Gender, work and technology in the information workplace from Remington to the ATM

We consider the relations between gender and technology in the workplace, focusing onclerical work in the information workplace, especially the finance and insurance sector.Our goal is to excavate a ‘hidden history’ of how clerical work and the artifacts whichsustain it have been understood and deployed under different cultural and economiccircumstances. We employ an analysis of technosocial relations developed in Science andTechnology Studies in which meanings about ‘technology’ and ‘society’ are mutuallyconstitutive, changeable, and in need of maintenance in order to sustain their conceptualcoherence. By drawing on examples from the USA and Canada, we argue that at variouspoints over the twentieth century particular office technologies became ‘feminized’, orassociated with characteristics coded as feminine, as a means of shaping spatial practiceand social relations in the workplace