Theory of Knowledge - Course Companion for Students Marija Uzunova Dang Arvin Singh Uzunov Dang

past 50 years, scholars have been looking
the
technological innovation through a feminist
at
and critically evaluating claims about how
lens
intersects with gender. The design of
technology
technologies or the mechanization
reproductive
domestic work through “labour-saving”
of
have been some of the sites of
appliances
thiswork.
dynamics between technology and gender
The
not always play out in straightforward
did
predictable ways. Consider the example of
or
technologies. In the 1980s Cynthia
printing
studied, through a gender lens, the
Cockburn
in the London printing industry
transition
the Linotype compositor to computerized
from
Operating one of the Linotype
typesetting.
was considered highly skilled work;
machines
trade was strongly unionized and exclusively
the
Wajcman: the new QWERTY
Summarizing
was designed to give women an equal
keyboard
greater chance to become typesetters, because
or
were cheaper labour.
women
male coding of technology, through
The
technological competence as
constructing
has meant that contributions of
masculine,
to innovation have been mostly left out
women
history. Consider that before we used the
of
“computer” to refer to a machine, we used
word
was done by hand, letter by letter. The
process
which uses its own type of keyboard,
Linotype,
set one line of text at a time, making
could
printing process much more efficient. It
the
well and so its design remained largely
worked
for close to a century.
unchanged
the 1970s and 1980s electronic methods of
In
text for printing started to take over
preparing
these used the QWERTY keyboard (the same
and
on typewriters). It is important to mention
used
typewriting was considered unskilled
that
and was performed almost exclusively by
work
Researchers in the field of technology
women.
have examined the printing industry’s
studies
to the new keyboard. It seems this change
switch
neither innovative nor inevitable. Instead, it
was
to have a political origin and gendered
appears
Feminist scholar of technology
implications.
as a job description for people who performed
it
In the early decades of digital
calculations.
the majority of human computers
technology,
women. Like other forms of so-called
were
work”, computing up until the 1970s
“women’s
seen as highly structured, repetitive and
was
As the field professionalized, academic
tedious.
and a culture that advertised computers
degrees
“toys for the boys” contributed to the gender
as
in technology that we are still aiming to
gap
II. Perspectives
II. Perspectives
male. Before the Linotype machine, the printing
Judy Wajcman explains.
a male province, it does not always coincide with the
In choosing to dispense with the Linotype [keyboard]
layout, management were choosing a system that would
interests of men as a sex. As we have seen, some
technologies are designed for use by women to break
undermine the skill and power basis of the compositors
and reduce them to “mere” typists. This would render
the craft control of men. Thus gender divisions are
commonly exploited in the power struggles between
typists (mainly women) and compositors (men) equal
competitors for the new machines; indeed, it would
capital and labor. In this way, the social relations that
shape industrial technology include those of gender as
advantage the women typists. The keyboard on the
new printing technology was designed with an eye to
well as class.
using the relatively cheap and abundant labor of female
(Wajcman quoted in Jasano et al 2001)
typists. Although machine design is overwhelmingly
close today.
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