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| By Urvashi Malav |
Abstract
A very small number of women after high school pursue their degrees in technical fields. For instance, only around 21 per cent of engineering majors are women and only around 19% of computer and information science majors are women. However, we do not need statistics to realize women’s under-representation. We all have seen how society has been and continues to be biased and stereotypical when it comes to women handling any type of technology. Be it the annoyance and gaze on women drivers on the road or females going for technical-like operations at home. We never expect our mothers to change the bulb (a very minimal kind of work) or carry the cars to the service centres. Even when females know how to drive cars, they do depend on their male counterparts for small affairs like - servicing of the cars, change of stepneys etc. Most of the women themselves feel that they are incapable of doing these tasks. This article delves into the historical background of the interaction of women and technology. It examines how technological developments shaped women’s lives and what they contributed to the so-called “meant for men” tech- world. At last, it explores certain challenges and the plausible threats that disparity and biases bring.
Industrial Revolution – Changing role of women
In the pre-industrial era, the household was the centre of production and everyone worked for the subsistence and the bare minimum trade-off. Women helped in the production of goods such as food and clothing, took care of the household and thus were better -off. But with the coming of the first stages of industrialization men began to work outside in the factories. Women’s role as producers was reduced and now their role was different. They had to take care of their husband who faced daily challenges and pressure outside to make money out of the hard labor in the factories. Women had the responsibility of being ideal wives and mothers who had to raise strong and competent sons for the awaiting struggles to earn a living.
Talking about the young women of houses, as the incomes of the family fell due to crop failures, and large sizes of families, they were compelled to move out to the towns to lessen one mouth to feed and even support the family. This helped these females to become financially independent but the independence came at the cost of immense exploitation.
Women at work
Recruiters never wanted the establishment of a permanent working class and women were the perfect face of lucrative, exploitable and temporary labour. Most of the women worked in the factories only until they got married and became mothers. Women as compared to men were less expensive and could be more easily controlled.
Though women were outside, working independently they were still subjected to stereotypes, limitations and exploitation. They were compelled to work for 80 hours a week with very few breaks and often inhumane conditions. Here, labour as a whole was exploited but being a woman was a whole other struggle due to the discriminatory lens of the recruiters.
By the mid-19th century, legislation forced more women away from the workplace for better or worse, and ideas of gender evolved to match the new dynamic that men had to go out – be the breadwinners and females – ideal mothers and caretakers. This is not only biased against women but this notion puts unnecessary pressure on men as well.
Computers who were women
During World War II women entered the labour force in great numbers, dominating industries such as nursing and teaching. These so-called “pink collar” jobs lacked clear opportunities for advancement, both financially and professionally. Traditionally, computer programming was seen as “women’s work.” In the early 1940s, the field was almost exclusively female and, as a highly feminized sector, it was rendered invisible. Men in the computing industry regarded writing code as tedious: making software was secondary to making hardware. As low-cost labour, they were seen as the best bet for office work, devaluing both computer work and the women doing it.
Though women were never recognised for their work there was a time when they had lead over their male counterparts in software technology, when they aced the coding and programming more than men. However, by the late 1960s, the power which the control of computers yielded was no longer hidden. The computer industry started booming and attracted the attention of the masses. Moreover, there was a popular narrative set that computers are meant just for boys, and popular media which had movies like “war games”, and “Weird Science” enforced such portrayals. When personal computers came, parents purchased them for their sons over their daughters.
This trajectory of women in the tech. field clearly shows how even women excelled in technical knowledge. The research shows no innate cognitive biological differences between men and women. National Institute of Health lists the reasons for the same as (a) cognitive ability, (b) relative cognitive strengths, (c) occupational interests or preferences, (d) lifestyle values or work-family balance preferences, (e) field-specific ability beliefs, and (f) gender-related stereotypes and biases. Experiences and interactions in these contexts illuminate individuals’ personal values, goals, social identities, competence to succeed, and connection to others. Over time, these sociocultural experiences accumulate to inform the development of cognitive ability and motivation, which in turn influence career choices. These trends led to the origin of theories like men have higher cognitive abilities, the “male maths brain”. This can be simply refuted by some examples of women like Ada Lovelace -the world’s first computer programmer. Grace M. Hopper was an esteemed computer scientist and one of the first computer programmers to work on the Harvard Mark I.
Challenges and the implications of gender bias in Future technological fields
We cannot forget the very recent case of Amazon’s gender bias in the recruitment process. The system was taught in the manner that it preferred male candidates over women. It identified the words like “women’s, women’s chess club” etc. in the resumes and rejected them. This was something which could be identified, however many of the biases still go unnoticed. Most algorithm programmers don’t even realise that unknowingly they transcend deep-rooted social prejudices. This can be evident from the present Machine Learning trends which reinforce the historical gender roles and notions of women as caring, submissive, and needing protection. For instance, security robots are primarily male, but service and sex robots are primarily female like Sophia, and Alexa. Thus even when we completely take care of providing an unbiased, ideal gender equality algorithm, AIs can automatically perceive the present biases in society and manifest them more dangerously.
Conclusion
It can be easily deciphered that it has always been the sociocultural and environmental factors that even lead to the notions that women in general in first place do not possess the cognitive abilities needed to understand technical studies or match like subjects. We even looked at how convenient it is for society and the power-bearers to influence the positions and notions as we saw in the case of World War and after the period in which the jobs were taken away from the females. With the need to promote more gender disparity in the STEM fields, we also need to be careful about the present gender biases and their jeopardising implications on AI and its spread.
References
Gender Gap in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM): Current Knowledge, Implications for Practice, Policy, and Future Directions, Wang & Degol
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5404748/
The Role of Women in the Industrial Revolution: Tsongas Industrial History Center
How the tech industry wrote women out of history
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/10/how-the-tech-industry-wrote-women-out-of-history
From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution
HistoryExtra
https://www.historyextra.com/period/industrial-revolution/womens-lifes-roles-industrial-revolution/
The Women Who Changed The Tech World
https://www.globalapptesting.com/blog/the-women-who-changed-the-tech-world
Gender and feminist considerations in artificial intelligence from a developing-world perspective, with India as a case study
Kumar & Choudhury
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01043-5
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