In a world where the pace of technological change moves fast and it seems that things change quickly, some things appear to remain little changed with time. One of those things is women’s relationships to technology. Although it is true that many of us know women who work in technological fields feeling comfortable with working in what society once considered (and arguably still does) the male domains of computing and engineering, and that many girls and women feel they can enter those fields, women’s low representation in computing and engineering persists.
This book revisits the vast research literature about gender and technology with the aim of helping designers understand what a gender perspective and a focus on intersectionality can contribute to designing information technology (IT) systems and artifacts and assisting organizations as they work to develop work cultures that are supportive of women and marginalized genders/people. The book will also be of interest to a range of readers interested in gender and technology at work, including those interested in the sociology of work, gender and occupational health, gender studies, and technology studies. We argue that the design of information and communication technology (ICT) systems that promote gender equality has to be anchored in the particular context that the design of those systems addresses. This requires designers to deeply engage with this context. This is a complex endeavor. This chapter takes a first step toward this aim by introducing the key concepts that will be used and further developed throughout the book: gender, gender subtext / the genderedness of organizations, technology, work practice, working conditions, skill, intersectionality, feminist theory, queer theory, race/racism.
Framing the Book
In the last forty or fifty years we have seen ebbs and flows in scholarship concerned with varied aspects of women and technological change – many of which we will address in the pages that follow. Much has been written across multiple disciplines and areas of study (e.g., labour history; sociology of work; women’s occupational health; women’s and gender studies; science, technology, and society studies), which has informed debates about women and technological change at work. Both historic and contemporary studies concerned with women and technological change at work have yielded important insights about how technological change is implicated in ongoing power struggles women and men experience at work. However, little has been written about how to design technological systems in general, and information technologies in particular that support more than just workplace experiences for women and other disadvantaged groups. With this book we seek to address this gap.
Areas such as computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human–computer interaction (HCI) increasingly grapple with what it means to employ a design-justice framework (Costanza-Chok Reference Costanza-Chock2018) and design for the overlooked (e.g., Schorch et al. Reference Schorch, Wan, Randall and Wulf2016). While we are excited to see new generations of scholars and practitioners address these issues, we are also aware that considerable work related to these areas has been undertaken in the past. As much of the early work was completed prior to the widespread digitization of scholarly sources we now take for granted, one of our interests and aims is to bring some of this historic work to contemporary audiences. Recounting some of the historic work concerned with women and technological change yields insights about the links between varied epistemological traditions that contemporary HCI and CSCW practitioners increasingly draw on. It also allows us to foreground the many ways that exploring the broad contexts in which women’s work occurs has yielded insights about how the interplay between technological and gendering processes occurs.
There is much to be gained by focussing on the rich insights past work has produced as we seek to move beyond what were arguably simplistic views of gender in the past, towards approaches that reflect today’s sensitivities towards gender as well as intersectionality. Taking a historical and intersectional approach allows us to outline what a gendered perspective can contribute to the design of technologies in general, and in particular the designing of IT systems and artifacts. It also provides a starting point for probing how research concerned with intersectionality can enrich design practices and emergent work concerned with design justice.
In this book we explore these issues in several steps. We go back to the rich debates about gender, science, and technology that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and in particular the ethical and political issues feminists raised. A large part of the book deals with work in different domains – from factories to hospitals and the gig economy – from a gender perspective. Our goal is to highlight the importance of considering context in a design-justice framework, and through a review of past work about women and technological change to identify some key aspects of context that have yielded significant insights about the gendering of technological change.
The material here will be of interest to those in computing (and especially those working in CSCW and HCI), design, social sciences, occupational health, and organizational studies. As new generations of scholars across areas such as gender studies, labour studies, sociology, and design seek to understand the interplay between technological and gendering processes in order to influence change, historical work offers a foundation while more recent work in HCI, CSCW, and design justice yields insights of interest to those in the social sciences concerned with work, technology, and gender.
There is much to be learned from looking back at theoretical work. However, we seek here also to move beyond a recounting of how varied disciplines have informed theoretical debates and the insights they have yielded. In the final chapters of the book, we revisit the contributions that feminist debates have made to the ethical political perspective towards design. We also discuss the challenges of contextualizing women’s work and focus on steps we can take in taking gender and intersectional approaches forwards in thinking about gender and technology and gender and work.
Such a project needs to be informed by many voices. Towards that end, we have interviewed pioneers as well as researchers who are earlier in their career: women who have influenced feminist scholarship concerned with design or who currently work in CSCW, HCI, and adjacent areas (such as science, technology, and society studies), addressing gender issues. We have attempted to include women from varied parts of the world (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Ecuador, the UK, and the USA). This allowed us to broaden the voices and perspectives upon which we have drawn. We have included materials from these interviews throughout the text. Among the interesting points that emerged in conducting these interviews is the different pathways that members of our team and those we interviewed travelled to arrive at their interest and focus on gender issues.
The Focus on Women
Why write a book about the gendering of women’s work, not including men? Why not be more inclusive of other marginalized groups, such as gender minorities and people of color? In her book Shaping women’s work: Gender, employment and information technology (1996), Juliet Webster argued,
Many feminist thinkers, particularly those working in a post-structuralist or post-modernist tradition, might argue for a wider focus on ‘gender’ as opposed to one simply on ‘women’, in order to introduce an understanding of the shaping of people’s (men’s and women’s) gender identities experiences and subjectivities into the analysis. … By focusing on ‘women’ as opposed to ‘gender’ in the broad sense of the concept, I am choosing not to focus on men and masculinity. I am less interested in the gender relations of work and technology and their implications for men and masculinity than I am in the gender relations of women’s work.
The last sentence in this quote also presents our position – we are mainly interested in the gender relations of women’s work and how an understanding of those can help achieve more gender equality in IT/technology design. We are, of course, aware that as gender norms are changing, the concerns of gender minorities need proper attention.
We use ‘woman’ here as a category that stands for an enormous diversity of people from different cultures, ethnic and social backgrounds, and sexual identities that, historically, have been called women without considering and respecting their diversity. Of course, we are aware that the category ‘women’ is tremendously diverse and includes (for example) heterosexual, lesbian and bisexual women (who may be CIS-gendered or trans),Footnote 1 as well as those who identify as queer.Footnote 2
Writing about women without recuperating the male/female binary is challenging. In the words of Lucy Suchman, the rise of queer theory and queer studies has ‘not only destabilised the idea of gender as binary’ but called attention to the multiplicity of relations between experienced and enacted … So if anything, I would say that gender has been exploded’ (Lucy Suchman, interview 04/22/2022).
We try to navigate through the ‘gender labyrinth’ of the multiplicities of identities and relations that the rise of queer theory has opened. Queer theory, sometimes referred to as a ‘postmodern critical theory that grew out of the women’s, gay, and queer studies’ movements of the 1990s’ (Goodrich et al. Reference Goldstein2016, p. 612), is often traced back to the work of Teresa De Lauretis (Reference De Laurentis1991), Judith Butler (Reference Butler1990), and others (e.g., Pullen et al. Reference Pullen, Thanem, Tyler and Wallenberg2016). It scrutinizes normativity in general and heteronormativity in particular, and challenges essentialist constructions and categories of gender and sexuality. Queer theory raises important questions about the status of gender/sexuality categories and highlights the relational constitution of identities (Watson Reference Watson2005) – all of which are important and have implications for how as a culture we understand gender.
But we retain a focus on women’s work because
… historically work is operating with the category of women. And it needs to recognize that within that category there has been far greater heterogeneity than that category does justice to. … [T]hat category has historically been a very salient one, it’s had huge consequences for distributions of labor and value and reward and so on. … [I]t’s been an incredibly consequential category.
Suchman adds that studies of women’s work look at ‘the work of those living in that category’ and ‘you can assume that, within that category, there is tremendous heterogeneity’ (Lucy Suchman, interview 04/22/2022). We are certainly aware of the heterogeneity and diversity (which also includes women who are ethnically diverse, live in different parts of the world, and come from varied class backgrounds), and we ask our readers to read our use of the term ‘women’ as expansive and inclusive rather than as naive.
We have tried to strike a delicate balance between acknowledging several areas of study such as queer theory and critical race theory (see below) and the differences they highlight and contributions they make, while retaining our focus on insights derived from empirically grounded research about women. We have cast our net widely, wherever possible referring to countries beyond the borders of North America and Europe, and within those regions, addressing (for example) ethnic, class, and other differences in women’s workplace experiences with technologies.
We are certainly cognizant of 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 (whether one is straight or gay, or bi) and gender – whether a person is CIS-gendered, trans, or gender queer. And we also know that we don’t yet have good data that would allow us to more fully understand how (for example) the interplay of gender and technology differs for a butch lesbian and a CIS-gendered heterosexual woman. These are interesting questions we hope will be taken up by others in the future. We have included material about the experiences of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) people whenever possible. We recognize there is tremendous diversity within this grouping as well, and that the terminology used to signal these differences varies across national contexts (for example, in Canada, LGBTQ2S+ is often used as an acronym that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and two-spirit, in recognition of the unique experiences of indigenous community members). When referring to the work of others we have retained the terminology used in the original, and otherwise use LGBTQ+ to signal an inclusiveness that varies cross-nationally.
We have discussed ethnicity when data are available and highlighted the need for the collection of data (particularly about non-binary genders), which will help us develop more nuanced views of the experiences of gender queer and trans workers in relation to technology. Yet we also acknowledge that this may be problematic. As Zooey Sophia Pook (Reference Pook2020) points out in relation to the collection of data about personal pronoun preferences, ‘these practices have unintended consequences as they contribute to the ever-expanding economies of data collection’ (p. 6). Pook cautions us that ‘the internet is the new locus of economy and power … [I]t is important to think about identity and data practices in line with these emerging technologies and in consideration of larger flows of information and capital’ (p. 10). She suggests that struggles for autonomy and control have shifted in important ways to the Internet, which, in the age of neoliberal capitalism, presents challenges with respect to queer autonomy.
We remain aware that our coverage of these and other topics (such as feminist theories, theoretical developments in science, technology and society studies), which have contributed to how we understand gender and technology at work, is limited. These shortcomings represent just a few of the many directions warranting greater attention than we have been able to grant them here. Indeed, the topic of gender and technology at work has both drawn on insights from many areas and contributed to insights in numerous adjacent areas of inquiry. Given that in many cases (e.g., feminist theory and queer theory) entire subfields of study have emerged within disciplines – the entirety of which is too great to address here – readers will almost certainly feel at times that there are intellectual roads not taken. This is true. We have limited our scope here to a focus on insights gained from empirically grounded studies of women’s experiences with workplace technology, and how that corpus of material has broadened our understanding of both gender and workplace technologies. ‘Gender’, Raewyn Connell (Reference Connell2009) has written, ‘is the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes’ (p. 11). Feminists have taken this insight as a starting point for analyzing gender inequality, recognizing that women’s location in the world and their experience is not only different but also unequal to those of men, also considering how systems of power and oppression interact. Some feminists also have studied both hegemonic and subordinated masculinities; and queer theory has extended feminist work on sexuality by ‘expanding the range of visible, plausible, and livable sexualities’, hence also ‘the meanings of woman and man’ (Marcus Reference Marcus2005, p. 200). The book will take up some of this work on men and masculinities in discussion of the genderedness of organizations and technologies.
There is growing empirical evidence of gender minorities (and people of color) experiencing social injustice in the form of bias, social exclusion, and harassment and that they are not represented in how technologies are designed nor adequately supported in their work or other activities. For example, a growing corpus of literature within HCI deals with how to make the voices of queer, trans-, as well as gender diverse individuals heard (e.g., Ladwig Reference Ladwig2020; Burtscher and Spiel Reference Burtscher and Spiel2020). Research documents the obstacles experienced by women of color in computing (e.g., De Oliveira Lobo et al. Reference De Oliveira Lobo, Da Silva Figueiredo Medeiros Ribeiro and Maciel2019; Rankin and Thomas Reference Rankin and Thomas2020; Erete et al. 2020). In spite of this work, current research that addresses gender minorities and design only covers a few areas of work, notably computing, and ‘numbers’ are often too small to support doing a comparative analysis of working conditions and technology relations from a fully intersectional perspective. Hence, our project is incomplete, as our understanding of gender has evolved more quickly than our data collection infrastructures – a point we return to in our discussions of design in the several parts of the book. And although we lack data that would allow us to more fully examine gender and technology from an intersectional perspective, this growing corpus of research provides valuable insights into how to account for multiple experiences and perspectives in design, and these insights remain salient even as our understanding of gender changes over time. We hope our work will contribute to future discussions about strategies and methods that can be used to explore the interplay between gender and technology for those who are gender queer and non-binary.
Feminist scholars in what is called ‘the Global South’,Footnote 3 which is immensely diverse in itself, question the dominance of Western feminist theorizing, critiquing the dominant Western frames of computing cultures and bringing forward accounts of stories about women with other histories with technologies (as for example in rural Mali; Twagira Reference Twagira2020). Feminist scholars that advocate decolonizing approaches also emphasize the complexity of identity concerns given the realities women have to face, as for example expressed by Maffía (Reference Maffía2007), who thinks that Western feminist positions
can result in a seductive trap from the intellectual point of view, immobilizing in a region where women can barely perceive the gender oppression among so many overlapping oppressions. Feminist criticism of science is a problem of academics when ancestral knowledge (of women also, but not only of women) is ignored by a relationship between center and periphery that is as sharp as patriarchal domination.
This book addresses these ‘other’ perspectives by including studies of the gender relations of women’s work by postcolonial feminists (and others) that help us to understand the particular and diverse experiences of women working in export-oriented factories, in the computing industry and/or doing data work in the gig economy. ‘Feminist and postcolonial projects will always be multiple and distinctively local if they are to serve those escaping local male-supremacist and Western-supremacist histories’ (Harding Reference Harding2009, p. 415). Apart from making these diversities visible, a postcolonial perspective also enriches thinking about how to do computing otherwise. Some material from our interviews sheds light on the challenges and complexities of adopting a postcolonial perspective.
A Historic Perspective
We anchor our inquiries in a review of historic debates about women’s work. One reason for returning to work previously undertaken is that it offers valuable insights that we can make use of for advocating the approaches we present in the final section of the book. Also, as argued in Balka and Wagner (Reference Balka and Wagner2021), we seek ‘to bring the different lenses through which women’s work has been viewed historically into clearer focus, in order to set out new conditions of possibility’ (p. 253); what Kate Soper (Reference Soper and Ramazanoglu1993) has described as potentially allowing access to hitherto ‘subjugated knowledges’.
Studies of women’s work reach back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Among the particular ‘treasures’ of research from this time are Elizabeth Beardsley Butler’s survey of the working conditions of women in nearly 400 companies (as part of the so-called Pittsburgh Survey, 1909); Marie Bernay’s study of the ‘selection and adaption among the workers in large, self-contained industrial enterprises, based on conditions in the Gladbach spinning and weaving company in Mönchen-Gladbach’ (1908); and Frances Donovan’s books, among them The woman who waits (Reference Donovan1920). In France, Marcelle Capy, a journalist and political militant, wrote ‘Avec les travailleuses de France’ (With the women workers in France; with Aline Valette) (1937), which was based on work in factories as an incognito, arguing that this is the only way to get to know the work situation.
The specific interest in women’s work was continued after WWII. While some of this research may be well known to an Anglo-American readership, influential research was also carried out in other traditions (most of which has not been translated into English), notably German industrial sociology and Francophone ergonomics, with numerous studies of the work of telephone operators, nurses, or women assembly workers in the electronics industry. While most of these studies were carried out by social scientists, the rise of feminism in the mid- to late 1960s brought women’s work into the focus of attention also of labour historians who started looking at women’s situations in different parts of the world. Examples are Heidi Tinsman’s study of women agricultural workers in rural Chile; and Mirta Lobato’s (Reference Lobato2001) study of the meatpacking industry in Buenos Aires (for an overview of these studies of women’s work see Balka and Wagner Reference Balka and Wagner2021).
Characteristic of feminist studies of work was from the very beginning, and still is, the attention they paid to the larger context of work – policymaking, organization, power relations, gender relations, relations of paid work and work done in the home. Much of the early work was driven by labour questions, namely working conditions and women’s health, and a commitment to improving women’s professional education in order to advance their chances in the labour market. With the rise of feminism, the relationships between paid work and the family, as well as the relation between the public and the private, or the political and the personal, moved to the foreground. From the 1980s onward, feminist scholars debated the nature of technology and started discussing issues related to ‘women, work and computerization’ with a focus on design.
This book provides access to key studies of women’s work, past and more recent. It follows a path that leads from early studies of factory work, office work, data processing, nursing, and women working as IT professionals and how technologies were used to define gender relations of work and technology, to studies of contemporary workplaces dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and the platform economy. This is done with a view towards what can be learned from these trajectories – from early office automation, the first nursing information systems, as well as the role of traditional machines in cementing labour market segregation and a gendered work organization – for the design of new technologies.
Finally, we take a historical perspective because our motivation in writing this book lies in part in our observation that at times design methods are used without reference to the epistemological stances that have given rise to methodological approaches. When this happens the potential strength of these methods to inform a design-justice framework is diluted.
Disciplinary Orientations
Our discussion draws on scholarship and empirical work in a number of disciplines including feminist theory, science, technology, and society studies (STS), sociology of work, political economy, organizational studies, labour history, as well as CSCW, HCI, and participatory design. We bring the insights of these cognate areas together to highlight the benefits and necessity of working across disciplines in order to understand the contexts in which designing for equity and justice must take place.
The historical focus of the book highlights the importance of the broad contexts in which work is carried out to technology design, while at the same time foregrounding key points and debates that, we argue, should be addressed in designing technology to support women at work. Several large debates that shaped the studies of women’s work were driven by what came to be women’s studies, with researchers coming from the sociology of work, labour history, organizational studies, and occupational health bringing gender issues into the focus of attention. Using mainly qualitative research methods in an interpretative tradition, including ethnographic fieldwork, they studied labour market segregation and its roots in gendered notions of skill, working conditions, and women’s health, as well as gender relations/power relations and the ways these play out in the work lives of women (and men). They contributed to an understanding of skills as not only technically constructed but also as socially determined. Many of these studies sought to make the invisible, undervalued aspects of women’s work visible; and they understood the confinement of women to certain types of work as deeply connected with their responsibilities in the home. Some research focussed specifically on how skill and gender intersected in paid and unpaid work.
Another highly influential strand of thinking that feminists, namely Dorothy Smith (Reference Smith1987 and Reference Smith1990) and Joan Acker (Reference Acker1990 and Reference Acker, Mills and Tancred1992), brought into the debate is the genderedness of organizations, as expressed in the gendering of jobs and other manifest gender inequalities and the hidden ‘gender subtext’ that produces and maintains gender distinctions in organizations. Numerous empirical studies point to the persistence of a masculine culture and images of masculinity in many areas of work, in particular but not only engineering, where the ideal worker is male. These studies often highlighted the ‘undoing’ of gender.
Feminist theory – the different discourses seeking to understand gender inequalities (extended and enriched by queer theory and the notion of intersectionality) – has influenced many disciplines. Key to our book are the views about the nature of technology that evolved in parallel with the emergence of science, technology, and STS. They focus on gender technology relations, asking ‘Do artifacts have gender?’ Another relevant strand of thought to this debate is feminist ethics, which aims to understand and criticize how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices. It has contributed to the concept of care as fundamental to human activities and to achieving social justice. It includes all forms of (professional or informal) care work but also caretaking in relation to data and technologies. The idea of design justice is anchored in these theories. More recently, gender-technology scholars have sought to theorize the Western cultural association between technology and masculinity. The increasing use of the term ‘gender studies’ (as opposed to feminist critique) of technology signals a more serious effort to study gender as a cultural construction implicating both women and men (as opposed to studying only women). Contemporary studies that problematize the gender–technology relation, however, remain informed by largely feminist, or pro-woman, liberatory goals.
Finally, we make use of design-oriented traditions. Foremost of these is participatory design, which at its beginning was deeply political, seeking to support workplace democracy. Although not focussing on gender, its mandate has always been to have multiple voices not only heard but also included in decision-making. The notion of skill and women’s invisible skills plays a large role in technology and work (re)design (Balka and Wagner Reference Balka and Wagner2021). The parts of CSCW and HCI that focus on technology design have worked in close connection with ideas of participatory design. There are other traditions we can learn from with respect to design, namely German industrial sociology and Francophone ergonomics. Both focus less on the design of new technological artifacts than on workplace (re)design with a perspective on working conditions and workers’ health. They have much to offer to technology design, which focusses on equity and justice.
Several themes come up repeatedly as we review scholarship across areas of work and disciplines. These include the genderedness of skill, invisible work, the genderedness of organizations, ideas of ‘undoing’ gender, the concept of care, and how we can understand each of these concepts in relation to intersectionality. In addressing these topics, we come up against issues of responsibility, power, agency, and control, which we argue should be understood in a design-justice framework in relation to intersectional concerns.
Conceptualizing (Gender) Equality
Sex/Gender
Key to discussing gender equality is the distinction between sex and gender that has been widely taken up by researchers and institutions alike:
Sex refers to biological differences between men and women such as chromosomes (XX or XY), internal and external sex organs (ovaries, testes) and hormonal profiles (of estrogens and androgens). Biological sex differences are often viewed as dichotomous, either male or female, although biological variability is substantial.
Gender refers to the socially constructed roles and relations, personality traits, attitudes and behaviours and values that are ascribed to the two sexes in a differential manner. While sex is a biological fact that is the same in all cultures, the meaning of sex in terms of gender roles can be quite different across cultures.
Although in recent years the notion that sex is rooted in biology has been the subject of debate and ‘the use of binary sex as a meaningful category explaining human biological variation across contexts’ is being challenged (DuBois and Shattuck‐Heidorn Reference DuBois and Shattuck‐Heidorn2021, p. 13), in general, the term sex is reserved for discussions of anatomy at birth. Gender is the more inclusive term when talking about differences between men and women and a much more complex concept than sex:
Gendered behavior arises out of a dauntingly complex, reciprocally influencing interaction of multi-level factors, including structural-level factors (e.g., prevailing cultural gender norms, policies and inequalities), social-level factors (e.g., social status, role, social context, interpersonal dynamics) as well as individual-level factors such as biological characteristics … , gender identity, gendered traits, attitudes, self-concepts, experiences, and skills.
Sex and gender are not mutually exclusive – ‘cultural expectations for women and men (gender) are not separable from observations about women’s and men’s physical bodies (sex)’ (Lips Reference Lips2017, p. 6) and we often don’t know whether particular differences between men and women are due to biology or culture. Examining Western notions of sex/gender Oyěwùmí (Reference Oyěwùmí1997) states, ‘the distinction between sex and gender is a red herring. In Western conceptualization, gender cannot exist without sex since the body sits squarely at the base of both categories’ (p. 9). Judith Butler (Reference Butler1990) pointed to the interconnectedness of sex and gender:
It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as a cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven surface (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced.
Gender is used as a label for the system of expectations held by societies with respect to feminine and masculine roles. Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘normalization’ addresses the power of these expectations that create an enormous pressure to conform to certain ways of behaving and presenting oneself (Foucault Reference Foucault1979). Foucault has described this pressure in particular with respect to the ways the body and sexuality are defined and experienced (Foucault Reference Foucault1973).
Harding distinguished between three aspects of gender: (i) gender structure, or the sexual division of labour (men and women are situated in sex typed ways); (ii) gender identity or individual gender; and (iii) gender symbolism, a fundamental category within which meaning and value are assigned to everything in the world (Harding Reference Harding1986, p. 57). In its meaning here, gender structure is articulated in relation to hierarchical structures of class and race (and, it can be argued, other forms of difference). Gender identity or individual gender has two meanings or aspects. Gender identity is projected (potential, actual, or desired identity as others perceive or portray them) and/or subjective (the gendered sense of self – the identity created and experienced by an individual). Gender symbolism involves representations and meanings, held by individuals as well as the larger society in which gendered individuals exist. Although Harding’s articulation of gender predated the emergence of queer theory, the two concepts remain intellectually compatible. Although no doubt some contemporary theorists deny the existence of biological sex, with the exception of Harding’s use of the word sex her articulation of how gender works remains salient.
Thus, we could say that technologies are part of the gender symbolism system (big machines such as earthmovers are seen as male). In using technologies, individual gender is created through the simultaneous activities of projecting a gender identity (where the ways our projection is understood are partly determined by wider social norms), and our own subjective understandings of our interactions with technology are part of bigger gender systems.
Intersectionality
In addition to highlighting the connections between issues and key concepts and components of gender, as we move through topical areas in the chapters in Part II, we will also highlight the relevance of the topics we discuss to intersectionality. Many researchers today argue that addressing gender equity/equality requires examining the complex relationships between biological and social dimensions. They also have extended their thinking to embrace intersectionality, an approach that builds on the insight that important social identities such as gender, ethnicity, and social class ‘mutually constitute, reinforce, and naturalize one another’ (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991, p. 302). Crenshaw saw intersectionality as a ‘provisional concept’ that helps explore the interlinkages of gender and race that in politics (and often also in academia) are treated as separate.
Feminist writing about intersectionality builds on a ‘long history of black feminist theorizing about interlocking systems of power and oppression, arguing that intersectionality is not an account of personal identity but one of power’ (Cooper Reference Cooper, Disch and Hawkesworth2016, p. 1) (see also Chapter 1). With respect to computing research, Keyes et al. (Reference Keyes, May and Carrell2021) argue that ‘Our understanding of intersectionality, then, is of a way of thinking about identity that is deeply attentive to questions of power, history and context – and one fundamentally grounded in the possibility and desire for change’ (p. 12). Costanza-Chok (Reference Costanza-Chock2018), in proposing the notion of design justice, emphasizes intersectionality, asking how to ‘escape from the matrix of domination’, a concept that Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins 1990 developed to refer to race, class, and gender as ‘interlocking systems of oppression, rather than each operating on their own’ (p. 4).
The Problematic Notion of Race
Writing a book about women’s work calls for respect for how the category ‘women’ is used in relation to other genders and how it intersects with other categories connected with the marginalization of particular groups of people. From a European (Anne, Ina, and Volker) and Canadian (Ellen) perspective, we feel uneasy with another category: the notion of race. The idea of ‘race’ and its transference to human history dates to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when pseudo-biological studies that used phenotypic features to categorize people became popular:
‘Race theorists’ interpreted history as a ‘racial struggle’ within which only the fittest ‘races’ would have the right to survive. They employed the political catchword with its vague semantic contours almost synonymously with the words ‘nation’ and ‘Volk’ for purposes of their biologistic, political population programs of ‘racial cleansing’, eugenics and birth control.
After 1945, the idea of race became deeply discredited. In Germany and Austria, it is strictly taboo for academics, politicians, the media, and the public to refer to ‘race’ and German law prohibits statistical material that refers to ethnic groups, races, or skin colour. In 2013 a draft law for the suppression of the word ‘race’ from the French legislation was adopted. In the same year, two influential anthropologists and authors of L’errore della razza (2011), Gianfranco Biondi and Olga Rickards, appealed to the Italian government to eliminate the word ‘razza’ from all legislation (Scacchi Reference Scacchi2016). Even in the medical field in these countries the category race is avoided and often replaced by country of origin to be able to account for the genetics of different populations. In the USA, the term race is used for classifying people in the decennial census and
the US federal government now structures the remedial allocation of certain goods such as social services, jobs, and political representation according to race, thus ensuring that race is continually reinscribed into American politics from above as well as from below.
What does this resistance against a discredited term mean? Certainly not (or not necessarily) an insensitivity to racial discrimination but a clear rejection of a notion that characterizes persons
as communities of descent and to whom are attributed specific collective, naturalised or biologically labelled traits that are considered to be almost invariable. These traits are primarily related to biological features, appearance, cultural practices, customs, traditions, language, or socially stigmatised ancestors.
‘Races do not exist, but racism does’ – the position of UNESCO reflects the work of Critical Race Theory (CRT) that holds that ‘race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient’ (Stefancic and Delgado 2010, p. 3).
Referring to Foucault, Goldberg (1993) defines racialization as a process that establishes ‘forms of power/knowledge relationship which focus on the body and processes of subjection’ (p. 54). Historically, the racialization of the world has come out of Europe to define the inferiority of other cultures and negate them. Barot and Bird (Reference Barot and Bird2001) refer to Frantz Fanon and his book The wretched of the earth (1963/1968) where he described the deep-seatedness of racialization that ‘has something to tell us about oppressors and oppressed and about the physical and psychic damage done by racism’ (Baron and Bird Reference Barot and Bird2001, p. 613).
We propose to have the history of race as a concept and its use as well as the different standpoints that have been put forward with respect to how we understand the racialization of the world in mind when thinking about gendered racialism. We also emphasize the need for research about racism to consider differences in language usage and their roots in different historical realities. Given our own histories, we often use the term ethnicity, and reserve use of the term ‘race’ for contexts where it is in common use (e.g., critical race theory) or it has appeared in a piece we are citing.
The Design Perspective
The third focus of the book is on technologies themselves, their ‘making’, the role of women engineers in their development, women’s agency, and the multiple ways technologies influence women’s lives. Here the book moves from more traditional technologies used in different industries and workplaces to early ICT-based tools and contemporary and future technologies. Finally, the book embraces a global perspective, seeking to assemble studies and viewpoints from different parts of the world.
A Word about Technologies
Technology is, as Leo Marx (1997) remarks, a ‘hazardous concept’. Historically, as Kjeld Schmidt (Reference Schmidt, Wulf, Pipek, Randall, Rohde, Schmidt and Stevens2018) has shown, there is a strong connection between practices and the techniques that practitioners of a particular art or trade have developed. He quotes Johannes Beckmann, a German scholar of the eighteenth century, who defines technology as follows:
Technology is the science of the transformation of materials or the knowledge of handicrafts. Instead of merely instructing workers to follow the master worker’s prescriptions and habits in order to fabricate a product, technology provides systematically ordered fundamental directives; how one for exactly these ends can find the means on the basis of true principles and reliable experiences, and how one can explain and exploit the phenomena occurring in the process of fabrication.
Technical knowledge changes ‘when scientific knowledge or science-based techniques (or “technology”) are somehow incorporated in the techniques of a given practice’ (Schmidt Reference Schmidt, Wulf, Pipek, Randall, Rohde, Schmidt and Stevens2018, p. 107).
Despite its origins in the systematic study of practices, most famously in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1766), the concept of technology is often narrowly conceived as standing for the technical artifact, its material aspect, such as a particular machine or device. Leo Marx (1997) points out,
Although in common parlance nowadays this material aspect often is what the concept of technology tacitly refers to, such a limited meaning … is ambiguous and misleading. It is ambiguous because, for one thing, the artifactual component only constitutes a part of the whole system, yet the rest is so inclusive, so various, and its boundaries so vague, that it resists being clearly designated.
This holds true in particular for modern technologies that comprise a whole system of ancillary equipment, specialized forms of technical knowledge (and the associated techniques and work practices), a specialized workforce, as well as the ‘complex social and institutional matrix’ in which they are embedded. Pipek and Wulf (Reference Pipek and Wulf2009) have tried to frame this complex phenomenon as ‘infrastructuring’.
Bush’s (1981) definition of technology – now somewhat dated – captures many elements of technology that have been important to contemporary STS scholars:
… technology is a form of human cultural activity that applies the principles of science and mechanics to the solution of problems. It includes the resources, tools, processes, personnel, and systems developed to perform tasks and create immediate particular, and personal and/or competitive advantages in a given ecological, economic and social context.
Central to this definition of technology – and much contemporary STS research – is a focus on the social nature of technological development: new technologies don’t simply pop out of the sky, but rather result from the coordination of vast networks of people, machines, processes, materials, and so on – what Callon (Reference Callon1979) and Latour (Reference Latour2007) called actor networks. Noble (Reference Noble1979) similarly suggested that technology bears the ‘social imprint’ of its authors. The technologies we live with in our lives seldom represent the only technological solution possible (just as a finished piece of art does not represent the only possible outcome of working with the constellation of materials an artist had at hand). Rather, the technologies in our lives represent the outcome of a complex series of negotiations that occur between a web of actors – both human and non-human (e.g., the installed base of a computer system). Technology development and use are both social processes, whose outcomes depend upon social and technical factors.
The particularity of computer-based technologies (and the various associated fields of research and development) is that, as Schmidt (Reference Schmidt, Wulf, Pipek, Randall, Rohde, Schmidt and Stevens2018) among others observes, they are highly malleable. He refers to Mahoney’s observation that
there was a time, a rather long time, ‘when the question “What is a computer, or what should it be?”, had no clear-cut answer’, and the computer and computing thus only acquired ‘their modern shape’ in the course of an open-ended process that has lasted decades (Mahoney Reference Mahoney, Echeverria, Ibarra and Mormann1992, p. 349). And there is no reason why one should assume that the concept of ‘computing’ has stabilized and solidified: the jury is still out, as the immense malleability of ‘the computer’ or ‘computing’ is being explored in all directions. In other words, it is confused to conceive of ‘the computer’ as a distinct technology.
Analyses of the gendered nature of technology have to keep this enormous variety (and malleability) in mind. They also have to contextualize technologies, paying heed to the learning, skills, practices, and social and institutional arrangements enabling their development, implementation, and use.
Supporting Work Practices
To achieve design justice, it will be important to move beyond understanding women’s work and how technologies, and in particular ICT-based artifacts and systems, shape the gender relations of women’s work, to a focus on design, and how to – from the point of view of design justice – strengthen practices of ‘user-sensitive inclusive design’ (Stumpf et al. Reference Stumpf, Peters, Bardzell, Burnett, Busse, Cauchard and Churchill2020) that benefit women and other people at the margins of technology production. This ideally includes taking action to counter existing inequalities (of access to skills, jobs, careers, and a ‘good life’) and reflecting on how to best serve democratic ideals.
In writing about gender as an important issue to address in computing it is important to recognize that in the 1980s and 1990s there was a strong positivist community in both HCI and CSCW in the USA, which lately has been strengthened again by research on AI and machine learning. However, overall, the Computers and Human Interaction (CHI)/HCI conferences have become open to a diversity of approaches, including participatory approaches, ubiquitous computing, as well as work practice studies. There is an increasing amount of literature that addresses how to engage people in digital (and other) projects that seek to contribute to more socially just worlds. Examples include Strohmayer’s (Reference Strohmayer2021) work on participatory e-textiles; advocacy and initiatives aimed at including Black women (e.g., Erete et al. 2020), and trans- or non-binary experiences (e.g., Keyes et al. Reference Keyes, May and Carrell2021) within the CSCW and HCI communities, and, more generally, Advancing Diversity, the focus of the third Gender IT conference (2015).
While acknowledging these important research initiatives, we want to foreground the European tradition in CSCW research that emphasizes the critical role of (ethnographic) workplace studies for designing supporting technologies, arguing that design criteria cannot be separated from the context of the work setting. As Wulf et al. (Reference Wulf, Rohde, Pipek and Stevens2011) have pointed out, ‘CSCW was the first research community in applied computer science which stressed the importance of an in-depth understanding of practices when designing ICT artefacts. From our point of view, this is the key achievement of the research field’ (p. 505).
The practice-based, mostly European, tradition of CSCW research bridges between ethnographic studies of work practices and the design of IT-based artifacts and systems. One of the influential scholars in this tradition was John Hughes, who argued that ‘the relevant properties of the social organization of work do not appear as “readily packaged” within work domains but need to be brought out by an analysis of the ethnographic materials’ (Hughes et al. Reference Hughes, Sharrock, Rodden, O’Brien, Rouncefield, Calvey and Hughes1994, p. 130). The emphasis on understanding the embeddedness of (work) practices in a particular organizational, political, and cultural context also strengthens the attention to gender and feminist theory in design.
Another research alliance of designers who work to benefit women and other people at the margins of technology production is Participatory Design (PD), which has developed methods and techniques for involving future users in design, by not just giving them ‘a voice’ but having them participate in decision-making in design. What Hayes (Reference Hayes2011) formulates for Action Research (AR), also holds for PD: ‘the credibility and validity of AR knowledge is measured to a large degree by the “workability” of solutions – that is, their ability to address real problems in the lives of the participants’ (p. 158) and to contribute to changes wanted by the participants. ‘Giving voice’, Bratteteig and Wagner (Reference Bratteteig and Wagner2014) argue, goes beyond listening to the future users of an IT artifact; it is about sharing power with them by involving them in design decisions. They provide examples of how users can contribute to ‘creating (design) choices, selecting a choice, concretizing choices, and seeing/evaluating a choice’ (p. 4). In this spirit, Wilson et al. (Reference Wilson, McNaney and Roper2020) emphasize the need ‘to broaden the inclusion and support of communities who have different communication needs’ (p. 1). With respect to how young people with disabilities ‘consume, create and circulate media’, Alper (Reference Alper2017) has argued that ‘technologies largely thought to universally empower the “voiceless” are still subject to disempowering structural inequalities’ (p. 3).
Taking these positions seriously means that the design of IT-based artifacts and systems that promote gender equality (as a whole, for everyone, women, men, and other genders) has to be anchored in the particular context the design addresses, requiring designers to deeply engage with this context. The chapters on women’s work in different domains in this book provide designers who plan such an engagement with insights from research that points out the working conditions to be found in these domains or fields of work (in terms of work organization, (gendered) culture, skill requirements, stress and other forms of hardship, specific barriers/opportunities for women, etc.), which design oriented toward social justice must engage with if it is to succeed in transcending design solutions that reproduce existing gender–technology relations.
The Ethical-Political Dimension of Design
One aim of this book is to promote a view of engineers/designers making ethical-political choices, by arguing that taking account of gender issues (or not doing so) is a part of such choices.
Ethical issues in engineering have increasingly drawn attention in recent years, including discussions about the extent to which engineers/designers are to be held morally responsible for the dangers, risks, and possible misuses of their technological products. One of the philosophers who emphasized the moral dimension of technologies was Hans Jonas. He argued for the ethical importance of finding ways to better predict the effects of new technologies as a way to strengthen and improve our decision-making about their design and use – a topic that also gave rise to formalized technology assessment processes beginning in the late 1960s. Because of the magnitude of the implications a technology may have, Jonas contends, ‘nothing is more natural than the passage from the objects to the ethics of technology, from the things made to the duties of their makers and users’ (Jonas Reference Jonas1979, p. 41).
The 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights advocates that the moral dimension of science and technology not only concerns the individual, as the human rights perspective traditionally assumes, but also insists this perspective has to be complemented by a focus on socially excluded groups and the dimension of collective action. It highlights
the importance of developing ‘new approaches to social responsibility to ensure that progress in science and technology contributes to justice, equity and to the interest of humanity’ (Preamble); of taking into account ‘the special needs of developing countries, indigenous communities and vulnerable populations’ (idem); of promoting ‘solidarity and cooperation’ (Article 13); and of fostering the sharing of benefits resulting from scientific research within each society and between societies (Article 15).
Recognizing the moral dimension of technologies is consonant with a feminist ethics that understands moral agency in terms of power, asking who is recognized as a moral agent, and how agency is constrained or facilitated by power relations. Feminist ethics, although by no means homogeneous, tends to prioritize
the moral contexts in which differently situated and differently gendered agents operate, the testimony and perspectives of the situated agent, the power relationships and political relationships manifest in moral encounters, the vulnerabilities of embodied actors that yield a plurality of approaches to ethical situations, and the degrees of agency or capacity that are shaped by experiences with oppression and misogyny.
Overcoming the historical invisibility of women (and other genders) in the ways most technologies have been made is a question of ‘doing justice’ to women’s lives and experiences (Riley Reference Riley2013) – and results in part from what Messing (Reference Messing2014) has identified as an empathy gap. Costanza-Chok (Reference Costanza-Chock2018) articulates this concern with respect to design as ‘design justice’, which she defines as aiming ‘to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community-based design traditions, knowledge, and practices’ (p. 5).
Overview of the Book
We organized the complex web of issues we plan to address in an arc leading from concepts to case studies of women’s work in different domains to ‘designing better futures’.
Part I provides an introduction to feminist thinking about gender and technology as well as about the ethical-political dimension of design. After looking back at the contributions of early work undertaken in an effort to understand the ways in which women and technology mutually constitute one another through gendering processes at work (Chapter 1), we move on to outlining the ethical political perspective of technology (Chapter 2), which developed out of a feminist critique of traditional ethical theorizing. Here we highlight some key feminist debates, which have implications for design. In Chapter 3 we introduce the women we interviewed for this book (whose insights we quote throughout subsequent chapters), using their accounts to demonstrate that there is no singular pathway or route that leads to a focus on gender and technology at work. We decided to include our own pathways in this reflection about which moments and contexts gave rise to a focus on gender as our paths too have been quite varied.
The second section of the book consists of chapters dedicated to women’s work in different domains: machine work in the factory (Chapter 4), office automation and work (re)design (Chapter 5), data work and the platform economy (Chapter 6), AI-based technologies (Chapter 7), the computerization of care work (Chapter 8), and the gendering of computer work (Chapter 9). As we move through these areas, we provide a more in-depth discussion of key concepts, such as skill, invisible work, and the genderedness of organizations. Throughout these chapters we highlight how gendering processes have worked, returning to Harding’s (Reference Harding1986) articulation of the various aspects of gender. In each of these chapters we move from early examples of workplaces and technologies to more contemporary ones, asking how technological changes brought about new issues and challenges. Each chapter ends with insights into how to address these issues in design, from both an intersectional and a design-justice perspective.
This sets the stage for Part III of the book (‘Gender and Design’), about how to use feminist/queer theory as well as an intersectional perspective in designing ICT systems that support social/design justice (Chapter 10) and how to contextualize women’s work in design (Chapter 11). The final chapter (12) reflects on designing better futures, highlighting a set of paths to follow.
