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?
Session Focus
• 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
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.popcultur
es.com/theorists/har
away.html
• Professor of the
History of
Consciousness
University of
California, Santa
Cruz
Haraway, D. (1985) A manifesto for Cyborgs:
science, technology, and socialist feminism in the
1980s. Socialist Review, 1985, 80, 65-107.
• 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).
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 raceneutral”
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
The Cyborg Manifesto:
Donna Haraway
"Late 20th Century machines have
made thoroughly ambiguous the
difference between natural and
artificial, mind and body, selfdeveloping 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"
The Cyborg Manifesto:
Donna Haraway
• 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
The Cyborg Manifesto:
Donna Haraway
Who Cyborgs will be is a
radical question?
The answers are a matter of
survival.
The Cyborg Manifesto:
Donna Haraway
• 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
A Cyborg World:
Donna Haraway
• 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”
A Cyborg World:
Donna Haraway
• “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”
A Cyborg World:
Donna Haraway
• “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 socialistfeminism 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 hightech 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
Women and the “New Industrial
Revolution”
• Clinic-Hospital: intensified machine-body
relations; loss of control of women’s relation to
reproduction; ideological struggle over role of
women
• Church: electronic fundamentalist “supersaver” 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
Women and the “New Industrial
Revolution”
• 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 havenots”
• “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”.
Discussion
How 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/lin
ks.html and also note this page:
http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/lin
ks_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.htm
l
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.educyberpg.com/Teachers/womenminoritiestech.html
Women and computers
http://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/svd