Women and Technology

My paper entitled Women and the Information Technology Revolution: Getting the Message of Markets has been released by the Independent Women’s Forum. I must confess that during the drafting phase, this paper was designated in my directories by the less dignified “chicktech.” This paper represents my first foray in some years into the strange world of feminist theory, in which technology is too often portrayed as yet another imposition of male culture. This stands in sharp contrast, I should note, to the not-at-all-strange world of feminist practice, in which one considers the situation of actual women in real situations, particularly in other countries. There is a much greater willingness from this perspective to recognize how much technology has done to alleviate misery. But still little appreciation of what markets have done for technology.

Shortly after I submitted this paper for publication, our family acquired a Roomba, one of those robot floor cleaners (I used to describe him as a robot vacuum cleaner, but the iRobot folks were cleverer than that, and avoided bulk by adopting the compact floor sweeper as a model, rather than a massive vacuum cleaner). Had we acquired him before I completed my paper, it would have been full of praise for the industry and enthusiasm with which he cleans our floors. (Yes, it’s a “he,” though we have not named him yet). There is a lot of whirring and twirling. He’s saved us literally hours of time… with three cats and a toddler, our floor accumulates a pretty nasty scum very quickly, and I’ve calculated that an entire day throughout the week was generally spent on sweeping and mopping. I’d like to challenge technology skeptics to acquire a Roomba, and cling to their vision of technology as a treadmill from which there is no escape from drudgery. And we didn’t even get the fancy new model that remembers rooms and calculates the most efficient path and charges itself!

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