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Gender And Technology
The role of gender in the construction of Western science and technology is a vast subject which, despite its importance and relevance, can only briefly be touched on here.
The relation between science, technology and society is also a vast topic. In general we can propose that technology is a result of the interaction between human interests and organisation, and the real non-human world. Human interests develop the technology, although the technology developed can have consequences unexpected by the designers and implementors, and can sometimes enable people to behave in new and unintended ways, which themselves have social consequences. Technology may also not be taken up because no group can see a practical use for it, or because the social organisation mitigates against it being taken up - the classic example being the steam engine in Alexandria, the application of which may have been hindered by the separation of intellectuals from any need for, or reward for, practical application, and by the easy availability of slaves. Societies may also be more ready to apply technologies of particular kinds - thus it is possible that capitalism particularly favours the development of technology which is perceived to deskill labour, or which allows the elimination of labour costs, or which speeds the elimination of sharing of profit with labour.
The development of the effects of technology is also influenced by the prior history of technology - the kind of technology that is embedded into subsequent technology by custom, by modes of use, or by the shear difficulty of changing it. Thus it can be argued that the printing press in China did not have the same kinds of effects it did in the west because of the difficulty of reading Chinese script, because of the sheer expense of keeping a full tray of such characters, and because of the structures of Chinese society, which restricted literacy to a relatively small class who valued the artistry of writing to an extent which mitigated against mass production. Perhaps this lack of effect of the press was also influenced by the absence of the theological controversy which provided a steady high volume market for the products of European printers.
As this example implies, technology can be further influenced by the distribution of knowledges and powers through the society. An innovation has to be recognised by some group as useful and employed, or it may be ignored. The degree to which the innovation can spread depends on the relative influence of a group, and its place in the communication pathways between other groups (in which the first group might have the chance to insert the innovation). Sometimes the sheer power of an organisation or a class can impose its technological solution on a vast number of people needing to solve the problems that particular solution effects. The 'market' which is often offered as an explanation for the success of particular technologies, is not a natural force, but is a political or social force. Thus there was no particular 'market driven' need for most of the computers of the World to run on Microsoft operating systems, but Microsoft's ability to insert its software into the IBM pc, to bind other producers to its products, together with its apparent ability to prevent other 'better' products from being distributed, or for it to insert its own products into its base systems to decrease the likelihood of people using other products, has lead to the contemporary dominance of their company and its particular ways of solving problems. Such a monopoly is not necessarily bad, and it may well have helped the spread of computers and computer programs throughout the world , though interchangeablilty of skills. As is also often exampled, the destruction of mass transport systems by automobile companies in the US helped further the dominance of the car and the spread of suburbs and the problems associated with pollution, but at the same time the car made possible a particular 'middle class' lifestyle. In this case, the destruction of mass transport was also bolstered by ideologies which made individually organised travel unobjectionable.
So the imposition of technological solutions which benefit some groups may cause technological problems for other groups. It may also be the case that these problems are not solvable within the system of power (as, for example, it may not be possible to solve global ecological problems within free market corporate capitalism), or they may not be solved in a technological manner. In the West the fact that most problems can be seen as calling for a technological solution, may show something about the way that the Western world view has been taken over by a 'sanctification' of a particular kind of technological approach and expectations. It is feasible to argue that this kind of approach is not the only, or the most efficient way of solving all problems.
Technology is also influenced by the nature of the world. No amount of interest or effort, could make the transmutation of mercury into gold through chymical means an economically, or institutionally, viable operation. Similarly, ignoring the effects of pollution, will not prevent pollution from having an effect.
Thus the position taken in this book is not either a straightforward technological determinism (in which society is determined by its technological base), or technological idealism (in which human society, philosophy or technology completely determines the nature of the world), but a technological interactivism (in which society, group interests, and technology interact with the range of possibilities of the world). This is an approach which looks at the range of potentials rather than seeking absolute determinisms. Thus there is a sense in which technological apparatus is "made at home in the world that has whatever organization it already has " (Sacks q Ten Have) and, while this making home can occur, it also can open new possibilities, or transform the range of behaviours available to people, thus making new fields for conflict and co-operation.
Gender and Technology
When considering the effects of, or utilisation of, technology it is necessary to consider social factors. The priority of these social factors is often not obvious, and attempts to give particular social factors priority, often seems to create somewhat pointless arguments. Among the factors involved with technology will be processes such as the division of labour, the organisation of the means of production, the structure of power relations and the different types of powers (recognised or unrecognised), the use of force, the organisation of space, the distribution of products, the ways property is defined or imagined, and the ways knowledge is distributed and legitimated. To be brief, nearly all of these factors also enter into the construction of Gender (or are themselves influenced by constructions of gender), but that does not mean that gender has priority over these other factors, merely that it cannot be ignored, while remembering that all these factors are all analytic tools rather than things in themselves.
One of the lessons of anthropological functionalism, which we tend to ignore in our 'postmodern' sophistication, is that everything interacts with everything else, and that in any division we make of the social field we can choose almost any term and use it to illustrate all the others.
Whatever the actuality of technology throughout human history, technology in the West (at least in the last 2-300 years) has been associated with males and controlled by males. The vast majority of recognised scientists and inventors have been male. Technology and science in this part of the world, appear to have been part of the construction of some groups of men's self identity as male, as have constructions of 'Reason' and so forth. Women were not only deliberately excluded as incapable (and thus largely rendered technologically incapable through lack of experience of certain types of technology, or lack of experience of particular ways of dealing with technology), but the interests, questioning and insights of women which came from their position as women, were ignored or rendered marginal, and often dismissed as irrational or emotional. Women who did do scientific work were largely unrecognised, had to work in positions with low status, and occasionally had their discoveries or ideas appropriated by males. Furthermore the kinds of technology which have been allocated to the sexes have been gendered.
Generally this kind of allocation follows gender roles: women have been more associated with domestic technology, and men with public technology - though this may be changing. As well, knowledge of the machines, or skill in machine use, was gender allocated, women were generally not expected to know how machines worked, or how to repair them, even with those machines which were almost solely used by women. Often the opening of a technologically skilled job to women has also resulted in the lowering of the status of that job, and correlated with a lowering of its income - even though it may still be easier for women to enter work which has been newly created through technology than to enter traditionally restricted jobs, or it may be that technically skilled work as it has become more socially valued (and seen as less 'natural') has become harder for women to enter (Wajcman 1991: 33-4, ??). It appears that forces can act the other way: many early computer programmers may have women (though they may have been carrying out the plans and instructions given by men), perhaps because of the association of the jobs of computers with typewriters, secretaries and the carrying out of instructions, but as computers became more important and more connected to the direct running of business, the usual programmer became male.
As Wajcman points out on many occasions, the absence of woman from the technological field is usually portrayed as a problem located in women to be rectified (if its not inherent as some argue) by changing women - usually through education. There is little suggestion that technology should be opened up by changing men, or changing the identification of technology with masculinity, or that the organisation of technology or the workplace should be changed to make it more compatible with the usual demands on women's lives. This claim that the absence of women in technology is women's fault, or that if they want to use technology women should be more like men, may mean that not only are women who act in the field marginalised, but that it means that familiarity with machines becomes social evidence of a woman's failure 'to be a woman'. If this is the case in general, then we might expect that with computing and Internet usage, it will be seen that male usage and organisation of computing is the norm, and that women are expected to change if they desire a more equitable use. It may even be suggested, if women protest against male conventions and uses, that if they cannot stand the heat they should therefore leave. But as the change in the gender of programmers might suggest, this identification of gender with a particular technology is not simple.
Likewise arguments that women prefer lowly paid casual work, because their interests are elsewhere, can be seen in several ways: as an ideological expression of the way women have to organise their lives within a particular social framework which favours men and which takes the interests and lifestyles which have been defined as male as the default, or as a way in which male managers justify their only employing women in certain capacities, or as an almost unconscious recognition that modern work is not particularly satisfying. The argument about part time labour being convenient for women is, for example, not applied when Western corporations use primarily full time sweated female labour in non-western countries - then it is suggested that these women require lowly paid work with long hours.
As Mills (1991) argues, organisations and their activities in general can be sexist, as the shape of the organisation has been made through sexist understandings. Thus it seems to be usually argued that people (usually women) should give up parts of their gender identity, or their gendered mode of being or acting, in order to fit into the organisation, rather than the organisation changing its nature to accept them. It is, of course, possible to suggest that this kind of demand that people bend to the will of the organisation is not exclusively applied to women - however as men generally only have the experience of one lifestyle and its demands, they are less sensitive to these demands as being against the demands of other lifestyles (such as being a mother involved with children). Exclusion of the other gender within an organisation can provide a way by which people construct their own gender and place. This can then bridge into a whole series of domains which are gender exclusive, not so much by virtue of force but by virtue of association.. These exclusions by custom then make a non-correctly gendered person seem awkward (as well as be awkward), and justify the exclusion.
In particular the effects of male identity being tied up with paid work, 'harsh reality', rationality, public life or culture, and women's association with unpaid work, compassion, emotionality, private life and biological necessity, make the realms of male and female unlikely to interact well because people have a whole series of associated behaviours which spread out from their particular situation and interferes with actions and expectations.
As well as this broad distinction between men and women, there was also a distinction between men based largely on access to administration and the kind of work being undergone. Paradoxically, in this division, high status males might be as ignorant of the workings of machines as the general female population, though in relation to women they might be expected to be knowledgable.
However, we should not assume that women are necessarily a uniform group with similar interests and problems, whatever the importance of gender to their society. Gender has different meanings, and can create different problems within differing groups (or classes) of men and women. The interests and lives of wealthy women, may not entirely correspond to those of poor women; the interests and lives of women in Thailand may not entirely correspond to the interests of women in Saudi Arabia; the interests of corporate women may not entirely correspond to those of academic women and so on. It may be that women of certain groups have more in common with, or identify more closely with, the men who belong to those groups than they do with women belonging to other groups. This kind of issue cannot be decided beforehand, it must be investigated. Likewise, whatever the public view of the subject, it cannot be assumed, that men posses *all* of the power in a society, or that women do not act to subvert or avoid that power, or do not have various powers of their own. Power is a relationship, a kind of ratio between people and groups, rather than a thing which is possessed and brought to bear on the unresisting. Such propositions do not deny that by all kind of measures most men may be better off than most women, but that we should observe how the genders actually do interact in particular social groups, without assuming that the 'subordinate' is powerless.
Further there is the question as to whether, the kinds of strictures which are supposed to affect women and technology, are the same for women who have grown up surrounded by computers. As Jenkins argues computers may no longer be considered to be technology but simply a fact of life. Kaplan & Farrell quote Paula Span in the Washington post, who "saw a generational issue within the gendered one:
"True, people of either gender can still live meaningful lives without computers.... I don't think that will be true for my daughter, though, or any of our daughters. They're entering a world in which card catalogue drawers have already vanished from the public library, replaced by terminals and keyboards.... [T]hey can't afford to see computers as toys for boys, to see ignorance as feminine, to wring their hands over the keyboard and worry that they will break something...."
Jenkins also quotes Gill and Grint "there are few who seek explicitly to challenge the idea that technology and masculinity go together. Even feminist writers, usually at the forefront of attacks on assumptions about gender, have mostly accepted the association, and, rather than challenging its existence, have sought to understand how and why this state of affairs has come about - and how it might be disrupted (Gill and Grint 1995: 3)". Jenkins goes on to report that in her survey of 50 net users "more women than men had more than ten years experience [with computers] (61.5% compared to 41.7% of the men)", though more men than women had more than 3 years experience, and those who spent the most time online seemed to be men.
In all, as Kaplan & Farrell remark "we have been so busy noticing what hinders and repells us [women] that we have failed to ask what draws some of us (but not others)".
"Spender (1993) and van Zoonen (1992) have pointed out that discourses that emphasise the exclusion of women from the information society or their lack of interest or pleasure in such technology construct a social domain in which there is no place for women or femininity" (Chua). However, it must be emphasised that to say that a domain is gendered, and thus affected by gendered modes of pleaure, does not imply that it is naturally gendered, or that the consequences of this gendering is that one gender or another must abandon that field, or forever expect to be marginal to that field, or even that they should expect to take no pleasure in that field.
Technology, may also enable or restrict 'techniques of the self', by the ways technology (within the above restraints), acts to further and implement particular kinds of self conception, and particular kinds of interaction with others - in particular technology can act to separate or join particular domains of life, and allow or conceal observation.
Telephones, for example, may allow the furtherance of kinship ties within a population which is dispersed, and may even make such dispersal easier to engage in. Television can act to give portrayals of hitherto hidden 'offstage' areas of life. International communications (including the Internet) may allow people who no longer live in a country to take an extreme position in that countries politics, as they can embrace this 'purity' as part of their identity, without suffering the consequences or having a need for compromise (Anderson...). Cosmetic surgery may allow people to manipulate their bodies in order to approach an ideal of gender appropriateness, and this may increase the need for others to embrace this technology as the appropriate image gets ever more exaggerated. Techniques of increasing or restricting birth likewise become part of a person's social self expression, and become embedded in questions of the degree to which women can be valued outside of their roles of wives and mothers, and the extent to which population control or increase is valued or considered necessary. Netsex, could then be a way in which women avoid the health consequences of female contraception and the reluctance of their males to participate in contraception.
Then there may be indirect functions of technology, or the discourse associated with it. It has for example been argued that much scientific work is a compensation for womb envy - a kind of artificial creation which makes men appear the psychological equals of women rather than psychologically or physiologically deficient. Technology may likewise be spoken about in ways which make activities associated with it masculine for men who do not meet their wider societies criteria of being masculine as they are not particularly aggressive, do not do physically dangerous activities, and are not particularly physically strong etc.
Gender and computers
It seems to have been frequently demonstrated that parents favour boys in computer use, parents are more likely to buy sons computers than daughters, and less likely to object to their sons obsession with computers. It also seems to be the case that there is less likely to be support at schools for girls in computing, that children themselves may tend to rate computers as more suitable for boys than for girls, and that game software (which is often what children spend most time doing on computers) is intensely gendered. It may also be that men, by the division, or expectations, of domestic labour have more time for computing at home (See LaPin, etc).....
Turkle suggests that different social groups might bring differing modes of interaction to computers and, as a result, find them more or less satisfying. Thus in terms of gender, women might tend to try to negotiate with computers, men tend to try and control them. Turkle goes on to claim that males are more abstract in their approach to computers and women more concrete, but only the abstract approach is rewarded by the teachers, and often by the demands of programs - which are usually written by males for males (1984: 192-3). This argument may be true in general, though it is always useful to remember that such kind of 'biological' differences are distributed in the population - thus even if the best male runners are faster than the best female runners, the best female runners are still faster than most males. But nevertheless, there is always a tendency for the valued characteristics to be appropriated by the dominant class. Just as it has been alleged that before Darwin and free market capitalism men were considered more uniform than women (who were freakish), after the increase in the importance of individualism and variation women became considered more uniform than men (??). As Wajcman points out, before computers it was suggested that men played with numbers and that women followed the rules, and here with computers the opposite is then proposed. Wajcman further suggests, that cognitive difference models of gender also imply that people do not actually learn in a social environment, subject to the pressures and encouragement of their peers and superiors, acting within cultural context in which boys are encouraged, or forgiven, for obsessing with computers while girls learn that computers are 'boys things', and usually learn to approach computers as a group (1991: 156-8).
Indeed in interaction with male monopoly of technological know how, many women may have embraced an anti science and technology position to emphasise their identity as female. "Men are absorbed in machines, women deal with real life". However when considering such socially approved pieces of common sense, we also have to check to see if it has any connection to the real situation and ask if, in fact, all men, most men, or particular groups of men, are associated with all technology, some technology, or differing technology, and likewise whether all women, most women or particular groups of women, are separated from all technology, some technology or differing technology. Perhaps, for example, technology used by most women, is not considered to be technology. Or perhaps technological usage might have differing emotional associations, it might function in different ways in different person's psychology.
There is also the claim that in order to use computers, women must abandon some of what amounts to their 'feminine identity' - in other words certain human potentials become invalidated by these machines: "Rather than feminizing the computer field, women are obligated to adopt some degree of macho to become part of it. To question the masculinity of computers is tantamount to questioning our image of masculinity itself: computers are power, and power, in our world, must be in the realm of men." (Coyle, 1996: 43). La Pin quotes a study from 1998 which "has shown that while the gap between boys and girls in math and science is narrowing, a larger one is developing regarding computer use, skill, and access".
The supposed lack of emotions (or non textual factors) might induce some people (particularly women) to find 'relationships', or interacting, with computers less satisfactory than it is for people whose aim is primarily 'results oriented'. Women as the official 'carriers' of emotions in the West, might define themselves in opposition to computers - particularly if they don't use them. Sophia reports research which suggests female students felt as competent as males in using computers but had more negative feelings about their involvement with computers (Sophia 1993: 72). Similarly in compensation for the perceived difficulties and complexities of dealing with 'real' humans the definitionally masculine or 'non emotional' male might 'flee' to computers - particularly if their masculine definition is not 'adequate' in other areas (ibid: 77, 104, 116).
Technology may also be associated with gender divisions at a fairly symbolic or implicit level. Thus Reeves and Nass claim that if a computer was given a gendered voice then both sexes took evaluations from male voiced computers more seriously than evaluations from female voiced computers. Female voiced computers which evaluated were considered less friendly than male voiced computers making identical evaluations. Notably participants in the experiments denied being influenced by gender stereotypes (Reeves & Nass 1996: Chapter 14).
Other theorists propose subtle, perhaps even unconscious symbolisms, which though often seeming far fetched and hard to test, may nevertheless reflect real behaviours and ambiguities. Reynolds, for example, suggests the 'primitive' or 'natural' is identified with the 'female' and 'protoplasmic', while the 'advanced' and 'technological' is identified with the 'male', the 'head', the 'phallus' - and ultimately with purification, spiritualization and exploding star lights (??? Chapter 3). A slightly less dramatic point made in feminist critiques of Western philosophy and ideologies (e.g. Goldenberg 1990: 78ff.) has been the tendency of male theorists to denigrate the body and to either praise some etheric transcendence or to derive the world from some disembodied set of categories or processes, while simultaneously constructing the female as an inferior, passive, and physical, body. This leads us to the relationships between male and female, spirit and matter, which we shall deal with in a later section of this introduction.