gender of tech

The Gender of Technology

Jesse Ramírez
2 unread replies.2 replies.
I enjoyed the discussion in session 3 around technology and gender. Since we had to end the session while the discussion was still underway, I wanted to devote a bit more time to it. However, our next session also has a lot of important material that I don't want to shortchange. We'll open the next session with 10-15 minutes of discussion time. 
Here I want to take a moment to clarify a few points and give you all the opportunity to use Canvas's discussion feature to contribute your own thoughts.
The readings by Sayers and Feenberg were intended to offer a non-essentialist, non-instrumentalist, non-determinist framework for the study of technology. We can call our alternative approach contextual, indeterministic, or constructivist. Basically, the meaning of technology depends on historically specific relationships among social actors and their interests, beliefs, perspectives, wishes, hopes, and desires. Technology can never simply signify "progress" because we always need to ask: progress for whom? Added: Whose concept of progress do we mean? We can connect back to Braverman here: if human work is unique because it can be guided by conception - by ideas and imagination - then this must be true for the work of designing robots, AI, and other automated systems as well. So what conceptions guide the design process?
The music video for the song "Ayo, Technology" was meant to illustrate one kind of contextual approach, namely, the study of technology in terms of gender relations in the United States. To be more precise: the video illustrates the similarity between fantasies of technology and fantasies of male control of women's sexuality. I underscore this point because a student asked for "a more concrete example." I believe there are few examples more concrete than this one, which is why I assigned it. It's not an example of how men actually use technology. You can't prove what's empirically the case with a work of fiction, obviously. But I believe a popular music video is an example of how popular American technological dreams and desires map onto popular American sexual desires, especially those associated with masculinity and femininity. It's just one small example, but the video both reflects widespread ideas about technology and male power and, through its wide popular reach, helps to reproduce these ideas. 
But it is understandable if some of you still want to know if/how these fantasies operate in the real world. In my opinion, male fantasy enters technology as an input (among others) and as an output (among others). One important empirical fact is that the vast majority of people who design technology in the United States are men. They also tend to be white, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class, and libertarian in political orientation. In Silicon Valley, some vote for Democrats and are left-leaning, but many are firm conservatives and almost all oppose government regulation and taxes. (Zuckerberg was recently recorded saying he thinks of Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren as his enemy.) The next part is open to debate: do the upbringing, values, interests, wishes, and desires of this very particular demographic group, including their gender biases, influence the technologies they design? I don't mean something as simple and direct as someone at Google watches "Ayo, Technology," thinks to himself, "Wow, it's cool when technology can be used to control women's sexuality," and then goes and designs a technology for that purpose. Obviously, technological design doesn't work that way, and neither does social influence.  Bias works much more subtly. 
To address the implied question of whether male fantasy is more than fantasy, i.e., whether it shapes actual design, I asked the following question: Why are almost all digital assistants--Siri, Alexa, Cortana-- named after women? By the way, yes, Cortana is based on a female name...from a videogame. In the Halo videogame series, Cortana is an AI that is often depicted nude. If you search "Halo Cortana nude" online, you'll find a ton of highly sexualized, nude or partly-nude images of Cortana. In fact, the very first search result (I use duck duck go) was a link to a porn site where you can find user-made videos of Cortana engaged in various sex acts.

halo-evolution-of-cortana.jpg

Added: Now, of course, Microsoft's Cortana doesn't look this way, and as far as I know, Microsoft's Cortana doesn't offer sexual favors. But it seems to me hard to deny that a highly sexualized female character from a fictional world - one that is predominantly popular among boys and men - has influenced the imaginations of the people who designed Cortana, who are also predominantly men. It seems to me that the very concept of an "assistant" is gendered female and reflects deeply ingrained assumptions that girls and women are servants. Cortana is gendered female because the labor that it automates - the labor of "assistance" - is widely assumed to be female labor. Conversely, when AI is supposed to offer not "assistance" but "intelligence," it tends to be gendered male. IBM's Watson, for example.
As for the other digital assistants, I highly recommend the following article: Jessica Nordell, "Stop Giving Digital Assistants Female Voices."
Nordell's point? "Consistently representing digital assistants as female matters a lot in real life: it hard-codes a connection between a woman’s voice and subservience."
Welp, that's my perspective on the issue. Please feel free to continue the debate here.
Best, Jesse

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