What is it that influences girls’ choices of new technology? How is digital creativity affected by gender norms? “Digital Gender & Aesthetic Technology” aims to make visible females as creative developers of the Internet and new technology, through interviews with students, artists, project managers, and entrepreneurs. The prevailing social norms appear to be reflected on the Internet as “digital gender norms,” where girls and boys prefer apparently different communication tools. While working with the question of “digital gender,” I have developed the hypothesis of “Aesthetic Technology,” namely that girls often have an artistic approach towards technology. Girls mainly learn technology for a personal reason, planning to create something once they have learned the technique, and their goal often have aesthetic preferences. The question of girls “becoming technical,” is more complicated than one might first think, in relation to gender. Even though young girls are often just as interested in technology as young boys are, it is difficult for them to keep or adapt their technical interest to normative femininity in their teens. Another problem is that expressions of technical competence or innovation, which do not correspond to the predominant male norm, might be hard to recognize. Females who study within the field of creative digital technology often begin their career by struggling with questions of equality, instead of just practicing their profession.
Articles by Sol Morén
\Sol Morén is a Swedish digital artist and senior lecturer at Umeå University. Her interest is in questions concerning how gender norms may affect creative use of new technology. Morén could be considered one of the female pioneers of digital art in the north of Sweden. At the Academy of Fine Arts, in the 1990s, she was one of the first to transition from analogue photo and video processing into the digital world that was just opening up. This led to a position as an artistic researcher at the Interactive Institute in Umeå in the 2000s. Morén is currently employed at the Department of Creative Studies, doing artistic research and development within the field of ICT.\