Virtual power: gendering the nurse-technology relationship.

Area of Science:

• Social history of technology
• Gender studies in healthcare
• Nursing informatics

Background:

• Traditional analyses of technology and consumers reinforce gender and hierarchy in nursing.
• Existing frameworks fail to capture the nuanced relationship between nurses and technology.
• A new analytical framework is needed to understand this dynamic.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a new framework for analyzing the technology-nursing relationship using gender analysis.
• To examine the early nurse practitioner movement as a gendered technologic system.
• To illuminate nurses' agency in shaping healthcare knowledge domains.

Main Methods:

• Social history of technology methodology
• Analysis of gender within the healthcare technologic network
• Examination of the 1960s nurse practitioner movement

Main Results:

• Nurses demonstrated agency in shaping traditionally male-dominated knowledge domains.
• The study identified gendered ways of knowing within the healthcare-technology relationship.
• The nurse practitioner movement was operationalized as part of a gendered technologic system.

Conclusions:

• A gender-focused social history of technology approach offers new insights into the nursing-technology relationship.
• Understanding nurses' agency is crucial for analyzing the evolution of healthcare technology.
• This framework provides new standpoints for analyzing the nursing-technology dichotomy in the future.