I just posted an entry about gender, technology and social construction at misbehaving.net, a great little blog that i’m playing at these days.

I have a tendency to point out when interfaces have gender biases in them. Lately, i keep getting asked what it would mean to create a separate interface for women. This question astonishes me, and i keep chewing on how to properly respond.

There are a lot of things that men and women do differently. For example, men are much better at spatial rotation, but their skills at differentiating shades are atrocious. Yet, there are certain tasks in the real world that men are better suited for and certain tasks that women are better suited for. The real world doesn’t have a gendered interface; it simply allows for different readings, different levels of access. For example, we all manage to negotiate three dimensions, but the cues we use to do so differ.

Technology is socially constructed. In other words, technology does not exist devoid of its creators’ prejudices, biases, cultural assumptions, etc. When men design and build toys and then have other men test them, it should not be surprising that the common experiences of those men get imbibed in the technology. (If this seems surprising, imagine what happens when you assume American roads, habits when designing a car for Amsterdam or Japan. Cultural dependence is not that different.)

The trick is not to design a separate interface (remember, separate but equal never really worked). The goal is to incorporate a wide variety of perspectives into the design and creation of a system, to create a system that people can repurpose to meet their needs. The goal is to encourage flexibility of expression, to not project a limited perspective into the technology. Designers must take into consideration the vast array of potential users, experiences, expectations, not simply their own. This is why things get tricky.