Nursing work offers a unique lens through which we can examine women’s work in relation to technology. The chapter follows a path from early nursing information systems to modern decision-support systems, to care robots. These technologies stimulate a debate about care and its nature. They also raise design-related issues concerning the limits of automation with respect to standardization and modelling. While standardization is an essential part of nursing documentation systems, nursing protocols, and care plans, the question is how to make space for judgment based on nurses’ experience and intuition. Another main concern with regard to nursing information systems is that they integrate a managerial logic into care work. The chapter also addresses the ethical discourse on robotics – the question of whether or not activities performed by a care robot can and should be considered ‘genuine’ caretaking. It raises fundamental questions about power, autonomy, and control in relation to robotics and the automation of care, foregrounding power issues and the need to address them through a focus on intersectionality.

Protest movements are gaining momentum across the world, with Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and strong pro-democracy protests in Chile and Hong Kong taking centre stage. At the same time, many governments are increasing their surveillance capacities in the name of protecting the public and addressing emergencies. Irrespective of whether these events and/or political strategies relate to the war on terror, pro-democracy or anti-racism protests, state resort to technology and increased surveillance as a tool to control the masses and population has been similar. This chapter focusses on the chilling effect of facial recognition technology (FRT) use in public spaces on the right to peaceful assembly and political protest. Pointing to the absence of oversight and accountability mechanisms on government use of FRT, the chapter demonstrates that FRT has significantly strengthened state power. Attention is drawn to the crucial role of tech companies in assisting governments in public space surveillance and curtailing protests, and it is argued that hard human rights obligations should bind these companies and governments, to ensure that political movements and protests can flourish in the post-COVID-19 world.

This chapter introduces the reader to facial recognition technology (FRT) history and the development of FRT from the perspective of science and technologies studies. Beginning with the traditionally accepted origins of FRT in 1964–1965, developed by Woody Bledsoe, Charles Bisson, and Helen Wolf Chan in the United States, Simon Taylor discusses how FRT builds on earlier applications in mug shot profiling, imaging, biometrics, and statistical categorisation. Grounded in the history of science and technology, the chapter demonstrates how critical aspects of FRT infrastructure are aided by scientific and cultural innovations from different times of locations: that is, mugshots in eighteenth-century France; mathematical analysis of caste in nineteenth-century British India; innovations by Chinese closed-circuit television companies and computer vision start-ups conducting bio-security experiments on farm animals. This helps to understand FRT development beyond the United States-centred narrative. The aim is to deconstruct historical data, mathematical, and digital materials that act as ‘back-stage elements’ to FRT and are not so easily located in infrastructure yet continue to shape uses today. Taylor’s analysis lays a foundation for the kinds of frameworks that can better help regulate and govern FRT as a means for power over populations in the following chapters.

In situations ranging from border control to policing and welfare, governments are using automated facial recognition technology (FRT) to collect taxes, prevent crime, police cities, and control immigration. FRT involves the processing of a person’s facial image, usually for identification, categorisation, or counting. This ambitious handbook brings together a diverse group of legal, computer, communications, and social and political science scholars to shed light on how FRT has been developed, used by public authorities, and regulated in different jurisdictions across five continents. Informed by their experiences working on FRT across the globe, chapter authors analyse the increasing deployment of FRT in public and private life. The collection argues for the passage of new laws, rules, frameworks, and approaches to prevent harms of FRT in the modern state and advances the debate on scrutiny of power and accountability of public authorities which use FRT. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Factory work was and still is strongly connected with images of masculinity and the ideal worker being a man. The chapter starts out with historical studies of women’s work in the electronics industry, meatpacking, and the automotive industry. The findings from these studies point to theories of the gendered organization: the gender subtext in organizations and its ‘omnirelevance’, the institutional nature of gendered notions of skill and performance, as well as the diversity and persistence of masculinities. Images of masculinity, one of the main barriers to ‘undoing gender’ in modern industrial settings, are particularly dominant in male-dominated industrial companies – in construction, mining, oil and gas – which continue resisting acceptance of women workers and women engineers, although new technologies have reduced the physical strains of the work together with a shift of skills requirements. The chapter also discusses feminist research on the gender dynamics of globalization of production and household relations based on cases studies in East Asian countries. It concludes with design considerations for the modern industrial workplace.

This chapter frames the book. It explains the focus of women as a historically highly relevant category while acknowledging the multiplicities of (gender) identities and relations that the rise of queer theory has opened. It also draws attention to the different experiences that women have at work in relation to technology, which are mediated in complex ways by ethnic and class backgrounds as well as issues of sexuality. The chapter outlines the different disciplinary orientations the book draws upon – including feminist theory, science, technology, and society studies, sociology of work, political economy, organizational studies, labour history, as well as CSCW, HCI, and participatory design – to then introduce the key concepts and theories used in the book: the distinction between sex and gender, intersectionality, the problematic notion of race, the view of engineers/designers making ethical-political choices, the concept of technology. It forwards the notion of practice-based research and the importance of involving users in design decisions as key to achieving gender equality in design. These concepts will be elaborated as well as made ‘practical’ in the course of the book.

Facial recognition technology (FRT) has been actively deployed by both private and public sectors for a wide range of purposes in China. As the technology has become more prevalent, the laws governing FRT have developed rapidly in recent years. While the use of FRT is increasingly regulated in the country, the regulatory restrictions can be invariably lifted for the reason of public security. Government agencies have consistently claimed this regulatory exemption for their massive FRT deployment. Moreover, the liability for government’s abuse or misuse of personal data is relatively insignificant when compared with that for private parties. Based on recent laws and cases, this chapter explains China’s asymmetric regulatory framework and the factors shaping it.

Like clerical work much of data work is skilled but undervalued, while other parts of data work are standardized, repetitive, and organized via platforms. Feminist HCI emphasizes the skills and care that are needed to create meaningful data. While online platform work is not necessarily women’s work, research suggests that significant gender disparities exist. The chapter presents a number of case studies ranging from outsourced ML (machine learning) data work in Latin America to small-town Indian women AMT or crowdworkers in India. While offering work to women who would otherwise not have access to an independent income, the studies also highlight their vulnerability to pressures arising from work and the demands from family members. The chapter underlines the importance of labour issues connected to modern workplaces – the invisibility of the workers, the precarity of their work situation, the lack of opportunities for learning, and so forth. It points at design issues such as how to support data workers in producing data with care, and how to provide them with opportunities to learn and professionalize their work.

This chapter goes back to the arguments about the importance of context for design-oriented research on women’s work. It addresses questions such as: What are the most relevant aspects of context, how much do designers need to know about them, and what are the methods that can help them understand and deal with contextual elements in their work? The chapter revisits concepts that help understand contexts and their epistemological roots and discusses approaches to dealing with context in practical terms: learning about the history of a place and its culture; understanding politics, policymaking, and the institutional/organizational context; getting a hold on working conditions and skills; making space for intersectionality. The chapter includes a retrospective analysis of two of the authors’ own design/research projects, looking into how they dealt with context. It formulates a set of questions intended to help designers develop strategies that will maintain a sensitivity towards gender issues.

This chapter follows the debate of data work, without which AI-based technologies would not exist. It introduces concepts that capture bias in datasets and algorithms from a feminist data ‘ethics of care’ approach and discusses approaches to avoid or countervail bias. The chapter then turns to work and the question how to make AI-based technologies work in practice. Examples, most of them from IT development and health care, help understand the centrality of care, trust, and human–algorithm collaborations, what is often called ‘the human in the loop’, as key elements determining the usefulness of AI-based systems and tools to work. Trust and care are central to data and algorithmic stewardship, which will need to be mobilized in relation to AI and machine learning if we are going to achieve gender justice in future work processes.

This chapter analyses the legal framework for the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in the public sector in Germany, with a particular emphasis on the pertinent German data protection and police laws. Under German law, a legal basis is required for these real-world applications of FRT. The article discusses whether the pertinent laws provide such legal basis and what limits they impose.

This chapter examines facial recognition technology (FRT) and its potential for bias and discrimination against racial minorities in the criminal justice system. The chapter argues that by defining the technology as an automated process, there is an implied objectivity, suggesting that such technologies are free from errors and prejudices. However, facial recognition is dependent on data used to train an algorithm, and operators make judgements about the wider social system and structures it is deployed within. The algorithms that underpin FRT will continue to advance the status quo with respect to power relations in the criminal justice system, unless both data-based and societal-based issues of inequality and discrimination are remedied. FRT is imbued with biases that can negatively impact outcomes for minority groups. The chapter argues that there is a need to focus on systemic discrimination and inequality (rather than calling for a ban of the technology). While the data-based issues are more straightforward to address, this alone will not be sufficient: addressing broader and more complex social factors must be a key focus in working towards a more equal society.

Scholarly treatment of facial recognition technology (FRT) has focussed on human rights impacts with frequent calls for the prohibition of the technology. While acknowledging the potentially detrimental and discriminatory uses that FRT use by the state has, this chapter seeks to advance discussion on what principled regulation of FRT might look like. It should be possible to prohibit or regulate unacceptable usage while retaining less hazardous uses. In this chapter, we reflect on the principled use and regulation of FRT in the public sector, with a focus on Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The authors draw on their experiences as researchers in this area and on their professional involvement in oversight and regulatory mechanisms in these jurisdictions and elsewhere. Both countries have seen significant growth in the use of FRT, but regulation remains patchwork. In comparison with other jurisdictions, human rights protections, and avenues for individual citizens to complain and seek redress remain insufficient in Australia and New Zealand.

The material for this chapter is interviews the authors conducted with women who pioneered research on women’s work and technology as well as with researchers who are earlier in their career and continue this tradition with their own ideas about gender and design. Analysis of these interviews shows that the ways that people come to focus on gender are varied: they come from different disciplinary backgrounds, have developed their approach in different contexts seizing different research opportunities, and forged their own pathways in making a career in women/gender studies and technology development. This chapter takes up these personal biographies, highlighting the different starting points, research interests, and struggles.