Gender in Science and Technology

BACK: Effective Technology

Two possible Senses

  1. Women’s presence in Science and Technology
  2. How Scientific practices and the design of technologies are shaped by assumptions about gender.

Domestic Technologies–early feminist writings on reproductive technologies endorsed forms of technological determinism.

New technologies free women from the tyranny of the houeshold and promotes women’s equality.

Ruth Schwartz-Cowan

The mechanization of the household in the US. This was a critique of Talcott Parson’s model for the ‘crisis’ of the modern family. Rather:

  • Middle-Class wives do not get jobs
  • They have new tasks (shopping)
  • Mechanized housework is equally time-consuming
  • Isolated houeshold: technology is not shared
  • New Ideology of the perfect housewife-mother and the disappearance of demostic servants.

Case Studies on how Gender Relations shape Technology

  • Cocburn-Ormrod (SST): the shifting status of the microwave, washing machines, sound systems, VCR..
  • Ann Jorum Berg (SST): the ‘smart house’ as an integrated house. Connects sensors, lighting, wired communication: motion, smoke, water leakage, temperature sensors.
  • Moyra Doorly: How could domestic technologies be different? Victorian feminists started a project for cooperative residential neighborhoods. Alice Austin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman on a professionalized housekeeping system.

The triumph of individualized household in the USA:

  1. Women as passive respondent to industrialization and victims of advertisers. There is a powerful alliance ‘domestic science’ + manufacturers. The fridge (gas vs electricity).
  2. Women responded rationally (to improve their family’s living condition)
  3. Women (and men) actively subscribed to an ideology that emphasized the values of privacy and autonomy over those of efficiency and community interest.

But what about the material context of women’s experience (workign class women in Britain in 1930s)? How much agency did women actually have in this process? Which were the alternatives?

We should rather see this as a process of negotiation.

New domestic technologies cannot be simply read as emancipatory. There’s no simple cause and effect relationship–there were unexpected use of domestic technologies. These are often transferred from other areas of application. Why should they invest heavily in domestic technology?

Changes in design from commercial/industrial to domestic use, in order to adapt to prevailing ideologies of housework.

Other Technologies

  • Military and commerical cockpit design
  • Computing: Gender-flip in computer industry
  • Fertility control
  • Many roads not taken (not studying a male birth control pill)

What is the direction of these new technologies? (Recall the big tree picture, where why we picked on route over the other and how we can’t go back).

New Reproductive Technologies (NRT)

Technologically assisted conception, through the manipulation of gametes (not just from biological parents). What are the limits to this? Why can’t we just use traits from all these random people. What is the natural family? Why should we just keep the idea of the nuclear family?

In the case of a “surrogate mother,” we need to distinguish between: mater/genitrix/rearing/conception/gestation. Any technologies in this area: we can’t just talk about the technologies as technologies–there is this huge social dimension to it.

Nelly Oudshoorn:

Ideologies of Gender as shaping medical technologies, and human bodies. What is the male and female body? They used to be thought of similar but then were complementarily opposite.

There was then idea that there were larger differences between male bodies and women bodies–“they” think differently and more emotionally, they aren’t good at mathematics, they’re better suited for certain tasks. The body is the hardware for the mind and determines how you function. Therefore, they cannot be part of academia or royalty or …

The pill was seen as a way to control women’s hormones. They caused them to think differently and more emotionally. Essentially the pill shaped women’s bodies–who were the people who got to research and design and make the pill?

Feminist Epistemologies

In which ways would science and technology be qualitatively different if women were better represented? (or Western minorities, non-Westerners, …)

If scientific knowledge simply reflects nature, then science would not be different–but we have seen that scientific knowledge is socially constructed. Engineers with a more diverse backgrounds end up designing to those different diversity groups. SOCIAL FACTORS MATTER.

Main lines of Research and Gender and Science

  • Gender itself is a Social Construction: This originated in the medical discourse after the war. Physicians had to assign gender to newborns who were suffering from diseases. They needed to be modified in order to have a clear gender for a “productive and whole” society. Biologizing gender differences in the public discourse were constantly critiqued. By saying “that’s a biological thing,” you kind of close discussion and ‘win’ the argument.

Emily Martin describes stereotypical roles and how biology is profoundly gendered. Does the sperm arrive to the egg or does the evil egg eat up the sperm?

Science constructs images of gender and technology often embodies them. Existing assumptions go into the technology and reinforces those stereotypes.

  • Standpoint Theory: Women’s experiences of discrimination allows them to better understand gender relations. They can see aspects of the discrimination that cannot be seen from the male perspective. They are well positioned to do so. People for whome social constructs are oppressive can more easily understand those constraints than others (in science as well as in society). You can see more than others–which is why forms of discrimination in science can be almost invisible. Everyone is a old white man.

  • Difference Feminism: There are masculine and feminine ways of thinking. Masculine: reductionism, distance objectivity, technical control as main goal. Feminine: attention to relationships, intimacy between observer and observed, empathy, holistic understanding. This tries to put the best in both sides.

  • Anti-Essentialism: What is gendered isn’t the scientific methods, but how we talk about methods. A lot of feminine values are how we described science before Galileo. It’s only under the ideas of modern science. Identities are “fractured,” there are not discrete standpoints–the experiences of women of color can be very different from those of white women.

Donna Haraway

Argues that feminism should play a role in shaping science and technology–they might be empowering. They shouldn’t be thinking if technology is good or bad, but trying to shape these things.

She thinks of the cyborg as a postive myth–it is a product of blurring traditional boudaries through technology:

  • organism/machine?
  • human/animal?
  • physical/non-physical?

NEXT: Reproducive Futures and Designer Babies