Since Durack (1997): The Continued Work of Documenting Women\u27s Contributions to Technical and Professional Communication

In this presentation I will examine how thinking about women’s technical and professional communication (TPC) has changed over the years. Key ideas include acknowledging women’s historical contributions to TPC; analyzing these contributions in terms of technology, gender, and power; and inviting and accepting diverse women’s contributions into the TPC fold. I trace three orienting frameworks. The first is from Durack (1997), who problematized the dualistic thinking of public vs. private, household vs. industry, and masculine vs. feminine labor. She felt that many kinds of women’s work—both public and private—should be recognized as technical communication. In TPC, there has subsequently been a movement to document the contributions of these women, both historically and contemporarily. Second, I examine some commentary from Koerber (2000) and Moeller and Frost (2016), who posit that, as we endeavor to document women’s contributions to TPC, we must remember to examine the complex relationships between society’s views on technology and gender, and to keep in mind that just because women contributed to TPC, it doesn’t mean that their contributions liberated or uplifted themselves or other women. Finally, I would like to examine Jones’s (2016) invitation to use a social justice approach to TPC. While Durack (1997) was landmark scholarship, the author documented historical TPC contributions made by women in a Western, heteronormative context. Some exciting new work, such as that by Ledbetter (2018) and Raign (2018) examines contributions by women of color and outside of the normative wife/mother sexuality implied by Durack. My audience takeaways are that the task Durack proposed to us is not yet done; that, as we document women’s contributions to tech comm, we need to keep complex relationships between gender, technology, and power at the forefront of our analysis; and that moving forward, a social justice perspective to our work is imperative