender roles in today’s society are slowly changing in how are presented. There is still a lot of room for improvements but there is a positive future on the horizon.