Gender and Technology: Week 3: A Man's World

Recently, two of my friends (J and D) and I decided to start doing a course on Gender and Technology. We pick up readings for each week and then get together and discuss them. This is me turning this learning course into a blog opportunity.

Gender and Technology: Week 3

A Man's World

When I was teaching in a government school in India back in 2011, there was a classroom that was filled with wooden planks and other tools. It was mostly kept locked up. Occasionally, however, I’d see a group of teenage boys making their way in and out of that room.

When I asked the other teachers about it, they said that the boys would go there to learn carpentry. 

My first reaction was, “That’s pretty cool.”

My second reaction was, “What about the girls?”

The teacher responded, “Oh, they have sewing classes at that time.”

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This week’s reading of our gender and technology course went a little bit over my head, as it covered different schools of thought in feminism regarding technology. However, a few points hit home that I’d like to highlight.

Women have historically not been a part of technological spaces.

One reason for this is the mindset of the society, where we tend to associate technology with ‘masculinity’. 

• It’s for this reason that girls were taught to sew, while boys were taught to work with tools. 

• It’s for this reason that the ‘science’ batches usually had fewer girls than boys, as was the case with engineering. 

• And conversely, it’s for this reason that men struggled with the social stigma associated with taking on courses that were not masculine enough (a friend of mine faced a lot of backlash from his family when he opted to study ‘writing’ in college).

As a society, we’ve been programmed, and we’ve continued to program children with believing that science and technology are the domains of men, whereas arts and humanities are ‘soft subjects’, better suited for women.

Another reason, apart from the social beliefs and expectations and stereotypes, are the structural barriers in themselves.

• If a girl was able to break away from the belief that she was meant to learn sewing, she still could not take the carpentry class, since that was only available for boys. The reverse was equally true.

• If a woman managed to get the required education to enter the fields of science and technology, she would have a much lower probability of being hired compared to a man with similar qualifications.

I know I’m using the past tense here, but these aren’t necessarily issues of the past. They’re still relevant today, as generalizations based on gender and workspace discrimination continue to shape our beliefs of what careers are more ‘suitable’ for women.

J pointed out that we can actually extrapolate these same ideas out of science and technology into other fields, such as that of the army, where we continue to see similar debates raging.

I suppose things are changing, especially with the onset of digital technologies. But even as more women begin to enter the world of technology, are our mindsets really changing?

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Reading source for this week: Wajcman, Judy. "From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience." Information, Communication & Society 10, no. 3 (2007): 287–98.