Feminist Perspectives

McGaw: No Passive Victims, No Separate Spheres: A Feminist Perspective on Technologies History

Rothschild: From Sex to Gender in the History of Technology

Preliminary Questions to Discuss

Clarification: One of the central arguments of Rothschild's essay is the manner in which gender perspectives can be used to understand the effect of developments in technology. Never having really studied gender theory in depth I was wondering if anyone could provide me with a brief overview of its basic tenets, particularly in relation to "gender analysis." I have looked up several articles relating to this issue, but most are concerned with gender theories' intellectual origins rather than addressing the discipline as it stands today. [+]

It's difficult to distill a whole discipline down into a few minute (or few sentence) statement. We'll see what we can come up with.

McGaw says that there are some assumptions that we have made on defining what characteristics are assigned to women and what to men, like nurturance, emotionalism, passivity, and piety to women and self-interest, rationality, aggressiveness, and preoccupations with material concerns to men. From where do these assumptions come from and why were they created? More importantly, do they hold across all cultures, or are they a particularly Western way of viewing things? [+]

Rothschild (pg. 193) explains how we ascribe socially constructed feminine characteristics to women and socially constructed masculine characteristics to men... Why then does she immediately follow with this sentence: Thus, we have come to view technology as masculine and inherently or naturally male and have conversely assumed that technology is neither feminine nor the province of females. Why does she assume this is the point of view we start with?

How would these authors ask us to reevaluate the descriptions of technology in Petroski?

Some Better Questions

It seems strange to me that in both of these articles on feminism and technology, neither mentions reproductive technology (birth control and in vitro fertilization, for example). Hormonal birth control had an enormous impact on women's lives, and it seems strange to me that neither of them are mentioning it. McGaw is taking a historical perspective, but I can't see why Rothschild wouldn't mention it. [+]

While reading about the impacts gender analysis has on technology studies, I thought about how Petroski's analysis of failure in engineering might change if he were to apply gender theory to his analysis. Petroski claims that engineers make mistakes like all humans. One explanation for these mistakes is the inability to foresee unintended consequences or uses of a technology. I think one reason some failures occur is because engineers are designing from one perspective, which is usually that of a white upper class male. As Rothschild said on pg 192, gender analysis also opens up issues of race and class as well. If Engineers had more background in gender studies and other multicultural studies, would they be better able to foresee problems? [+]

On p. 175, McGaw writes "If we continue to view the choices of most men as freer than the choices of most women, we need to scrutinize our own notions of gender. If we we have been able inadvertently to treat men and women so differently, we need also to reassess our ghettoized approach to the study of women and technology". First, I'm not sure what exactly she is trying to say about men and women and what "ghettoized approach" means in this context. I think she is saying that studying masculinity is just as important as studying femininity. But I'm not sure if I agree with her first sentence. I think she is saying that the choices of men are not any freer than the choices of women. But don't men have more mobility and therefore more choices than women in a patriarchal society and thus freer? [+]

Has technology clearly liberated women or are they victims of technology (or both)?

I'm confused by what McGaw is claiming on p. 173 in the paragraph that begins There are, I think, three general ways ....

A Few Questions That Sam Answered

Since gender and technology is becoming such an important area of study, I was wondering if anyone had ever studied gender-neutrality and technology? Or is gender-neutrality too new of a concept for people to have concerned themselves with it?

It feels like McGaw addresses this issue a bit in her article.

Both articles referenced WITH and SHOT. Are SHOT and WITH still functioning today? Are they large organizations with many members? How influential are they with regards to gender and technology? [-]

This is a question that you should be able to answer with Google. It took me a minute to find the WITH and SHOT Web sites: http://women-in-technological-history.net/ and http://www.historyoftechnology.org/. I do note that WITH has a nice link to an archive on women in science and technology at Iowa State, http://www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/wise/wise.html.

In McGaw, she says: "Nonetheless, scholarship on women and technology has been marred by assumptions that women are more sensitive, spiritual, or nurturant than men; that men are more hard-hearted, violent, or preoccupied with issues of control than women." What does this mean? How have these assumptions marred scholarship on women and technology?

Any assumptions are likely to mar scholarship, since assumptions can blind us to interpretations and understanding. McGaw is claiming that if we think about women and men in these ways, we will tend to describe their interactions with technology in terms of these concepts.

The Rothchild article touches on the notion that using a feminist perspective can open our eyes to other over looked perspectives such as class and race issues. Rothchild discusses how various minority races interact with technology, but I was wondering how other races and classes interact with technology. How does the middle class American white woman interact with technology beyond household items? How does this differ to other races and classes?

I had hoped to find some articles on other perspectives, but I've run out of class days for such articles. Perhaps you can dig some up when you're working on your paper.

On page 177 McGaw speaks about men working in dangerous conditions but not complaining about the state of their conditions because complaining about danger was not masculine. With this definition would accepting hazard pay then be non-masculine?

Different times, different perspectives. Men have learned to value at least a bit of themselves. (Although note that there's some evidence that sports players don't complain about excessive treatment.)

Goodman talked about the fact that the majority of funds spend on technology were used for advances in weaponry and other items that society considers masculine. Is this because technology is dominated by masculine ideals? If technology was dominated by feminine ideals would our funds be spend on medicine or some other kind of technology?

Other Questions

McGaw notes on p. 174 that "Available scholarship scholarship documented that social and economic forces encouraged and permitted the continued employment of women in less industrialized jobs despite profound technological change in the workplace." McGaw also notes on p. 181athat "Simultaneously, increased industrial demand for women's finishing and inspection work kept most employed at tasks so similar to domestic activities that women's jobs reinforced the belief in women's distinctive natural abilities." The first quote clearly indicates that the feminine gender is also capable of doing "tough", non-assisted-by-industrial-technology work. While the second quote shows how the stereotype in people's minds led to women being more employed in certain professions. This becomes a kind of a chicken and egg problem. Does society influence women's role in employment? or do women become so well acquainted with a certain set of tasks that the gender association with skills becomes legitimate? I think technology does not help in sorting out this matter. Unfortunately, its a social problem that certain stereotypes are self-fulfilling. Do you think technology can help mitigate this problem?

Rothschild writes "When gender analysis demonstrates that certain groups have been excluded, and that certain questions of not been asked, it reveals the danger of universalizing technological experience and phenomena on the basis of only a selected segment of human experience and human history."

This is true of any scientific analysis, we get better models with better data. I'm also concerned about the idea of "technological lag"... does this mean that "eventually" tech. will solve the issue of a particular gender being associated with a particular type of work? Also, if technology does lead to a solution (this is debatable), how can we work to minimize this "technological lag"?

Rothschild mentions on p. 196 that through an examination of women's roles in four different industries (insurance, printing and publishing, agribusiness, and telecommunications), several patterns can be found; cataloging the positions and wages in terms of ethnicity and gender. Why is such a study remotely valuable; the sample size of the industries is small enough so that there may be industry specific trends that are used to draw general conclusions which may or may not be unsound. Such a study looking at position and wage trends regardless of industry may produce more statistically accurate results (or it may skew due to gender dominated industries - male/athlete, female/nurse and so forth)

I agree with the author that there are stereotypes that women are less competent or less able to operate technology. How can we alter such assumptions?

Judith A McGaw says "..ideologies...have attributed certain characteristics to men and others to women." Are there any examples of everyday technology that reflect this?

What are the differences between using the word "at" and "through" (177) or "in" (178)?

In the opening section of her essay, Rothschild argues for the use of "gender" and technology rather than "Women" and technology. Do you support her argument? Given the seeming masculine centered focus of most technology studies, would we benefit from a perspective of analysis which focuses exclusively on women?

McGaw states that "we have customarily studied females actors as women and male actors as people" (173). This is the first article written by a woman, and who seems to identify as a feminist by our class. She points out that when people see or think about the word gender they automatically think about women in whatever field, in this case technology. Is it problematic to have a woman write about how women are not represented in the history of technology, if we are trying to break the stereotype that the subject of "gender" is mainly associated with women and women's issues? Would our perspective changed if it were a man writing about the misunderstandings of feminist theory?

On 193, (first paragraph), Rothschild explains that "we ascribe socially constructed 'feminine' characteristics to women and socially constructed 'masculine' characteristics to men. Thus, we have come to view technology as masculine." It seems that she's making a big leap here. Some technologies, especially more recent ones like computers and cars, are often seen as masculine, but others, like laundry machines and ovens, are seen as feminine. It's unclear to me *what* technology she's connecting to masculinity. What definition of technology is Rothschild using, and and how does her argument on gendered analysis of technology change if we talk about a specific technology instead of "technology" in the abstract?

Does Schumacher in the article "Buddhist Economics" confine his scholarship to "separate spheres" as McGaw explains it, when he made the claim that "the large-scale employment of women in offices or factories would be considered a sign of serious economic failure" (pg. 73)?

Is the entrance of gender analysis in technology studies, as explained by Rothschild, an example of how technology studies is a social construction and what Pool (an author the class read early in the semester) described a "paradigm" change (Pool,pg. 19)?

How have physical differences between men and women (men are on average stronger and taller) influenced technology?

On page 192, Rothschild talks about people avoiding the label 'feminist', why do some people dislike the term, and is there a better/more accurate term that could be used?

Rothschild describes six ways that feminist perspectives can broaden and enrich the study of technology. But what exactly IS a feminist perspective? From the examples given, it seems clear that subject matter has something to do with it, but are there other aspects? Is Rothschild using the same definition that McGaw uses (pg 173)?

McGaw discusses the importance of studying both how industrialization affected the sexual division of labor, and how the sexual division of labor affected industrialization. In this class, have we looked more at how technology shapes society, or how society shapes technology? What are the benefits of each approach?

In our extremely gender conscious society, do you think McGaw's hope of "[r]ewiting the history of technology so as to minimize gender biases" (173) is possible? Do you think we can begin to create new technology without gender bias or is it too late for society to reform?

Rothschild discusses six areas in which gender analysis impacts technology (class and race, culture, broadening subject matter, challenging and modifiying theories, questioning and transforming concepts, raises new concerns). How might the changing roles of women in the 21st century - from stay-at-home to working moms, homosexual vs. heterosexual households, etc - fit (or not) into these six areas, and are there new areas in which gender analysis impacts technology that we should be considering?

McGaw talks about how calling female labor "unskilled" is less derogatory and more descriptive, as the tasks that women were assigned were learned in the home but still required learning and effort. She says that "the availability of cheap commercial goods had modified domestic labor so that women spent more time in doing repetitive tasks that required precise movements or visual discrimination, including sewing, cleaning, and laundering" (p.181). Today, these tasks are often specialized rather than performed by a mother who is also baking or watching children. What does this say about our ability to improve on our skills? Is it better to learn to do more at the same time, or to delegate each task to a specific individual?

Rothschild says that Ravetz wrote that in the past fifty years in England, social factors have prevented changes in women's roles and living patterns. To which social factors is she referring to?

Both authors claim that the field of technology is understood to be masculine, and the default language and person in technology literature is male/masculine, yet Rothschild asserts that with the advent of typewriters, new opportunities opened up for women because as a new tech. these were not yet gendered and so women were not displacing men (198). Is it possible for the field in general to be masculine, but specific technologies to be gendered as female?

McGaw talks about the reluctance to view men as constricted by their gender in the same way that women are, following the rhetoric that men take action and women react, or are acted upon. Is it perhaps the case that since male is often considered the default, and female abberent, that men are not considered gendered as often, and society is more reluctant to question masculinity than to question femininity?

On page 181, McGaw states that, "Men's labor drew them from the home, so that they had less reason to understand and appreciate women's skills" (181). Before men's labor started taking them away from home, what jobs did they have that kept them at home during the day where they did see the women's skills?

On page 199, Rothschild mentions the use in literature of the word "man" and how it can refer to both male and female. How does this relate to pictures of humans using technologies?

What kind of connections can we draw between this feminist perspective and other readings and theories that we have previously looked at? Can it be applied to any of the technologies we have looked at?

In McGaw's reading, she says "examining both male and female paper mill workers forced me, after considerable attention to gender influences on women's work, to suspect men might be subject to similar influences". What are the gender influences on women's work and what are examples of those?

How big of an impact was women's power of selection and development of technologies (specifically household technologies) on the overall development of all other technologies and industry during the nineteenth century?

What does she mean that "emulation...needs to be studied rather than assumed" based on Hindle's outlook (that we have not read)? (McGaw)

With the negative "she" personification of nature in Rothschild's article, how does the "he" (father) personification of time create a similar gender conflict?

Is there a fundamental difference between the way that men and women relate to technology and has it shaped the development of technology? Do you agree or disagree with Rothchild's assessment on page 195?

As McGaw mentions on page 177, we don't often analyze masculinity -- but how has "masculinity" shaped the development of technology and the relationship of technology to society?

Rothschild mentions the intersection of socio-economic class and race and gender and their effect on technology. What is the greatest barrier to full access to technological advancement? Can we measure populations most limited in their access to technology?