This book made my blood boil! I'd give it no stars if I could.
Dale Spender presents her own biased observations as fact, wrapped up in the "women as victim" agenda. Just like the early scientists who used the emerging evolutionary theory to support the "primacy of white man", this is an arrogant and badly one-sided "history" that presents cyberspace and technology as yet another male bastion built to keep the women-folk out.
As a woman who was in on the net before anyone but uni students had heard of it, I have to say that she is badly, badly mistaken. But she wouldn't know that because she didn't talk to any of the men and women involved, she just projected her own assumptions and uses raw participation numbers to support them. Since she attacks the intent as well as the result, this is unconscionable.
If the contents of this book were presented as a research project at any university in the world, it would be knocked back for the lack of validation/triangulation to support the conclusions drawn.
In the four years since this book was published Spender has been proven very wrong. Access to cyberspace was and is now still, not determined by gender, but by economics!