PhD project
Part of the Leibniz-Verbundvorhaben „Digital Inequalities“

This project examines the influence of digital change on gender-related inequalities in East and West Germany since the 1970s. It asks whether digitalisation processes perpetuated, weakened or reproduced gender inequalities. From the perspective of a cultural history of digitalisation, this thesis aims to show how technical, cultural, and social developments in both German states were interwoven from the 1970s until after reunification and contributed to shape a gendered social order that is still in place until today.

The development of microchips in the 1970s laid the foundation for computers and other digital technologies that profoundly impacted the world of work and private life. From the beginning, computers and digital technologies were accompanied by gendered expectations about their usage. The constructed nature of these expectations becomes apparent when examining how they have changed over time. While programming was considered a “female” activity in the first half of the 20th century, the cliché of the male “computer nerd” emerged in the later twentieth century and remains widespread today. The project aims to investigate how, by whom, and in what context gender expectations regarding the use of digital technologies were created and, based on this, how social inequalities got digitalised.

The period under investigation extends from the digital-historical "epochal threshold" of the 1970s to the 1980s, as the decade of a new enthusiasm for home computers (with the computer being a central artefact for digital change) and the emergence of various digital (sub)cultures up to the 1990s. In the 1990s, the computer changed from a calculating machine to a communication medium, partly due to the triumph of the Internet. As such, the computer was anchored in reunified West German society. The comparative German-German perspective will highlight the extent to which the gender history of digitalisation was system-bound while simultaneously emphasising where common, interwoven lines of development ran between the divided societies. The dissertation will analyse political, legal, economic, social and cultural factors whose interplay shaped the digital society and its inequality regimes.