Women's position in information technology (IT) employment in the wider context of feminist debates on gender and technology and indeed, interest in gender, science and technology developed largely in response to the long-standing marginalisation of women from technically-oriented work and professions, such as engineering. 

Technology was seen as a defining feature of masculinity, producing and perpetuating occupational segregation by sex in the workplace. Since then, groundbreaking developments in digitalisation and biotechnologies have led many contemporary feminists to surmise that the traditional link between technology and male privilege is finally being severed. Since the ground breaking developments in digitalisation and biotechnologies - that have led many contemporary feminists to surmise that the link between technology and male privilege is finally being severed. Yet, there is a suspicion that some existing societal patterns of inequality are being reproduced in a new technological guise. After all, our view of the woman-machine relationship has long oscillated between pessimistic fatalism and utopian optimism, technophobia and technomania.