feminist technology

I've been thinking recently about whether or not I can sneak in feminist technology into my Engineering Ph.D. thesis. And, well, about what "feminist technology" might really mean.

I feel it's worth speaking out against male priviledge in society, education, and technology, but I also think it's worth speaking out against the dogma that "we're all the same."

I think we all pretty much deserve the same respect, but I don't think that means that we should treat everybody the same exact way.

Uniform treatment leads to, in my opinion, a culture implicitly defined by the majority, where most people don't have the language or vocabulary to talk about how we actually differ. In the States, this tends to mean we treat people as if they were heteronormative white males.

What if we didn't think of everybody as exactly the same? Talking openly about our statistically average differences may lead to racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on, but I don't think it necessarily has to.

I can see, though, why people would be afraid that knowledge of our differences could be used to oppress and divide. But at the same time, I think there's also hope for making the best out of those statistically average differences, rather than fearing for the worst.

I think also, that the main thing we ought to fear is acting on judgments that are borne out of fear rather than hope.

So then, what do I hope?

I hope that when we can talk openly about differences, in a framework of possibility, that we can use this discussion to build better systems (hey, I suppose I am a kind of engineer), and that after we understand our first-order group differences, we can then try to include-exclude our way to treating people as they are as individuals.

Why don't we then treat people as individuals from the get-go? It sounds ideal but I think it's computationally intractable, for people and compters, to talk about our differences this way, to design this way, to interact this way.

I haven't thought as much about PoC technology, but I have been thinking about what it might mean to have "Women-oriented Computing - Architectures" (WoC-A :), in a way that's not demeaning or simply theoretical.

When I left my last company, I sent an email to the hoppers@ list about how backwards it seems sometimes to think about recruiting women to technology. It's as if they (The Engineering Professor Man) want to make women interested in technology, rather than changing the technology to be interesting to women. In other words, they push, but I'd rather pull.

I got a few positive responses by email, and told them that I'd let them know what I'm up to at school.

In that hoppers@ email, I also wrote about where I might start out when thinking about designing WoC-A from an academic yet practical perspective. I said that studies such as the Pew Internet report would be a good place to start, in seeing how men and women, on average, tend to use computing these days.

I think, too, that an analysis of gender ought to include not only ideas from linguistics and communication (Deborah Tannen for example), but gender studies and queer studies, as well as sociological and psychological research on "sex differences."

Enough for this post. Although I have been talking about these ideas, and more specific projects, with professors at a number of top ten engineering schools, I wanted to write some more about the subject at length.

I have been writing ideas in my own project notebook, and making comments on a certain other person's blog, but it's probably more appropriate to write here than to intrude on someone else's space, especially when the blogger in question tends to see things another way and screened one of my comments recently.

That's fine, it's plausible that my style of Socratic questioning wasn't consistent with the blogger's style. I use Socratic questioning a lot, but as Tannen points out, it can come off as argumentative and attacking, to someone who doesn't know where you're taking them or to someone who doesn't want to go that way, or field such questions in that way.

I'm just guessing, of course, but I'll keep my comments here for the moment and try to change the world in my own little way.