Technology reflects the biases of its creators; if most are men, women’s needs will be left out of the design of tech innovation.
Over the past couple of years, there has been a proliferation of narratives on ‘women in tech’. They the need to involve more women in tech development and design, encouraging girls to pursue academic programmes that will get them into the tech workforce, including women in tech decision-making across public and private policy spaces, as well as leveraging technology to address a range of social, economic, political and cultural issues women face across the globe.
These are all important aspects to ensuring that women are involved, not only as consumers but also as co-creators of the digital present and futures. They have been meaningful in challenging assumptions that technological advancements are gender neutral. They have also spawned off numerous initiatives aimed at including women and girls in tech. This article reflect on the successes and challenges of these efforts, as well as the powers and pitfalls of women in tech narratives.
Women have always contributed to advancements in science and technology. The Hidden Figures book and, later, the movie have been instrumental in making this clear, not just among practitioners, but also to societies more broadly. Owing to adverse sociocultural biases, women’s contributions have been downplayed; coding, for instance, was once considered a non-prestigious and low paying job for women. As its significance became clearer, women were increasingly boxed out, and the accruing prestige and pay instead went to men. While women were more than capable, adverse sociocultural norms came into play to dictate who gets credit and remuneration. This is an important ‘origin story’, as it challenges the myth that there are fewer women in tech—and less diversity in the tech workforce overall—owing to a ‘pipeline problem’. This narrative obfuscates the institutional aspects that hinder women from entering and remaining in the tech education fields and workforce, such as unequal access to educational opportunities, biases in hiring processes and hostile work environments. Dispelling this myth continues to happen, and in turn, it can help ensure ‘women in tech’ interventions and investments are more strategic. Understanding and eliminating the barriers to women from all backgrounds in accessing education opportunities that can lead them into the tech workforce—as well as reforming the workplace environments—must occur in tandem, while the false narrative that ‘there are not enough women’ must be extinguished.
Owing to adverse sociocultural biases, women’s contributions have been downplayed; coding, for instance, was once considered a non-prestigious and low paying job for women.
A prevailing assumption in tech design and roll out is that it will usually be applicable to the ‘end user’. When Apple Inc. rolled out its HealthKit app in 2014, it aimed to create a hub for users to track their health and fitness. For women, our reproductive health would be a priority, yet the app was launched without such a feature. This betrays the app developers’ imaginary idea of who the user was, and also, who its developers were (only 20 percent of Apple’s engineers were female at the time). Nor is this a singular incident. From smartphone sizes to artificial hearts, the ‘end user’ in mind is often not women. One may encounter this phenomenon and quip that women should just design what works for them. Increasingly, women are venturing to set up tech companies that cater to this diverse demographic. However, they encounter structural barriers, such as in accessing venture capital funding.
These are just few examples of how the tech industry is yet to become gender responsive. Even in tech policymaking, ‘gender blindness’ manifests, leading to policies and investments that do not reach women and girls. For instance, investments in internet access tend to favour setting up public access points such as cyber cafés. While laudable, it is not always guaranteed that these spaces will be safe for women, including the public safety of women getting to and from such access points.
On the back of calls to address gendered disparities in tech, a cottage industry catalysed by development funding has emerged. It aims to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment through technology innovation, utilising the instruments of experimentation and ideation.
On the back of calls to address gendered disparities in tech, a cottage industry catalysed by development funding has emerged. It aims to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment through technology innovation, utilising the instruments of experimentation and ideation. It has resulted in efforts such as hackathon challenges for gender-based violence, and tech innovation challenges for gender equality, to name a few. While well-intentioned, this approach of putting technology into service for ‘women’s issues’ often fails to account for the structural challenges that precede technology, as well as those also brought on by technology. While innovative solutions, such as use of tech to report gender-based violence (GBV) can be created, they need to be integrated into law enforcement, shelters and other social welfare systems that should be in place. A success metric cannot just be an increase in the use of or number of incidents reported through an app or a website. Nor is gender equality a ‘stack’ issue to be treated to the modes of work that tech employs to create solutions.
Narratives are powerful catalysts. They go a long way in framing challenges and expanding the imaginary horizons for what can be done to tackle them. Women in tech narratives have certainly had an impact on the trajectories taken in education, the tech industry, and public policymaking. However, we must continuously ensure that they are not misappropriated to obfuscate the complex interplays of sociocultural, economic and political factors that affect when, where and how women are impacted by, and contribute to tech.
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Nanjira Sambuli is a researcher policy analyst and advocacy strategist who works to understand the intersection of information and communications technology adoption with governance media ...
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