Hacking the Narrative: How a Philadelphia Hackerspace Uses Storytelling to Explore the Gender Gap in Technology

The Hacktory, a technology education and creative space in Philadelphia, has developed an interactive workshop, “Hacking the Gender Gap.” Attendees are asked to write stories of their positive and negative experiences with technology and post them on a physical timeline. The resulting clusters of experiences at key ages provide visual data, highlight patterns, and provide insight into how people engage with technology now and in recent history. We have run this activity with women-only and mixed gendered crowds, each time with interesting results. The stories and patterns help communicate the pervasive nature of this problem, and give form to the underlying cultural bias at work, which current academic research on the gender gap doesn’t cover sufficiently. We see these narratives as living data, both personal expositions that provide an accessible human angle, and information that can be mapped. We would like to share our experience, how the workshop discussions tend to take shape, and how mixed-gender discussions have differed from women-only. The Hacktory plans to transform the data into an online app in early 2013, which will be a compelling instance of a digital humanities project. We aim to gather data from around the globe and share it freely