Cracking the Gender Code

The digital world, its advertising machinery and the popular media are pushing women back into traditional roles and once again creating a “superior” hypermacho expert male. Women must look critically at who is in charge of the new technology and challenge the gender codes that can work against them. In this path-breaking book, Melanie Stewart Millar explores power relations in the digital world and asks us to question what is really going on. How is technology shaping our future? What is the role of women within digital culture? What is the corporate agenda? How is it influencing women’s work?

Provocative and incisive, Cracking the Gender Code questions how the gains women have made through feminism over the last decades are being eroded. It looks specifically at how the articles and images of Wired, the magazine of the digital generation, are detrimental to women — a discourse that may be establishing the underlying ideology of a far-reaching communications industry. Stewart Millar argues that simply being computer literate or knowing how to use the Net is not good enough. Women need to demystify the technology and crack the gender code to participate equally in the cyber world of the future.