ABSTRACT
Gender relations play a central role in the creation and constitution of information technologies, which bear their imprint in a host of ways. Information technologies also, in their turn, affect sexual divisions of labour, women's working patterns and the gender relations of workplaces. In this chapter I look at this aspect of the gender/information technology relationship - the role of information technology in shaping and reshaping women's patterns of employment and sexual divisions of labour. This chapter is concerned with developments in employment and information technologies at the level of national global economies, and with large-scale trends in women's work. Here, I focus particularly upon the practices and strategies of employers of women in their use of female labour. The women themselves come to the foreground in Chapter 5, where I examine gendered work at close quarters, and the impact of information technologies on the detailed labour processes of jobs done by women and on gender relations within workplaces.
