Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine, London: Routledge, 1998, £45.00, paper £13.99, 216 pp.

Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert (eds), Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, London: Routledge, 1997, £45.00, paper £14.99, 264 pp.

Feminist research can be characterised by the key question which its practitioners habitually ask: ‘Who is doing what to whom here?’ By asking this provocative question, and by thinking through the answers, feminist researchers have been able to make the tacit, often taken-for-granted structuring work done through gender into a visible phenomenon open to discussion. In this way, feminist thinking has been able to make strategic and principled interventions in a number of apparently gender-neutral fields, doing much to expose exclusionary and inequable practices both historically and in the present.