ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how rhetorics of technological innovation are gendered and have historically constrained women and girls' access to computer technology and resulting STEM careers. It also explores how technofeminist activists and scholars have developed counter-rhetorics to challenge the limiting assumptions about women's techno-literate lives. The chapter demonstrates the ways a technofeminist framework can recover women's technological histories and use the storiographies to re-write and speak back to the larger circulatory rhetorics that oppress women. The rhetoric is far stronger than any reality of today's women working in technology and the larger contemporary history of women who shaped it, such as Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. The cultural assumptions about gender and technology circulate widely and early amid the visually and semiotically gendered pink aisle in toystores and bookstores. People cultural assumptions about gender and technology continue to leave insufficient space for women and girls to become part of a larger rhetorical and material present and future.
