Race, Gender and Technology – Session 11

Race, Gender and Technology – Session 11

"Computing includes not only the machines as artefacts, but also the expertise and

knowledge, culture and values of the computing profession, and the gender

divisions and gender relations involved in production of hardware and software"

(Juliet Webster, 1996: 9)

Before we go: Readings

• In the context of this theme, take a look at the article by Eileen Trauth (2002) Odd Girl out: an individual differences perspective on women in the IT profession. Published on Information Technology & People 15 (2), p. 98-118.It is available electronically and full text from Rutgers Indexes and Databases. Exam item.

• Advertisement for Online Security Systems

• (EuroTech)

• Has your organization an appropriate security wall?

• Examine the work of theorists such as Haraway, Nardi and O'Day to explore how ICTs play into the racial and gender equation

• Understand the concept of the “Digital Divide”

• Begin to explore the relationship between technology and race and gender issues

Session Focus

Review of Learning

• Technological determinism vs social construction of technology

• Irrational users vs rational machines

• Human expendability

• Digital divide: gender, culture and technology issues

Key Theorists: Donna Haraway

• http://www.popcultures.com/theorists/haraway.html

• Professor of the History of Consciousness University of California, Santa Cruz

• Uses metaphor of the cyborg to discuss the relationships of science, technology, and feminism.

• Argues that hi-tech culture challenges and breaks down the old dualisms of Western thinking -- things like the mind/body split, self/other, male/female, reality/appearance, truth/illusion, and so on.

• Instead, we have become cyborgs, mixtures of person and machine, where the biological side and the mechanical/electrical side become so inextricably entwined that they can't be split (sort of like the Borg in Star Trek).

Haraway, D. (1985) A manifesto for Cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the

1980s. Socialist Review, 1985, 80, 65-107.

The Cyborg Manifesto:Donna Haraway

• “The ‘New Industrial Revolution’ is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities, new ethnicities, … emergence of new collectives, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender nor race-neutral”

Intimate dependence on communication & information

technologies:• Political processes• Modern states• Multinational

corporations• Military power• Welfare state

apparatuses• Satellite systems

• Fabrications of our imaginations

• Labor control systems• Medical constructions of

our bodies• Commercial

pornography• International division of

Labor• Religious evangelism


"Late 20th Century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert"


• Central to new working class is the CYBORG Cybernetic organism

• Hybrid of machine and organism• Structuring our societal transformation• Committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, perversity• Oppositional, utopian, completely without

innocence• IIlegitimate offspring of militarism, patriachial

capitalism and state socialism


Who Cyborgs will be is a radical question?

The answers are a matter of survival.


• The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these machines are so deadly

• The need for unity of people trying to resist world wide intensification of domination of cyborgs has never been more acute.

A Cyborg World:Donna Haraway

• A Cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet

• A Cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints

The Informatics of Domination:the societal transition

• Representation

• Physiology

• Small Group

• Organism

• Eugenics

• Hygiene

• Reproduction

• Sex

• Genetic Engineering

• Simulation• Communications Engineering• Subsystem• Biotic Component• Population Control• Stress management• Replication• Genetic Engineering• Robotics


• Crisis in identity

• “I do not know of any other time in history where there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the technological dominations of “race”, “gender”, “sexuality” and “class”


• “Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide”

• “The production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated”


• “Science and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action. Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics”

The effect of new technologies• New family structures: patriarchal nuclear family,

mediated welfare state family, family of the homework economy

• Robotics put men out of work in developed countries

• Intensification of vulnerability of work• Altered gender divisions of labor and differential

gender migration patterns• Eradication of “public life” – eg video games /

miniaturization modern forms of “private life”• Militarization of our imaginations• Electronic and nuclear warfare

The effect of new technologies

Affect social relations of both sexuality and reproduction:

• View of body as biotic component or cybernetic communication system

• Visualization and Intervention technologies: transformation of the reproductive system and predatory nature of photographic consciousness: restructuring of biological / sexual possibilities

The effect of new technologies

• The reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical workforce

• Formation of a strongly bimodal social structure: masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, especially people of color, confined to homework economy; illiteracy of several varieties, general redundancies and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance to disappearance

Women and the “New Industrial Revolution”

• Home: re-emergence of home sweat-shops, flight of men, intense domestic violence; home-based businesses and telecommuting

• Market: target for less clearly needed commodities; intensified sexualization of consumption

• State: continued erosion of welfare state, reduced occupational mobility for women

• Schools: public education linked to high-tech capital needs: differentiated by race, class, gender; continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of color; development of numerous elites


• Clinic-Hospital: intensified machine-body relations; loss of control of women’s relation to reproduction; ideological struggle over role of women

• Church: electronic fundamentalist “super-saver” preachers soleminizing the union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; struggle over women’s meanings and authority in religion; spirituality intertwined with sex and health


• Massive intensification of insecurity

• Cultural Impoverishment

• Urgency of socialist-feminist politics addressed to science and technology

DIGITAL DIVIDE

Your reaction to these ideas?

The Digital Divide• Culture, race,

ethnicity

• Gender

• Economics

• Education

• Infrastructure

• Access for disabled

The Digital Divide: What is it?

• “Gaps between the information haves and have-nots”

• “Excluding the world’s poor from the information revolution”

• “The Digital Divide is about more than connecting to the Internet, it is about connecting to opportunity in the new digital economy. Silicon Valley's Digital Divide is the gap between different communities in workforce, education, the economy and technology”.

The Digital Divide“A society which is fractured, not along racial or economic

lines and not by war, famine or religion,

but by information or, more specifically, people’s ability to gain access to it”

(Weekend Australian, February

27-28, 1999 p. 6)

The Digital Divide

• Information Rich: those élite members of the population capable of understanding and harnessing the fast-moving opportunities of information technology

• Information Poor: those people excluded from information technology opportunities because of a range of social, cultural, political, economic or educational factors

The Digital Divide

“People lack many things: jobs, shelter, food, health care and drinkable water.

Today, being cut off from basic telecommunications services is hardship

almost as acute as other deprivations, and may indeed reduce the chances of finding

remedies to them”

UN Secretary General Kofi Anan

The Digital Divide:some divided viewpoints

• “Brave new world replete with an electronic agora and online democracy” (Al Gore)

• “From Manhattan to Madrid, the Internet has fundamentally changed work, recreation – even love. But in Malawi and Mozambique, life remains very much the same”

• (Jane Black – BBC)

The Digital Divide

• More than 80 % of people in the world have never heard a telephone dial tone

• 2% of the people in the world are connected to the Internet

• 1 in 100 people have access to a computer• Industrialized countries, with 15% of world’s

population, are home to 88% of Internet users• Less than 1% of people in South Asia are online,

even though it is home to 20% of world’s population

The Digital Divide• Africa has 739 million people and only 14

million phone lines (Fewer phone lines than Manhattan)

• I million Internet users in Africa compared to 10.5 million in the UK (80% of these in South Africa)

• Ratios: Internet access: USA / Europe = 1:6; Africa = 1:5,000• Even if telecommunications systems were in

place, most of the world’s poor would still be excluded from the Internet revolution because of illiteracy and lack of basic computing skills, as well as English language

The Republic of Benin (Africa)

• Location: Western Africa, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean, between Nigeria and Togo

• Area - comparative: slightly smaller than Pennsylvania

• Climate: tropical; hot, humid in south; semiarid in north

• Land use: arable land: 13% permanent crops: 4% permanent pastures: 4% forests and woodland: 31% desert: 48%

• Irrigated land: 100 sq km

• Environment: recent droughts; inadequate supplies of potable water; poaching threatens wildlife populations; deforestation; desertification

• Population: 6,395,919 excess mortality due to AIDS;

• Life expectancy at birth: male: 49.24 years female: 51.16 years (2000 est.)

• Languages: French (official), 6 tribal languages

• Economy: underdeveloped and dependent on subsistence agriculture, cotton production.

• Imports - commodities: tobacco, foodstuffs, petroleum products, capital goods

• Telephones: main lines in use: 28,000 (1 in 300)

• Televisions: 60,000• Population below poverty

line: 33% • Budget:

revenues: $299 million expenditures: $445 million

• Illicit drugs: transshipment point for narcotics associated with Nigerian trafficking organizations

• Literacy: can read and write total population: 37% male: 48.7% female: 25.8%

• Information access: for those 40% who are literate, 80% websites are in English, a language understood by 10%

Bill Gates

“The Internet, along with other computer technologies, is literally

enabling some developing countries to "leapfrog" the industrial revolution

and jump straight to the Internet Age”.

DiscussionHow can the WWW and networked

information technology make a difference to the future and well being of

Benin?What infrastructure would be required?

What should be the priorities?

Useful resources• Center for Women & Information Technology:

http://www.umbc.edu/cwit/

• Women's Studies/Women's Issues: http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/links.html and also note this page: http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/links_sci.html (one of the best collections of sites for women and technology)

• Gender, Science and Technology Gateway: http://gstgateway.wigsat.org/

Gender-Related Electronic Forums at: http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/forums.html

Against the Odds: http://nrgen.com/against_the_odds/index.html

Barriers for Women in Computing at: http://www.ul.ie/~govsoc/barrierstw.html

Best Online Resources For Women and Minorities in Science and Technology: http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/womenminoritiestech.html

Women and computershttp://www.ualberta.ca/~nfriesen/582/intro.htm

• Spender, D. (1995). Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace. Melbourne: Spinfex Press.

• Turner, E. (1997). "What is our worth?" In: A.F. Grundy, et al (eds.), in Women Work and Computerisation: Proceedings of the 6th International IFIP Conference, Bonn, Germany, May 24-27, 1997). Germany: Springer.

• Webster, J. (1996). Shaping Women’s Work: Gender, Employment and Information Technology. London: Longman.

• Women and Technology Workforce: http://www.jointventure.org/resources/2000Index/svdd.html

Race, Gender and Technology – Session 11

Documents

Transcript of Race, Gender and Technology – Session 11