Intersectionalized Professional Identities and Gender in the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (original) (raw)
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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).
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