Women and Technology

THESIS ABSTRACT


Contemporary Character Design
At the Intersection with Emerging Technologies and Activism



Angela Alcerro

November, 2006


There is a wealth of documentation identifying the problem of middle school girls losing interest in mathematics and science as well as the scarcity of women in technology related careers. This phenomenon is now having a ripple effect on previously unrelated fields.
The problem of potential underrepresentation of girls in the areas of emerging ideas and technologies as it intersects the arts and arts education is one of great concern. This area is growing so rapidly that comfort and ease with technology at a young age is urgent as an extension to a contemporary visual artist’s vocabulary as well as the artist’s participation in future developments.
Over the past two years, conferences specializing in emerging technologies such as Siggraph and The Virtual Storytelling Conference demonstrate an increased interest in more emotional character and story driven content as well as the need for characters that are positive role models for girls. Conferences such as Girls ‘N’ Games at UCLA identified these areas as types of content of interest to girls with regards to gaming. Gaming is seen as one pathway to fluency in technology.
How does a singular artist or character designer contribute and participate in activism to encourage creative middle school aged girls to be and stay engaged in math and science as well as collaborative learning experiences?
The process of inquiry was informed by the application of critical theories and literature on emerging technologies and education to develop a character design.
The goals in the thesis project were to help expose girls to a more sophisticated and aspirational visual vocabulary integrating art, science, math and computing. This would not simply reflect back an aesthetic they were comfortable with, but would instead supply them with rich content to inspire and think about.

In the pulp magazine period (1926–1946), science fiction’s publishing practices excluded female authors from the burgeoning genre. Using a network analysis of over 2,400 authors and 14,000 stories, this article demonstrates that women’s publication numbers in science fiction went down over the pulp period. Women, unlike their male colleagues, were published in ways that made it nearly impossible to gain economic stability and prestige in the pulps. The consolidation of sf into a marketing genre thus came at the expense of a female sf community who troubled the purity of a newly exclusive field.

The main question explored here is whether videogames are gender-exclusive, meaning that females cannot gain pleasure from what is essentially a male-dominated environment/activity. I will analyse some examples of games and characters that have been successful in appealing to both genders and explore the reasons why it is difficult to find empowering female representations within videogames. I will argue, however, that although it may be true that men and women may derive different pleasures from playing videogames, this should not be a reason to condone the propagation of gender stereotypes.

This review focuses on the participation, retention and success of women in Australia in these science and technology disciplines. The review concentrates on the horizontal and vertical segregation of women academics and researchers as key contributing factors that impact on the research and innovation agendas.

This manuscript discusses the relationship between women, technology manifestation, and likely prospects in the developing world. Using India as a case study, the manuscript outlines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics affect women’s opportunities in developing countries. Women in developing countries, notably in South Asia, are perceived as doing domestic work and are underrepresented in high-level professions. They are disproportionately underemployed and face prejudice in the workplace. The purpose of this study is to determine if the introduction of AI would exacerbate the already precarious situation of women in the developing world or if it would serve as a liberating force. While studies on the impact of AI on women have been undertaken in developed countries, there has been less research in developing countries. This manuscript attempts to fill that need.

Livro: https://repositorio.ufba.br/ri/bitstream/ri/32218/1/internet-e-feminismos-REPO.pdf
Graciela Natansohn e Florencia Rovetto

Sobre o artigo:
O desenvolvimento acelerado das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TICs) tem colocado desafios para distintos campos sociais. Além disso, a internet não apenas impacta vidas e relações, mas progressivamente apresenta-se como elemento constitutivo de subjetividades e sociedades. Isso quer dizer que questões envolvendo mídias digitais desenrolam-se como preocupação temática e metodológica em todas as áreas das ciências sociais. Em especial, tem levantado atenção, a forma de uso e o papel dessas novas mídias para grupos minoritários e atuação política em geral. Este texto procura trazer uma contribuição às respostas a essas questões,
a partir de uma certa literatura sobre gênero e violência, sobre sexualidade e internet, e de pesquisas de campo anteriores sobre a prática e seu enfrentamento no Brasil.

Sobre o livro:
Este livro é uma manta coletiva plurinacional, produzida com o cuidado
minucioso e calmo que requer o trabalho da costura a muitas mãos. Tecido como um espaço para o encontro, para urdir a trama, um lugar de reunião para a conversação entre amigas, colegas, ativistas, que cara a cara, corpo a corpo, tecla a tecla, vão intercambiando suas experiências, reflexões e saberes. Nesses textos, a virtualidade e as tecnologias infocomunicacionais são lidas como ferramentas a serviço do acumulado de práticas feministas, que conta com uma longa história de costura – a rede permite esse estado de assembleia que nós feministas sabemos sustentar no tempo e potencializar no espaço. Mas essas tecnologias também são revisadas e esquadrinhadas nos vários veículos que reproduzem a violência estrutural que caracteriza o sistema patriarcal-capitalista em que vivemos.

While late-Victorians associated bicycles with male riders and masculinity, James Joyce counters Victorian conventions in Finnegans Wake and captures the subversive potential of the bicycle to empower women with a new brand of feminine sexuality that recalls characteristics of the late-Victorian "New Woman." Rather than condemn these female cyclists, Joyce's narrative admires them and shows that women can be both skilled bicyclists on the road and, in a metaphorical sense, biological cyclists (through menstruation and childbearing) that physically enact a self-propulsion similar to cyclists. As these actual and metaphorical cyclists propel through various terrains and biological sequences, they simultaneously author(ize) their own personal narratives and, in doing so, the composition of all narratives involving human life. Moreover, Joyce's female cyclist is not only a figure of liberated female sexuality but also a figure of the artist herself.

Whose Artifacts? Whose Stories? explores uses of public history to tell stories of women’s relationship with science and technology at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, one of Canada’s national museum. The article examines how stories of women, which have been long overlooked by curators who in the past considered technological artifacts through the lenses of type collecting and history of science and technologies methodologies, are now being framed in the context of public history and hence are coming to the forefront of museum collecting and interpretation. * ¿De quién son los objetos? ¿De quién son las historias? explora el uso de la historia pública para narrar historias de la relación de la mujer con la ciencia y la tecnología en uno de los museos nacionales de Canadá. Este artículo analiza cómo las historias de las mujeres fueron ignoradas por los curadores de museos, quienes en el pasado categorizaron dispositivos tecnológicos con criterios como tipo de colección, his...

This manuscript discusses the relationship between women, technology manifestation, and likely prospects in the developing world. Using India as a case study, the manuscript outlines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics affect women’s opportunities in developing countries. Women in developing countries, notably in South Asia, are perceived as doing domestic work and are underrepresented in high-level professions. They are disproportionately underemployed and face prejudice in the workplace. The purpose of this study is to determine if the introduction of AI would exacerbate the already precarious situation of women in the developing world or if it would serve as a liberating force. While studies on the impact of AI on women have been undertaken in developed countries, there has been less research in developing countries. This manuscript attempts to fill that need.

Este trabajo realiza un diagnóstico de estudios dedicados a las compositoras, artistas sonoras y cantautoras en Costa Rica. El estudio analiza los enfoques historiográficos aplicados en el estudio de la vida y obra de estas autoras y su contexto. Se procura introducir un estado de la cuestión, para a continuación proponer un modelo crítico de investigación de los casos propuestos, a partir de un estudio de filosofía tecnológica feminista.

El enfoque propuesto procura evidenciar cómo las teleologías impuestas por la historia de la música occidental, la historia de la música en el siglo XX, y la historia de la música en América Latina, construyen discursos y narrativas introducidos en la historiografía costarricense, la formación en composición musical y la educación general básica. Consecuentemente, el modelo propuesto, aplicado al trabajo de estas autoras costarricenses, ofrece una consideración de las historias contingentes que se tejen en su trabajo creativo y los imaginarios culturales, artísticos, tecnológicos y geobiopolíticos resultantes.

"3D Things" was conceived in a moment when some women's organisations in Sri Lanka had begun to explore how they could do their mobilising through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as on YouTube and blogs. It emerged from the intention to recognise and explore their growing political engagement with online platforms. Yet computers and social media are only the more recent examples of the devices and technologies that have had broad significance for women's organising. The radio, the typewriter, the cyclostyle machine, and print technologies encompassing the letterpress, litho press and silk screen printing constitute some early examples. Proposing that there is more than a functional narrative to these devices and technologies, "3D Things" foregrounds 'things' and their materialities as they are discursively represented in women's organising, approaching them from the personal, political, affective and economic dimensions through which activists apprehend and engage with them in doing their organising.

This paper explores ICT use by Indian and Filipino female migrant workers who are employed as live-in maids in Singapore through ethnographic interviews with
twenty women. Their particular employment circumstances translate into a
circumscribed and isolated living and working experience which makes their access and use of ICTs even more significant. Our findings show that these women employ a variety of technologies for everyday communication, including letters, the mobile phone and
the Internet, with the mobile phone being the most crucial communication device for most of them. Mobile communications enable them to foster emotional links with their friends and family, grow their social networks and afford them greater autonomy in
seeking better job opportunities and the management of their personal matters. The paper concludes by making three policy recommendations aimed at improving ICT access for migrant workers. First, upon arrival in their host countries, all migrant
workers should be educated about the access, use and cost of different communication devices and services available to them. Second, contracts between employers and migrant workers should have clear provisions for the employees’ rights to communication and specifically, mobile communications. Third, governments, nongovernmental
organisations and the private sector should actively seek to narrow the technological divide between migrant workers’ home and host countries so that these workers’ communications with individuals and organisations in their home countries are not impeded.

Lying at the intersections of disciplines such as of gender studies, media and communications, social psychology, sociology, anthropology and science, technology and society, women’s engagement with mobile media has been the subject of provocative and innovative research that have provided as much insight as they have inspired points of reflection. Encouragingly, there has been significant growth in the diversity of subjects studied over time, from nuclear families
to single parent households, from working adults to the elderly, as well as a widening range of issues being investigated, including household coordination, family relationships, romantic partnerships and workplace (dis)empowerment. And yet, as this chapter seeks to elucidate, even as the technological landscape of mobile media changes with the constant appearance of disruptive technologies such as the recent tablet phenomenon, the social settings within which women appropriate mobile media remain
fundamentally unaltered. The socio-cultural norms and expectations surrounding women’s roles in society, as daughters, spouses, mothers and individuals in their own right, are as circumscribing as they are circumscribed, as can be witnessed in women’s use of mobile media as they strive to fulfil both familial and professional obligations. As Leopoldina Fortunati astutely observed, women are more vulnerable than men to the pressure of “double work” - the challenges of balancing obligations in both the home and the workplace.
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From the boom of the 1990s to the bust of early 2000, women have been carving out careers in information technology. For these IT workers, it is not just about earning a living but about applying their technological, scientific and engineering skills and knowledge. Doing IT demonstrates that women fill a wide variety of these technological occupations, yet continue to face barriers preventing them from reaching their full professional potential. Scott-Dixon examines the IT environment's traditional workplace that keeps gender, race, class, ability and pay inequities firmly in place. Drawing on personal interviews, she shows that despite these barriers, women in IT bring passion to their jobs and draw on their wit, intelligence and creative resourcefulness to shape their career paths. Doing IT is an invigorating conversation among women in search of greater employment opportunities.

Having a metaphorical image helps catalyze conversations. Everyone has the ability to communicate visually. Being 'an artist' is not the core capability of the visual journalist. Visual communication involves images and words, entwined in an intuitive yet intentional way that makes more of each. Visuals work. They are archetypes. We see not only our own point of view: we also make a picture of the connections. Everyone sees something different while agreeing that it looks the same.

Whose Artifacts? Whose Stories? explores uses of public history to tell stories of women’s relationship with science and technology at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, one of Canada’s national museum. The article examines how stories of women, which have been long overlooked by curators who in the past considered technological artifacts through the lenses of type collecting and history of science and technologies methodologies, are now being framed in the context of public history and hence are coming to the forefront of museum collecting and interpretation.   

*

¿De quién son los objetos? ¿De quién son las historias? explora el uso de la historia pública para narrar historias de la relación de la mujer con la ciencia y la tecnología en uno de los museos nacionales de Canadá. Este artículo analiza cómo las historias de las mujeres fueron ignoradas por los curadores de museos, quienes en el pasado categorizaron dispositivos tecnológicos con criterios como tipo de colección, historia de la ciencia y metodologías de la tecnología. El artículo se centra en cómo ahora estos mismos objetos se enmarcan en el contexto de la historia pública y por lo tanto se ubican a la vanguardia de la colección e interpretación en museos.

ICTs such as television, the Internet and mobile phones are assuming a growing presence within the modern homestead and are having an indelible impact on family dynamics
and parenting. While gender studies have sought to  understand ICT domestication from the perspective of mothers, the influence of social and cultural factors on the adoption and appropriation of ICTs has not been as widely studied. So as to better explicate the influence of
socio-cultural factors on mothers’ domestication of ICTs, this article studies the experiences of mothers in China and South Korea and compares its findings against studies of ICT
domestication by mothers in other countries. Based on ethnographic interviews with mothers in media-rich families in Beijing, Shanghai and Seoul, the article explores how mothers
incorporate ICTs into their household routines and how they utilise ICTs as they fulfil their maternal duties of managing the home, coordinating schedules, fostering family interaction and
supervising their children. It also pays particular attention to how they oversee their children’s ICT use. The article finds that cultural conceptions of motherhood and maternal responsibility, the premium placed on academic achievement by children, as well as the two societies’ highly
positive outlook on technology, greatly influence how Chinese and Korean mothers use and supervise their children’s use of ICTs. It also finds that the mothers are creative in deploying
ICTs in coordinating schedules with, disciplining and monitoring their children, but also find the perpetual mothering which is enabled by always-on ICT-mediated connections to be burdensome and stressful.

This paper explores how the internet is taken up and used by women in the everyday; how it enters their lives, and how it is integrated into other projects and areas of life. Internet use is treated as an activity that needs to be viewed in context, considering the rich social world that goes on around it, to understand how the internet emerges and is made meaningful through a set of embodied everyday practices. Women have historically been somewhat excluded from the internet, and the form of this exclusion has proved difficult to understand using traditional methods. This paper reviews a set of research and literature that attempts to contextualise use of these technologies to tease out some of what is particular to women’s experience of the internet.

This paper is located primarily within strand 2. (i) ‘How much is change and how much is more of the same.’ It has some elements of relevance to (ii) ‘The technological ‘gap”, in that it illuminates some gender differences on access to the internet, and a little relevance to (iii) ‘How do young people use personal technology? What purposes does it serve?’, in that it addresses these issues with regard to women, and there will likely be some commonalities.

From the boom of the 1990s to the bust of early 2000, women have been carving out careers in Information Technology. For these IT workers, it is not just about earning a living but about applying their technological, scientific and engineering skills and knowledge. "Doing IT" demonstrates that women fill a wide variety of these technological occupations, yet continue to face barriers preventing them from reaching their full professional potential. Scott-Dixon examines the IT environment's traditional workplace that keeps gender, race, class, ability and pay inequities firmly in place. Drawing on personal interviews, she shows that despite these barriers, women in IT bring passion to their jobs and draw on their wit, intelligence and creative resourcefulness to shape their career paths. "Doing IT" is an invigorating conversation among women in search of greater employment opportunities.

New domesticity—which is a return to a lifestyle that centers
domesticity “in the service of environmentalism, DIY culture, and
personal fulfillment”—is taking shape in mostly Westernized DIY
spaces. New domesticity exists in a neoliberal and digital DIY
ontology that distinguishes itself from the domesticity of previous generations while also making claims to a “return.” This essay lays 10 out some key issues that need to be taken into account regarding this emerging form of Wi-Fi gadget facilitated public engagement through domestic space while noting how the issue of unwaged labor resurfaces in the context of digital labor by women.

Researchers have examined the impact of the internet in regions experiencing economic change and struggle. However, broad assumptions about opportunity and access to the internet in these regions still exist. An unproblematised 'global village', where equal opportunity to engage in an open dialogue, is yet to be achieved. This article examines these issues in East Central Europe and the electronic discourses emergent in and about this region. The article questions the empowering capabilities of the internet in East Central Europe. The article will present the voices from this region who assert that only with widespread access, can the internet fulfil its democratic promise. Women's access to the internet will also be discussed. Finally, the article highlights women's organisations in Hungary, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic which are creating spaces for collaboration and connectivity, and providing a forum for new voices which have previously been silent.

This chapter focuses on fertility awareness digital tracking tools and compares discourses about older methods of birth spacing such as ‘natural family planning’ to the evolution of fertility awareness towards digital forms in the early twenty-first century. Originally promoted as the only sanctioned alternative to other forms of birth control, these older methods were—and, for some, still are—taught in mostly religious frameworks, whereas contemporary fertility awareness-based methods are now disseminated and practised in a variety of contexts that have no ties to institutional churches. Yet some advocates and practitioners of fertility awareness ascribe spiritual aspects to this practice, in line with environmentalist ideals, with the urge to ‘know oneself’ better while respecting the ‘natural’ cycles of women, as well as with some discourses of feminist menstrual activists. The new articulations of fertility management, women’s health, religion, medicine, and technology give rise to a plurality of discourses about the contemporary digitalization of fertility awareness: while some see it as an alternative to oppressive medical and pharmaceutical authorities, others regard it as a return to religiously mandated forms of contraception and to forms of conservatism.
Pasche Guignard, Florence. 2021. “Digital Tools for Fertility Awareness: Family Planning, Health, Religion, and Feminine Embodiment.” In: Lüddeckens, Dorothea, Hetmanczyk, Philipp, Klassen, Pamela E. and Stein, Justin B.  (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health. Routledge, p. 293-307.

Technological Innovation and Human Resources Vol. 4 Women and Technology Urs E. Gattiker (Editor) © 1994 Walter de Gruyter• Berlin• New York Chapter 5 Home-based Telework and the Politics of Private Woman and Public Man: A Critical Appraisal Andrew Calabrese ...

Computerspiele sind aus medienökonomischer Sicht zwar längst ein Massenmedium, in der gesellschaftlichen Wahrnehmung werden sie jedoch tendenziell immer noch als Spielzeug vornehmlich für junge Männer wahrgenommen. Dabei liegt der Anteil derjenigen, die regelmäßig spielen, in Deutschland bei fast 50 Prozent der Bevölkerung - und hiervon sind wiederum ca. 45 Prozent Spielerinnen. Ausgehend von diesem Missverhältnis zwischen gesellschaftlicher Verbreitung und Wahrnehmung rückt Sabine Hahn einerseits aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive die Spielerinnen in den Fokus und wirft andererseits aus mediensoziologischer bzw. kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Perspektive einen Blick hinter die Kulissen der Games-Industrie.

Promotion document of Women/Music/Technologies event.

In preparation for the Yorkshire Sound Women Network's (https://yorkshiresoundwomen.wordpress.com/) presentation at the National Media Museum on March 17th, (http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/events/adults/lates/music) we bring you several live performances that will be recorded and later used for source materials for the event.

Cost:
FREE but donations greatly appreciated! (last minute venue change has us scrambling a bit for costs)
Location:
the wonderful safe and cooperative space CHUNK
Time:
4-7pm
it is BYOB so bring tasty morsels and beverages!
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The line up.....

SHELLY KNOTTS
Shelly Knotts is data musician currently based in Newcastle, UK. She performs live-coded and network music internationally, collaborating with computers and other humans. In 2014-15 she was part of Sound and Music’s ‘New Voices’ cohort. As well as performing at numerous Algoraves and Live Coding events, current collaborative projects include network laptop bands BiLE (Birmingham Laptop Ensemble) and OFFAL (Orchestra For Females And Laptops), and live coding performance [Sisesta Pealkiri] with Alo Allik.
www.datamusician.net
www.soundcloud.com/shelly-knotts

JOANNE
Joanne Armitage is a Leeds-based live coder and synthesist. Her performance is the live development of code that controls hardware instruments. This improvisation can produce sounds ranging from complex structures of rhythmic uncertainty to somatically swelling drones. With strong ties to the ever expanding Algorave scene, Joanne works to open up the creative process. Humanising, subverting and exploiting her machines, she enjoys failure and error.
https://soundcloud.com/joannnne/pubdrone_19_7_15

MARLO DE LARA
Born in Baltimore, MD, USA, Marlo De Lara is a sound performance artist currently pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Under the Marlo Eggplant alias, De Lara produces textural compositions which develop from microscopic tone landscapes into dense and expansive states of noise and drone. Her works aim to blur the definitions of (un)intentional sound and music. As curator of the Ladyz in Noyz international compilation series, an ongoing project from 2008 to the present, she continues to promote emerging female artists.

#YWSN2015 #ladyzinnoyz #IWD2016