Regendering Technology

In this episode, we look at the historical entanglements of technology and gender. Made in the image of their (often male) designers, technologies end up serving and reproducing patriarchal systems. How can technology finally "undergo a sex change" to overcome its current gender inscriptions? What political imaginaries make that possible, or become possible through feminist approaches to technology? Host Ana-Maria Carabelea tries to answer these questions in conversation with Professor Judy Wajcman and visual and multimedia artist Silvia Binda.

Resources:
Baltan Laboratories, Technology Otherwise
Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
OffDAC

Books by our guests:
Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman
TechnoFeminism by Judy Wajcman
Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism by Judy Wajcman

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger
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Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast is part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

Transcript

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to The Digital Deal Podcast, the series where we talk about how new technologies reshape our democracies and how artists and critical thinkers can help us make sense of these changes. My name is Ana Carabelea, and today I am joined by Judy Wajcman and Silvia Binda.    

Judy Wajcman is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE) and a Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, where she leads the Women in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence research project. She has been a Visiting Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and is a member of the AI100 Standing Committee. Judy has published widely in the fields of science and technology studies, feminist theory, work, and organizations. She is probably best known for her analysis of the gendered nature of technology. Her books include Feminism Confronts Technology, TechnoFeminism, and, most recently Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism.   

Silvia Binda is a visual and multimedia artist, researcher, and creative coder. Her artistic practice critically explores power dynamics in the digital era through a gender perspective, aiming to subvert stereotypical and biased gender representations in social and virtual spaces. Silvia earned her Doctoral Degree in Fine Arts: Practice and Research from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where she was part of the Art and Gender research group. She holds an MFA title in Visual and Multimedia Arts and an MFA in Artistic Practice from the same institution. Silvia is also the founder of offDAC, a multidisciplinary platform that explores the intersection of feminism, art, and technology.  
Welcome to both of you. Thank you so much for joining me today.  

Silvia Binda: Thank you very much for the invitation.  

Judy Wajcman: Hello. Thank you.  

 Ana-Maria Carabelea: When first thinking about this episode with Sylvia, obviously Judy's name came up. And I'm so glad to have both of you here because the work you do challenges this assumption that technology automatically brings about a new order, even a better one, and shows that technology carries a lot of the old into the future. And this is something that we've touched on in our previous episodes as well.   
What I find very interesting is that neither of you fall into this techno-determinism and you straddle very well this fine line between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism to argue that technology has the potential to challenge an existing order, but for that to happen, a societal or cultural shift is needed that would lead technology on a more progressive, feminist path.   
What I'm hoping we can do in this episode is go back in time a bit to see how this historical entanglement of technology and gender came about. How is it perpetuated into the present? But also, how technology has the potential to evolve beyond its current gendered inscriptions. And, if we get there, how this evolution might also be translated into politics or political imaginaries. So, I'd like to ask both of you to start with a brief history of the evolution of this entanglement between gender and technology, but also how it's still with us in the present.  

Judy Wajcman: Right. A brief history. I'm not sure how brief a history can be. There are lots of elements to this. Let me start with even how we think about technology. I happened to go last night to the Science Museum for dinner. There was an annual dinner at the Science Museum here in London. The Science Museum is opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum. And historically, what has happened is that arts and crafts are seen as what women do. But I always think it's very important when thinking about the relationship between gender and technology to have a historical perspective, to think about how recent our conception of engineering and computer science as male areas of expertise is. It was only in the 19th century that engineering gets defined and professionalized as a male activity. As we know, there's been some fantastic books by Mar Hicks that have come out in the last ten years looking at the history of computer programming and documenting how central women were during the Second World War in the invention of computers. The programmers were all women, we've seen all those photos. It's important to see how, over time, programming changes its status and, once again, something that's a low-status occupation becomes very high-status and becomes masculinised during that process. Now we have a whole new so-called technological revolution - how revolutionary it is, we can debate. And someone just said to me the other day: How is it that all the pictures of artificial intelligence are blue? I just looked at the person and said it's kind of blindingly obvious that it's blue because the representation of it is masculine. Of course, it's blue; all the representations of intelligence are blue, stereotypically male. What's important to emphasize is that if we look at the figures today - which we've been doing in our project at the Turing Institute - on how many women are involved in the design end of artificial intelligence, how many women go to machine learning conferences, how many women are at the top of computer science, we find a reproduction of this old distinction that somehow these forms of expertise are seen as masculine forms of expertise.   

I should quickly add that the one area where there are lots of women is biotechnology. We know that's because biology was a much more feminized discipline and lots of women went into biology when it was very low status - physics was high status, biology was low status. So, it is a historically contingent occurrence that, because there are a lot of women in biology when it becomes biotech, there are more women in that. But if you look at the hardware, software, IT bit, which is where the money is going into hugely with AI, it's still very male-dominated actually.    

Maybe I'll just add very quickly one other thing in terms of thinking about the very definition of technology. When I started my PhD way back in the 1970s, I thought about technology as what happened in car factories and in shipyards, in industrial technology. It was when I read Ruth Schwartz Cohen's wonderful piece on the Industrial Revolution in the home, where she talked about how we think of the Industrial Revolution as having to do with the steam engine and the rise of factories - and that's our conception of technology - but a revolution was going on in the home with sewage, electrification and a complete transformation of household technologies. However, we never think of those things as technologies. It was a complete sort of Gestalt switch for me. I suddenly thought there were technologies all around me, but I don't think of them as technologies because they're to do with women's work, the household, and unpaid labor. So, I think both of those things are important: how we think about technology and the historical evolution of technical expertise.  

Silvia Binda: When considering the historical factors, what is for me very fascinating is this very old and, unfortunately, still present dichotomy of nature and culture being attributed to women and men. This affects all the areas of our lives - including technology - because nature, the emotional is attributed to women and the way they think and behave, while the rational, culture, and the intellectual is attributed to men.   

From this derives also the way men and women relate to technology because for some reason, this stereotype is so strong, still present and so deeply rooted in the social, cultural structures, and in education. As a consequence, this reflects the areas of interest for women and men, respectively. It results in motivating boys and men to get involved with technology, to engage with hardware or software - you know, the programmer, the geek. Then girls and women are not motivated - I would even say they are demotivated - because it's not seen as natural. This then also reflects the professional choices. When we consider the environment of startups, tech companies, the bro culture, - just linguistically, it’s a very young and masculine culture that excludes women - it's not a friendly environment.   

And another example of this language, which I find very interesting is the term God mode. It's a term used within computing to describe a hidden feature of a system, a mode that provides access to all system settings, or all system controls within the operating system. We see here how the power and versatility of coding is metaphorically emphasized, this power and impact of coding and technology on society. All this demonstrates how technology is socially attributed to men and embedded in the image of masculinity, and how women, as Judy mentioned, were erased from, or trivialized in history. In fact, there were many women participating in the evolution of programming, to mention just some: Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm, even before there were computers; Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer programming and the development of the compiler; the ENIAC programmers; all the human computers that were women working on the evolution of, for example, the voder - the first voice synthesizer, which, by the way, back then had a male voice, unlike the modern systems which assist us and have usually female voices.   

All these factors are important to consider in order to understand the current social climate, where girls and women are just not motivated to engage with technology. And what I think is also very interesting is that this is creating a new type of dependency or subordination. If women and girls do not understand or engage with technology, then this is a phenomenon where again, there is this relation of subordination. The stereotype of technology being a masculine domain is very wrong and harmful and I think we should seriously start deconstructing it.  

Ana-Maria Carabelea: If we’re starting from this idea that historically we've been in this predicament where women were excluded, and thus we've ended up with a gendered technology that is serving a patriarchal system, and we wanted technology to undergo this sex change, as Judy so nicely puts it. I want us to go a bit into, how we would not want a feminist or feminine technology to be. What are the pitfalls of some of the different feminist approaches to technology? What are the pitfalls of this language of ‘female values’? Let’s start defining it negatively first, and then we can move into what it would look like.  

Judy Wajcman: As you're well aware, for years there's been critiques of what we call essentialism. It's a very difficult problem to avoid because there have been strands of feminism that have quite rightly emphasized that within a patriarchal society, given the division of labour, women are much more sensitized to caring, emotional labour, and a whole set of things which is to do with how we've lived and how we're brought up, but are often taken as somehow biological and natural - the nature-culture thing that somehow women are naturally better at childcare. And what's difficult is to both revalue those things in a society where actually the rational is valued much more than the emotional, but not fall into the trap of seeing that somehow these are kind of natural, biological, essentialist features of women as opposed to results of particular societies that bring people up with particular sets of values. And so, when we think about technologies, we're trying to think what it would be to think of sets of technologies that don't reflect the patriarchal society in which they're designed. And what's important to emphasize - I think there have been strands of feminism, but it's much more the dominant ideology in Silicon Valley - [the ideology] that somehow, we just get the best technology that science will produce, that technological progress is inevitable, that technology progresses and we’re on this teleological quest for general intelligence when these things reap benefits, rather than uncovering the fact that technologies aren't neutral. We get technologies that reflect power relations and the society we're in. At the moment, the main AI technologies are being developed by five huge companies in Silicon Valley. Let me just give you a kind of trivial example. Last night, I was talking to somebody who said he bought an electric car in London and there weren't charging stations and blah, blah. I told him I didn't understand electric cars until I went to California. Electric cars are designed by these Californian guys who spent half their time driving from San Francisco to Palo Alto. They all have houses with garages where there's a charger. They're not charging in the street like in London. They're not designed for roads in India, in Mumbai. They're designed for driving around San Francisco and Palo Alto, where the streets are wide, and where you have a garage. There were old debates, I remember in the 1970s and ‘80s about what we used to call in the old days technological transfer – the idea that you design technologies in the first world and then you take them to Ghana or Nigeria, and you find that there isn't even an electricity system or refrigerators, etc. It's that business of thinking you can design technologies in some universal way and not always have them in a context with users where you think about who's designing them, who are they designed for, who are the designers imagining they’re designed for, and what would it be to design technologies in context, with different kinds of users? And that applies as much to low-income countries, as it does to women users. A trivial example is the size of phones, but there's a lot more profound examples of the fact that technologies reflect the designers and the context in which they're designed.  

Silvia Binda: Absolutely. I can only agree with Judy. We often perceive technology as some artifact, and we tend to think that technology is more neutral and objective than humans. We tend to forget that behind every technology, there is a designer. Behind every AI and every algorithm, there is a human mind at the very start. I think it's important to highlight this. And when talking about feminist technologies or the relation between feminism and technology, for me, the main question is, how can we use technology to deconstruct these misogynist stereotypes and to resist the patriarchal power? I see technology as an opportunity also within the considerations of different feminisms. If we want to rethink technology, we can also try to actualize feminism as a movement. For me, it's about the feminist values and principles that I want to involve in our interaction with technology. And these principles emphasize empowerment, agency, autonomy, and building a more equal and fair society. We should think about how we can approach this, and a first step would be, of course, to stop mystifying technology. I think we should start opening this black box and require big tech companies to be more transparent and care about the educational aspects of the technologies they are producing and selling to us because they are such an integral part of our everyday lives. Technology invades our day-to-day life, our intimacy, and our privacy, and so we really should be more aware of what is going on on the inside.  

Judy Wajcman: I absolutely agree. In terms of what's going on inside the technology, I think it's important as well to recognize how it’s represented that these technologies are made and how they're really made. There are several books now on ghost labour - the labor that goes into AI. In San Francisco and Palo Alto, you have highly paid engineers getting a startup going, looking for venture capital. And then you find that they rely on people in the Philippines (and in all these places) who are not just content moderators. There are all kinds of ways in which a huge amount of labor is contracted out from the US to countries where wages are low in order to make those startups work. And we know that predominantly it's women at home who are doing that work. So, I think it's important to expose the labour that is actually going into these technologies and how unjust it is that there's these highly paid engineers getting a fortune and shares in the company, and this extraordinary labour that on the whole women are doing at home (very often mothers to supplement their income) being incredibly low paid and never getting shares in the company. I think partly, the image of technologies produced by these young genius guys is not an honest, transparent picture of how actually the technologies are made and how they continually rely on this labour to make them look frictionless and smooth and like they're working (because even to have them working, they rely on all of this labour). I think it's incredibly important for us to keep stating and exposing this.  

Ana-Maria Carabelea: I think it’s important that we started the discussion from feminism and moved on to highlight all the other things that technology obscures and all the other categories it excludes. To me, that is a very good sign of what a feminist technology would be. And I'm so glad you both got to that point fairly quickly: that it's actually about it being more inclusive in general and looking at all these excluded categories, whether they're women, people working in the global south, or other categories that haven't been perceived as either consumers or target audiences of these technologies. I find it very important to stress that.   

Sylvia, you're doing a residency with one of our partners in the European Digital Deal project, and your project is very much focusing on these issues. Can we look into how you're going to approach the project and how the ideas we've discussed feed into that?  

Silvia Binda: Absolutely. The project I'm developing is called Reclaiming Technology: A Collaborative Feminist Approach. My idea is to develop a series of activities that contribute to learning about technology for different groups of participants, irrespective of their age, gender, or social background.  I want to research and debate the relation between feminism, art, and technology and I also want to transfer this idea of taking back control over technology. This is inspired by the maker and hacker culture, by reverse engineering methods when analyzing hardware, opening it up, and seeing literally what is inside. It's also about learning basic programming, basic coding, and the basics of electronics so that you can then adopt this critical approach. I put knowledge as a tool of empowerment and freedom at the center of my project. I also want to highlight the open-source principle, because this is what leads to transparency. I call it open hardware, open-source hardware, because it's open by design, it's not hidden, instead all the components are open, and everything is published online so that you can see what materials and what code was used. This is a project I am developing in Hungary, and I will also involve local communities. At the end, I want to also give support and visibility to female digital creators, because they are still very underrepresented in this area. Besides this knowledge sharing and collective learning, I would like to organize talks and small conferences on specific related topics. So, there will be programmes throughout the year. I really expect to have some good feedback from the local communities.    

Ana-Maria Carabelea: I was wondering about the socio-political context in which your residency is happening in Budapest, Hungary - one of the countries in Europe that have in recent years seen a resurgence of conservative patriarchal narratives. Has that influenced or changed the way you see your project or the way you've conceived your project?    

Silvia Binda: Yes, absolutely. It is a factor I was considering - and it's not only Hungary but also other European countries as well - because it's important to understand this context in relation to feminism. This term can carry very negative connotations and is even perceived as a word you prefer to avoid, or you should be ashamed to say out loud. That's why I think it's very important to highlight this feminist approach, to reestablish this term in a positive way. The media portrayal of feminism is also very negative, and the government rhetoric describes feminism and gender as an ideology, a harmful ideology that is affecting traditional family values. In this context, it's important to support projects that are trying to pursue a feminist approach, because in the end, attacks on feminism are also attacks on democracy.  

Ana-Maria Carabelea: That’s where I was hoping we would get with the discussion. These more feminist, inclusive approaches to technologies, what sort of political imaginaries do they open? What sort of political action could they lead to? I know it’s a tough one. It’s probably the question everyone tries to answer, and no one can. But if you have any thoughts about it.   

Judy Wajcman: One of the things I take great joy in is that in this current technological revolution, a lot of the discussions about bias in AI, what's going on in AI, are completely being led by feminist scholars. When I was doing this work - when we had the digital revolution, let alone when I began with the microelectronic revolution in the eighties - there was hardly a feminist voice. There were more in the digital revolution. Now, if you look at the leading people who - and I think very convincingly - talk about gender and racial bias in algorithms, the need for regulation, particularly in relation to children, they're a whole generation of young feminist science and technology studies scholars. Young feminists who are very engaged with technology, because this generation of women is using technology as much as men. So, I think the debates and discussions about algorithms and how they're being used are much more infused with feminist discussion. That's a ray of hope, in my context, which I know isn't yours.  

Silvia Binda: If I may add, I think that in terms of policies, what will be necessary in the future is to introduce some basic tech literacy in schools, so [children] learn from early on. This is a transformation that will involve a change in the school curricula, not only in some schools but globally. It should be standard knowledge because this type of knowledge should not be kept for a selected group of people or engineers. If this knowledge is institutionally democratized, then it's not a source of manipulation, power and great capital anymore.  

Judy Wajcman: I think that's absolutely right. And I think the debate has really matured over the last few years. It used to be a very controversial thing to say that technology reflects the values of society. Everyone now takes that for granted, right? Everyone knows. I shouldn't say everyone, but I think in public discussions about technologies, there's much more of a sense now that technology does contain social values, that we need to think about the kind of technology we want and that we could design it differently. I think that debate is much more sophisticated than it was a few years ago.   

And the whole debate about regulation, particularly in Europe, has been good and important. I can tell you whenever I'm in Silicon Valley, they're very worried about European regulation. I just think, great, that's terrific! Let Europe be ahead in terms of regulation and then the companies will eventually have to adopt these things. I think that is very hopeful.  

Ana-Maria Carabelea: I'm glad to end on that positive note. Before we go, I always ask this for listeners who want to dive deeper into this topic. Do you have any recommendations of articles, research pieces, books, artworks that you've recently come across? Sylvia?  

Silvia Binda: I would like to recommend this year's programme of Boltan Laboratories, which is titled Technology Otherwise. Boltan Laboratories is a cultural interdisciplinary lab based in Eindhoven, Netherlands. And this year, they are practicing this hopeful approach towards technology, exploring how technology can help us live otherwise. The idea is to answer questions like: does technology belong to us, what technology, which us? The programme includes a series of workshops, exhibitions, lectures, talks, and residencies. I recommend to everyone who will be around the Netherlands to check out this year's programme of Boltan Laboratories, titled Technology Otherwise.   

Judy Wajcman: That sounds great. Can I recommend, as a professor, a book that I think is great?   

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Of course!  

Judy Wajcman: Data Feminism. I think this book is wonderful, and the authors are terrific. And I think data feminism is really important. There's a very extensive literature now on gender bias in the data that feeds algorithms and there's increasing awareness of that. But I think what Ignazio and Klein really emphasize is the gender gap in data. Because of the way data is collected, there's so much we literally don't know about women's position. We found, even in Britain, that there weren't good statistics being collected on how many women were in machine learning, for example. And we know that right through society, there's a gap in terms of the data, which then reflects a gap in terms of the research that's done, that then feeds into the financing of particular kinds of health developments, and all these things. So, I thought the book was terrific in trying to say, that actually one of the things we really need to do as feminists - and I think feminist economists have done a wonderful job on this - is to make sure that the data is available. We need the data to then make arguments and push for various resources for women's benefit.  

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Right. That's great. Thank you. And of course, I'd recommend reading Judy's books, which are great. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was a great pleasure to have you.   

Silvia Binda: Thank you so much. It was a great pleasure talking to you.  

Judy Wajcman: Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.   

Ana-Maria Carabelea: That's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed it. The Digital Deal Podcast is part of the European Digital Deal, a three-year project co-funded by Creative Europe. If you want to find out more about the project, check out our website: www.ars.electronica.art/eudigitaldeal.