Cracking the Gender Code

This is one of those books that had to be written. Cracking the Gender Code explores how digital technological change is being packaged and sold to the public through cultural messages that support a particular view of how the future should be organized - a view that is "profoundly sexist and racist". ...The questions make the book worth reading.

After delineating an account of "the roots of digital culture," Millar develops a typology of feminist responses to it. She describes both "liberal feminist" and "cyber-feminist" positions as being positive towards "digital culture" and in opposition to earlier, "eco-feminist" positions, which were inherently hostile to virtually all aspects of technological innovation.

Millar's book is rooted firmly in cultural theory and analysis... ...the new technology, presents women with a stark choice. If we do not understand it and organize to control it, others will use it to control us, and in that case we will suffer all the cultural, economic and political indignities that technology's most hostile opponents have described.

Melanie Stewart Millar's book offers an analysis of the digital world's exploitation and exclusion of women, particularly women of colour. She makes a strong case for looking at the world of "hypermacho" man and digital discourse. Her prime example is her examination of Wired magazine. She poses the question: "what is going on here and what does it mean for women?" and explores the relationship between the rise of digital technology, the development of capitalism and the entrenchment of stereotypes of men and women.

Provocative and incisive, this book questions how the gains women have made through feminism over the last decades are being eroded. Author Melanie 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.