Reproducing the Motherboard: The Invisible Labor of Discourses that Gender Digital Fields (original) (raw)
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A Plea to Reflect on the Entanglements of Gendered Work Patterns and Digital Technologies
2021
Just like the First Industrial Revolution, digitalisation is found to be profoundly shaking up the world of work and it has therefore been called 'the Fourth Industrial Revolution', 'Economy 4.0', or 'Industry 4.0'. The rapidly increased implementation of smart technologies, automation, robotics, cyber-physical systems, and digital labour (cloud-and crowd work) in many occupational areas, including the service sector and industry, has sparked a variety of fundamental transformations in the organisation of professions, work, working conditions, and the structure of the labour market. In addition, the widespread use of mobile phones, computers, and data clouds has been challenging the traditional boundaries between private and professional life. Technological innovations have always been discussed as catalysts for social innovation. However, digitalisation is not a one-way-street. It has to be regarded in the context of its multiple facets and consequences. On the one hand, it creates new possibilitiesfor example, to reconcile work and private life or to create less hierarchical industrial relations; on the other, it fosters new possible ways for employers to control employees and gives rise to less secure jobs, of which women are historically more often disadvantaged then men. And since technology is a human creation, historically grown social inequalities between genders, ethnicities, and classes are partly implied or transferred into algorithm decision-making, big data sources, and many other areas, and this has large-scale consequences (Eubanks 2018, Lischka, Klingel 2018). It is striking that the current debate on digitalisation in the world of work and its EDITORIAL GENDER AND RESEARCH | 4 | consequences is dominated by gender-blind perspectives, especially in economics, labour research, computer science, and technology research (Rosenblat, Stark 2016; Scholz 2017; Vallas, Kovalainen 2019). This makes all the more important the studies and theories that introduce a perspective that systematically integrates gender and feminist theory into science and technology studies and into economic and labour research. It is not enough to just include a gender perspective in this research area, and it is instead necessary to take into account feminist theory, since many studies on artificial intelligence (AI) claim to use 'gender' perspectives, but actually incorporate or even undermine professional knowledge from gender studies and feminist research. This is evident, for example, in the debates on the controversial 'Gay Faces Study', which examines the extent to which a person's sexual orientation can be determined solely from their face (see Wang, Kosinski 2017; Leuner 2018). Conversely, in Gender Studies and Feminist Technoscience, there is a long tradition of exploring the relationship between gender, work, and technology (Haraway 1991b; Wajcman 1994; Ernst, Horwath 2014), which unfortunately has not yet received attention in the ongoing debate about digital workplaces and the social construction of digital industrial relations, data sets, and algorithms. With reference to technology, one of the pioneers of Science and Technology Studies (STS) is undoubtedly Donna Haraway (1991a), who, in the 1990s, started a discussion on the disruptive and transformative potential of the upcoming 'virtual world' or emerging 'cyberspace' for traditional gender orders and for the dualistic divisions between humans and animals, and things and creatures. Since then, gender researchers in STS have assumed (and hoped) that individuals would be able to reinvent themselves in the virtual world beyond conventional dualisms and gender identities, which might challenge gendered, stereotypical, and restrictive notions of human abilities and interests. This vision culminated in the image of the 'cyborg' (Haraway 1991a). Some researchers even believed that the new technologies opened new job opportunities, particularly for women, because they perceived that completely new professions were emerging that initially had no gender connotations (Wajcman 2004: 108-109). The figure of the cyborg also serves to deconstruct the humantechnology-relationship within industrial relations (Halford et al. 2015). Indeed, women have become more and more powerful and more interested in technology, and they are entering the halls of engineering and computational science. Women are, even if only slightly, more involved in the construction of technology, in the smart industries, and in data science (O'Neil 2017). However, the tech industry remains merely white, male, middle class, and able-bodied (Rommeveit et al. 2017; Reinhardt 2015), and research about the digital divide indicates that globally women have less access to the world wide web, that they face cyber-bullying and-mobbing, and that their technical skills are disregarded (OECD 2018).
Past research on gender online has made important land gains but under-theorizes the Internet as a passive, fixed, and somewhat insubstantial space or context. By contrast, this special issue draws on new material thinking to put into questions the very notion of “cyberspace” as a distinct realm. In this vein, the contents of this issue critically examine how the Internet and related digital technologies actively “work” to maintain or transform systems of oppression, as displayed, for example, in the digital doing(s) of gender. They also show how digital technologies and related concepts can be used to challenge current understandings of race, class, and gender and to produce and provoke new forms of knowledge. While the contents of this issue are drawn from different fields and display great diversity, the individual contributions of each author helps to chart out three potent venues for future Internet research: namely digital gender as perspective, phenomena, and practice.
Virtually Absent: The Gendered Histories and Economies of Digital Labour
Feminist Review, 2019
Digital labour refers to a range of tasks performed by humans on, in relation to or in the aftermath of software and hardware platforms. On-demand logistics services like Uber and Deliveroo, micro-work venues such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, data transactions generated by social media channels and online retail portals devoted to one-click consumption all comprise digital labour. So do the maledominated workplaces of high-tech firms with long hours and oblique Human Resources policies in an era of #MeToo revelations. Digital labour is intrinsically bound to physical space and to hardware, even when it is classified as 'immaterial' in nature (Fortunati, 2018). Very few workplaces now exist without dependency on the mobile devices, computer sensors and data servers upon which software operates. Feminist scholars have successfully highlighted the role women play in the front line of technology assembly (Pun, 2005; Nakamura, 2014) as well as computer science and programming (Hicks, 2018). Underpaid female and migrant labour, some of it located in electronics assembly plants in East Asia and Eastern Europe, is the labour that powers the internet and its necessary hardware (Sacchetto and Andrijasevic, 2015). Inhumane working conditions and the pressure of untenable production speeds in manufacturing became visible in 2010 when fourteen workers at Foxconn, the main assembler for Apple located in mainland China, committed suicide. Since then, more workers at Foxconn have 'jumped' to their deaths and thousands of others have protested their plight via work stoppages, wildcat strikes and organised mobilisations (Qiu, 2016). Next to this vast army of underpaid offshore workers, 'free labour' is the defining feature of the digital economy (Terranova, 2000). In the early days, volunteer moderators in the USA engaged by America Online spent thousands of hours making the internet 'safe' by investigating complaints and grievances and keeping harassment and abuse in check (Postigo, 2009). Today such work continues, largely uncompensated, with women of colour, queer and trans people joining other minority activists to moderate online interactions and call out a constant stream of sexist and misogynist content (Nakamura, 2015; Roberts, 2019). Even workplaces that functionally rely on moderation work do so with the help of 878929F ER0010.
TOOLS AND TOYS: Communicating gendered positions towards technology
Information, Communication & Society, 2007
With the rising importance of technology in the information and knowledge society, the gender-technology relationship is ever more important when thinking about gender equality. Gender researchers have shown not only that the use and design of technologies is gendered, but that people also position themselves in relation to technology, based on certain gendered assumptions about technology in societies. This article looks at how people working in quintessential information and knowledge society professions, namely information communication technology (ICT) work, position themselves in relation to technology. Using a social constructivist framework and a discourse analysis, it shows how gender differences are achieved in communication: men tend to describe technology as a toy, while women tend to describe technology as a tool. In some instances this pattern is broken, which opens up the opportunity to rethink the gender binary. This article argues that the way in which people position themselves in relation to technology continues to be gendered, which may threaten gender equality in the information and knowledge society, and it also indicates that there is the possibility of change.
CYBERFEMINISM REVISITED: IS ICT EITHER FEMININE OR MASCULINE?
STS working paper, 2005
Surprisingly often, ICTs like computers and mobile phones and ICT-based services like sms or the internet are characterised as either feminine or masculine. This occurs among academics as well as in everyday life conversations. How should we as analysts understand and cope with this issue. Is this kind of gendering unproblematic as long as it shifts between the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’? What kind of work is performed through such gendering and with what kind of effects? This paper will approach this set of problems through a dialogue with so-called cyberfeminism. It represents an approach that argues a quite general change in the gendering of ICT, from masculine to feminine. For example, Sadie Plant claims that as the network features of ICT become dominant, ICT emerges as a deeply feminine technology. In many ways, this appears to be an optimistic view from a feminist standpoint since there is a promise that the gendered digital divide will disappear, perhaps to some extent reversed. Drawing on the extensive research into these issues performed through the large European SIGIS-study (Strategies of Inclusion: Gender in the Information Society), this paper will discuss some of the problems arising from the cyberfeminist perspective. A major weakness is related to the extensive employment of dualist binaries in the underlying understanding of gender. SIGIS research shows that often, these dualisms are translated into discourses that make claims about gender dualist practices related to ICT. SIGIS research also shows that when ICT practices are analysed in greater detail, the gendering turns out to be paradoxical, diverse and heterogeneous. However, the discourses may inject stereotypical norms and notions about what kind of artefacts and practices that are gender appropriate, thus producing a dualist force that may work to reproduce gender dualisms rather than dissolve them. Thus, while cyberfeminism may seem as a progressive countermove to a traditional assertion that computers are masculine, its discursive effects may not be that progressive in the longer term.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014
While early day Internet research often hailed "Cyberspace" as an arena where individuals would be liberated from the social shackles of their biological gender, a growing body of research makes evident the exaggerations present within these romanticized claims. Though the online gender divide is rapidly eroding, the Internet remains rooted in society at large. While digital technologies can challenge normative views, they therefore often maintain status quo. Consequently, there is a need to revisit old claims and challenge traditional notions of "Digital Gender". In this vein, this manifesto reports and synthesizes findings and discussions from an international workshop titled "Digital Gender: Theory, Methodology and Practice", held at Umeå University, Sweden, in early 2014. Against this backdrop, we chart out a new agenda for research on how the digital intermingle with the social in the production of gender. In particular, we argue that scholars must move past the idea of Internet as a separate-virtual-realm and direct attention to the increasingly complex ways that digital technologies permeate social practices, altering the very fabric of society itself. On the one hand, we stress the need for research that focuses on how particular Internet technologies help maintain as well as challenge normative views of gender. On the other hand, we stress the need to uncover how particular material properties of digital technology affect the (un)making of such views. Overall, we also stress the need for scholars of gender to move beyond binary oppositions and to be appreciative of intersectionality in their analyses of digital gender construction.
Technology and Feminism: A Strange Couple
The “gender digital divide” constitutes a prolific research program that compares the differences between women and men in access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Nevertheless, those using feminist socio-constructivist perspectives argue for the need to pay attention, not only to “access,” but also to “design,” in addition to considering social relations as something that is coded within technological artifacts. From this perspective, gender constitutes an integral part of technological production. This paper explores the co-constitution of gender and technology, considering a specific action-research experience. It is argued that the re-signification of gendered and technological codes drifts through: a) the opening of gendered and technological codes; b) the production of new cultural imaginaries that question hegemonic representations of gender; and c) the production of new subjectivities through the reorganization of socio-technical practices to develop performative acts that transform patriarchal relations.