Gender, Technology and Development: Reflections and Provocations

Introduction

This article reflects on the past 25 years of the journal Gender, Technology and Development (GTD) and provokes thought about the future.
It questions the meanings of gender, technology, and development, both separately and combined.
It examines the emancipatory potential of development and technology and their interlinkages.
The editors never assumed a positive relationship between development, technological changes, and greater gender equality.
The creation of GTD in 1997 recognized the need to locate and interpret hidden transcripts of gender difference in tradition, knowledge systems, technology, and development.
Connections between gender, technology, and development are fraught with tensions due to power relations marked by inequalities.
Dyadic relations between gender and development, and gender and technology are paradoxical because their emancipatory potential is countered by patriarchal modernization.

Development and Gender Equality

Development leading to gender equality and women’s empowerment has been a premise of development paradigms, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Development is a gendered process influenced by male-dominated political institutions and economic processes that undermine indigenous and gender knowledge systems.
Critiques of patriarchal structures can be applied to schools focused on human-centered development and sustainability.
Feminist political ecology has reframed environment/development linkages, revealing how sustainability agendas can reflect masculinist views.
A gender-blind approach is often taken in climate change mitigation/adaptation, agricultural research, and poverty alleviation, even in historical assessments of income, education, and health.

Technology and Gender

The gender gap in technology is stubborn and wide.
Technologies have the potential to advance health, education, agriculture, and well-being, but are also infused with patriarchal power.
Technologies can empower men and increase their control of gender power relations, undermining development goals for women.
Sustainable development advances techno-environmental solutions at the expense of social approaches that address gender at its core and inequalities in political power.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how technological solutions failed to address inequalities that engender vulnerability.

Opportunities and Paradoxes

GTD editors believe technologies offer opportunities for change and can help women and disenfranchised groups by lowering barriers to education and health.
Technologies can expand the capacity to tap into the benefits of a rapidly changing knowledge economy.
Feminist technology studies and GTD articles have noted this emancipatory potential.
Low-income countries have sometimes fared better than high-income countries in gender equality indicators.
The gender equality paradox notes that high-income countries with higher gender equality scores may perform poorly on indicators of women in STEM.
Introducing technologies for better development outcomes requires a clear, comprehensive, and well-funded gender strategy.

Digital Technologies and Social Media

The development of technologies, especially digital technologies, in the last 25 years has been unprecedented.
Social media, through movements like #MeToo, generated bottom-up momentum toward accountability for sexual harassment and violence.
Social media has been a technology where women have been early or primary users.
Technology-induced socio-political crises, such as the use of ICTs and social media to promote misinformation and undermine social cohesion, raise ethical issues with gender as a key area of concern.

AI and Robotics

Developments in AI and robotics raise concerns about biased design and datasets reproducing gender stereotypes.
Biased AI can amplify extremist forms of discrimination and widen gaps between those who control these technologies and those who are excluded.
Gender remains a key structuring force of technological change, even amidst overlapping power dynamics based on ethnicity, race, and religion.

Feminist Science and Technology Studies

Tensions exist between gender and development, and gender and technology, often due to a gap between Feminist Science and Technology Studies (focused on high-income countries) and development-environment studies of gender inequalities in the Global South.
Donna Haraway’s Cyborg and Vandana Shiva’s Goddess represent contrasting views on technology and gender.
The cyborg is seen as a tool to subvert hegemonic power structures.
Shiva critiques global power structures and the destructive logic of technoscience, advocating for women’s spiritual connection with nature.
Lykke proposed bridging these views to disrupt current social relations of science and technology.

Combining Technology and Development

Articles have increasingly tackled relations between gender, technology, and development combined, driven by the pervasiveness of digital and mobile technologies.
Development research must address the role of technology in both empowerment and disempowerment processes.
This creates a tension between the hope that technologies can empower and concerns about the risks of generating gaps and undermining equal development.

AI and Gender Bias

The article by Ardra Manasi, Subadra Panchanadeswaran, Emily Sours, and Seung Ju Lee addresses the paradox of AI as both a tool for change and an instrument of inequality.
Bias in AI can be unintentional due to biased data or algorithms, or intentional through stereotypical understandings of gender orders.
This gender order is problematic when AI is integrated into gendered robots, visually replicating stereotypes.
Overcoming bias requires addressing bias in current applications and using AI-powered tools to address bias and inequality.

Gaps in Technology-Related Fields

Sophia Huyer and Eugenia Nunez’s article on “breaking through the silicon wall” examines gaps in technology-related fields.
These gaps are a concern considering how developments in digital technologies, including AI, may reverse momentum in gender equality.
ICTs can promote economic independence and gender justice, but the slow pace of change demands concerted efforts.
A solid analysis of intersectionality could break the impasse and reduce gaps in representation.

Gender Gaps in STEM

Ewa Lechman and Magdalena Popowska’s article shows that gender gaps in STEM fields are a real concern in Europe.
Gender gaps in STEM education enrollment persist, with limited progress in some countries.
Gender gaps in STEM graduate representation are persistent, with women representing only around one-third of graduates in Europe.
Gaps are large in STEM-related employment, with women representing half men’s number, and are increasing in many countries.
Progress in female STEM graduates does not translate into greater employability, with the ICT sector faring among the worst.

Development Challenges

Development challenges are not limited to low-income contexts, as shown by the gender equality paradox.
The number of female STEM graduates and employees in Europe remains well below those in many low and middle-income countries like Thailand, Philippines, and Kazakhstan.
Claire Babirye et al. discuss concerns about breaking the cycle between education and work in technology-related fields that exclude women and girls in Africa.
Solutions include addressing representation in training material, unequal language and imagery, and lack of participation in the policy process, combined with mentorship, scholarships, and peer-to-peer support.

ICT4D and Empowerment

Becky Faith notes that technologies proposed to empower often do the opposite, particularly in ICT4D.
ICT for development has often been implemented without understanding power dynamics at the root of social and gender inequality.
This undermines the emancipatory potential of these technologies and turns them into tools for online gender-based violence (GBV).
Reversing this requires questioning and resisting the production of visible, hidden, and invisible power in socio-technical systems and infrastructures.
Responsibility for tackling online GBV should shift from individuals to companies and governments.
Solutions require challenging economic models that underpin social media platforms and addressing gendered digital inequalities in technology industries.

Online Media and Marginalization

Rok Smrdelj and Mojca Pajnik’s article on online media reporting on same-sex partnerships in Slovenia discusses the power of media in the digital age and processes of exclusion experienced by sexual and gender identity minorities.
Online media often fail to address the intersectional realities of same-sex relations and the different contexts of social exclusion.
The lack of specification of various contexts of social exclusion in liberal discourse weakens it and strengthens discriminatory forces.

Knowledge Economy

Dev Nathan, Govind Kelkar, and Pallavi Govindnathan argue that women are excluded from certain areas of knowledge.
Gendered knowledge inequality leads to other forms of inequality.
Examples include indigenous groups and the Hindu caste system, where women are prohibited from acquiring knowledge transferred through rituals or Vedic texts.
Exclusion of women from science and knowledge creation has become more subtle, with women internalizing the idea that STEM is for men.

Black Cyberfeminism

Felix Idongesit Oyosoro, Chinaemelum I. Okafor, and Ruth Aigbe’s article about Black Cyberfeminism and women’s influence on the #EndSARS protest in Nigeria highlights the positive view of technologies as enabling emancipation through information.
Digital technologies amplified the work of the Feminist Coalition (FemCo) by bringing attention to issues ignored by traditional media.
The article highlights the contribution of women to the protest movement and digital advocacy.
Researchers need to question the vacuum in women’s access to science and technology and avoid reinforcing the invisibility of women’s actions and contributions.

Gender and Fisheries

Meryl J. Williams and Victoria Syddall’s paper sheds light on the linkages between gender, technology, and development from the perspective of fisheries.
Technology is defined broadly as not only industrial or biological but also the social organization and networks that enable the productive process.
The paper analyzes the gender division of labor, the focus on capture fisheries where men dominate, and women’s invisibility in fisheries.
Feminist technology studies have challenged the invisibility of women, but gendered approaches to sociotechnical systems and transitions research are needed.
Feminist research is inherently political and commits to social action.

Fisheries in Kerala, India

Nikita Gopal, Rakesh M. Raghavan, Sruthi P., Rejula K., and Ananthan P. S. address women’s contribution in capture fisheries in Kerala, India.
They focus on the invisibility of women’s contribution, showing their wide spectrum of activities from gleaning to diving.
Women fishers are precarious because they lack legal access to fishing areas and depend on kettus, which are shifting to aquaculture and other industrial uses.

Caribbean Fisherfolk Organizations

Maria Pena, Patrick McConney, Leisa Perch, and Terrence Phillips study the organizational leadership of Caribbean fisherfolk organizations.
Changes toward greater attention to women in leadership came about when women’s role in decision-making was highlighted in global and regional guidelines such as the SSF Guidelines.

Rural Livelihoods and Agriculture

The special issue includes articles on agriculture and agricultural extension.
Katie Tavenner, Todd A. Crane, Renee Bullock, and Alessandra Galiè introduce a step-by-step guide to intersectional approaches to agricultural research for development (AR4D).
Many studies use “single identity intersections” or “snippet” approaches to intersectionality, but deeper intersectional approaches can lead to fragmented social identities.

Agriculture Training

Gloriose Nsengiyumva et al. analyze the outcome of the Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PISCA) training.
Both women and men are stimulated to make changes in their agricultural practices, but poor women household heads have the most difficulty due to their relations with other household members, access to land and money, and social networks.

Future Directions

The special issue reflects the ways GTD has changed over 25 years, with a focus on the gendered impact of technologies, especially digital technologies and robotics.
Gender and development challenges brought by these technologies are transcending our understanding of development.
The lack of focus on sexual and gender identity minorities has contributed to a view where issues of sexuality and gender identity did not matter in development.
GTD aims to contribute to research that questions binarism and heteronormativity, including through iterations of queer thinking.
Theorizing on gender-based marginalization of certain groups of men and subordinate masculinities can provide nuanced insights into the evolving conceptualizations of gender and development.

Feminist Scholarship and Technology

Feminist scholarship remains a key contributor to critically rethinking development and development studies, and their linkages to technology.
A worrying trend is that technologies are being created at such a fast pace that society remains behind in understanding their impact and forming a new social contract.
This concern is valid considering the bias against women in technology development, use, and derived benefits.
AI and robotics can “fossilize” a gender order socially and culturally in software and physically in hardware, creating a vicious cycle between technological representations of gender and social constructions.

Addressing Gender Bias

There is an urgency in addressing the gender bias found in technology, but little progress has been made in addressing gaps with regards to women in STEM.
Examples of success in technology development and application that help reduce the drudgery of women’s everyday lives and/or make gender relations more equal need to be highlighted.
Technology has great emancipatory potential if we recognize the gendered construction of technology and address it through gender transformative change toward gender justice.

Final Thoughts

It is crucial to minimize the negative effects of technologies that marginalize women and other vulnerable groups and maximize their emancipatory potentials.
The effect of technologies differs and changes in time and space, and GTD continues to carry out insights from around the world.
GTD remains committed to exploring development in broader anticolonial contexts by supporting scholarship from the Global South and indigenous and minority perspectives.