Found this book on Stanford's Lane Reading Room Digital Humanities Shelf: LB1028.43 B64 2000
David Bolt and Ray Crawford, "Digital Divide"

It has a chapter titled "The Gender Gap." It discusses the case of Fulmore Middle School in Austin, which has grants from Bill Gates to pursue a number of technology and education initiatives.

Specifically, it raises the question of how girls and boys tend to approach computers in the classroom, touching on scarcity of technological resources and girls' withdrawal and subsequently reduced access to computers.

The chapter also touches on increasing efforts (though still too few in number) to create technological domains (games, sites like chickclick.com, after school tech programs) that are empowering, safe spaces for girls to learn. Part of this effort is the "girl" software market. The chapter profiles Nancie S. Martin (Director at Mattel Media-Software for Girls, a division of Mattel Toy Company). Her division has put out "Barbie Fashion Designer" which sold more than 500k copies in its first two months on the market. The success was also met with criticisms (that I myself would and have lodged) that the software supports existing stereotypes and implicitly labels other, more challenging software products as "for boys." Mattell also bought Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon software in 1999. A company called Girl Games (Austin, TX; president Laura Groppe) has created titles such as "Let's Talk About Me."

I don't have time to do analysis on this right now. All in all, I didn't really learn anything new from the chapter but at least it gave me a whole bunch of names of people for my "Barbie Project" (as discussed with Fred Turner, doing a research project on the design process and how gender stereotypes get encoded in software; it actually seems fairly obvious phrased that way, but I bet there would be some interesting fodder to chew on once I got deep into the research process).