This chapter revisits the ethical-political perspective on technology design. Feminist/intersectional approaches to the design of IT artifacts build on practices developed in participatory design and action research, enriching them with norm-critical, norm-creative, and social justice-oriented perspectives. Practice-based design adds experiences with designing flexible, malleable systems that are open to end-user development, offering technological tools for designing systems that are open to other ways of thinking and doing (work). Decolonizing approaches contribute to doing justice to parts of the world that experience(d) oppression and marginalization, discarding the needs of people and disrespecting their knowledge. Among the specific challenges of a feminist/intersectional approach to design are the need to make invisible aspects of work visible; to recognize women’s skills without falling into the trap of gender stereotyping; to engage in improving working conditions; to defend care against a managerial logic, take care of the many overlooked and undervalued aspects of work in design, but also to care for research subjects and create safe spaces.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The chapter starts with the invisibility of women in the early days of computer science and their substantial contributions to the field. An important part of this chapter are studies demonstrating the differences in women’s participation in the computing field in different countries. A nuanced, culturally situated intersectional analysis of gender and computing reveals that some countries (e.g. Malaysia or India) are much more open to educating and employing women IT professionals than others. Power issues continue to determine women’s opportunities to enter a career in the computing field. The chapter describes women’s work experiences in IT professions, the male-dominated working culture, and forms of gendered racism. One of the main barriers for women continues to be the typical working conditions in IT companies. But studies also show how women with time empower themselves, carving out a space that helps them deploy their skills and grow, and take control of their own careers. The chapter concludes with the question ‘What is wrong with computing?’

We have covered a considerable amount of ground. After beginning with some working definitions of gender and technology and providing an overview of the ethical-political approach to design, we went on to address historical and contemporary studies concerned with the interaction of gender and technology at work. The first step was to look back, collecting and presenting studies of women’s paid employment in different areas of work. This was done with the aim to describe key insights about gender and technology that were gained in these early studies and analyze in what ways they influenced our approach to system design and design justice. A crucial role was, for example, played by findings about invisible work. We also demonstrated how the early studies of women and technology at work helped lay the foundation for related areas that are concerned with design justice in relation to technology at work – such as critical race studies, queer studies, and intersectionality.

This chapter discusses the computerization of office work, which in many ways served as a focal point for the emergence of research about gender and technology in the 1980s. The focus on office automation allows us to explore topics that have been central to the development of feminist perspectives on work. The issues the chapter addresses include the nature of office work, invisible work and skill, the ‘gendering’ of office machines, and debates about skill – deskilling, upskilling, and the social construction of skill. Observational studies of office information also produced many valuable insights concerning technology, organization, and managerial decisions, with a focus on skill, learning, and the need for workplace design aiming to support office workers to appropriate the new technologies integrating them into their practices. The chapter positions workplace design with respect to several strong traditions of (re)designing jobs and the organization in which they are embedded that were developed in the 1970s and 1980s.

This chapter goes back to the feminist discourse on science/technology and gender, which started in the 1960s and 1970s and was led by women scientists. Feminists criticized the gender binary and other dualisms and brought forward an understanding of ‘scientific objectivity’ as being rooted in the multiplicity of experiences. Feminist criticism of science and technology was later enriched by queer theory and a focus on intersectionality. Of particular influence on a feminist approach to science and technology were feminist standpoint theory and, connected with it, Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘situated knowledge’. In an STS tradition, Cynthia Cockburn analyzed the gendering of technologies – or the mutual shaping of gender and technology. Researchers in the field of cultural studies have followed the STS tradition with empirical studies of how gender plays out in activities such as radio tinkering or in makerspaces. One of the important insights on the way to a gender/intersectional perspective on design is Faulkner’s work on engineers and her understanding that the gendering that occurs in engineering practices is complex and heterogeneous.