Women who learn computing like men: different gender positions on basic computer courses in adult education

摘要

This article argues that research on gender and adult learning too often regards men and women as unified and separate groups, and does not take intra-gender variation into account. It presents one possible approach to address this problem, in a study of 142 women and 35 men attending basic computer courses in Swedish municipal adult education centres. Two clusters of learning patterns and computer attitudes were found among these students. All men and 20% of the women belonged to one of them, while the other cluster only included women. In this article, gender transgressors, i.e. those women who belonged to the masculine cluster, are focused on and compared with the rest of the women and the men. This is an explorative study with a small sample, but it raises questions about the diversity of students in computer classes in adult education, and points out the importance of taking the variation among female students into account.