ICTC’s Tech & Human Rights Series
Gender, Inequality, and “Tech for Good”
An Interview with Tulsi Parida
On Friday March 6th 2020, ICTC spoke with Tulsi Parida as part of ICTC’s Tech & Human Rights Series. Tulsi is an internet and educational-technology (edtech) professional who focuses on reducing digital inequality and promoting responsible/inclusive technology. She has led teams at startups working to bridge digital divides in literacy education both in the US and in India. She recently studied the implications of mobile learning technologies in emerging markets, responsible business, and impact finance/investing. In this interview, Kiera and Tulsi discuss the role of technology in education, the concept of “Tech for Good,” and the links between digital inequality, gender, and development.
Kiera: Thanks so much for joining me, Tulsi. To start, can you tell me briefly about your background and how you became interested in studying and working in the digital technology sphere?
Tulsi: I am a socio-technologist — which means I study the processes at the intersections of society and technology — but I started out in education, as a teacher in New York with Teach for America. I was always passionate about social justice issues and helping to address structural inequalities that exist. I did a lot of that work in college and I saw education as one avenue through which I could help address these issues. I pursued my education as a teacher and while I really enjoyed my two years with Teach for America and working with the amazing 30 students in my classroom, I started seeing that there was little scope for impact beyond the children that came into my classroom everyday. I wanted to see how to scale my impact beyond the classroom. This was how I became interested in “edtech,” or educational technology. I started talking to folks working in the edtech sector in the United States and realized this would be a great way to keep working in education while also working towards a bigger social impact at scale. I worked in the edtech field briefly in New York, and then when I wanted to see the global implications of tech and education, I moved to India to investigate how edtech worked in the Indian context. After India, I then moved to Oxford to complete my degree at the Oxford Internet Institute and my MBA, and here I am.
Kiera: You’ve spent a lot of time examining the inequalities that come with technology, whether in access, education, development or other spheres. What is ‘digital inequality’ and what are some major intersections between technology and inequality that you work on?
Tulsi: There are multiple ways of looking at it. The simplest form of digital inequality is in access to technology. For example, the fact that more privileged members of society often have access to the most up-to-date forms of technology, while those in under resourced communities have little to no access to this tech, is one form of digital inequality. Beyond access, however, there is also inequality in understanding and ability to use technology. Specifically, oftentimes, technology isn’t built or designed for marginalized communities. For example, a smartphone is designed as a one-device-per-person device in the Western world, but in India, a single device is shared among many people. If a device is not designed for you, how can you adapt it and use it properly for your needs? So after this baseline access (do you have access to the tech?), there is the question of, “Is the actual use of that tech as impactful for some people as it is in other parts of society?”
On the flip side, while digital inequality, of course, often reflects inequalities that exist in society, technology can also be a tool to address those inequalities. For example, if only certain schools have the money to buy up-to-date textbooks, then only privileged students can have access to content; but if technology can bring textbooks and content to students who otherwise can’t afford it, technology here becomes an equalizer.
Kiera: What role can technology play in global development? Is it currently being used to its potential or are there better ways it can be used?
Tulsi: Today, you see a lot of “ICT for D” (ICT for Development) and “Tech for Development” being rolled out in the development field, which is essentially using technology to advance development. These are generally well-meaning efforts, but one thing that I’m always cautious about with regard to these programs is the way that technology is often presented as a silver bullet. As in, “Oh, there is inequality between urban and rural dwellers in this area, and tech is going to solve this.” In reality, social problems are much more complex, and technocentric solutions often take a very myopic view of what the issue is and overstates the capacity for tech to have an impact. Often, those who roll these programs out — whether non-profits or government, etc. — end up seeking particular metrics of success, and thus tend to mold their solution to those metrics, rather than looking at the larger structural problems. Those metrics too narrow. In reality, the most effective solutions are those that understand the broader system inside which a problem lies, and then treats tech as one tool with which to tackle it — and that is only one part of a solution.
Kiera: How does technology intersect with education and some of the issues you cited above? Can technology in education reduce the inequalities you’ve discussed, or is it currently enhancing them?
Tulsi: I think edtech has a great potential to enhance and improve the status quo of education, but in most contexts, I don’t believe teachers can be replaced. This goes back to my comment about tech being seen as a silver bullet. So much of education is about socio-emotional learning, about the human connection that teachers have with students and that students have with each other; I don’t think technology can or ever should fully replace teachers. However, I do think that the right technology can help a teacher do his/her job even better, especially if it can help reduce some of the repetitive tasks that a teacher has to spend time on, giving them more time to spend with students, or if it can help provide students with more tailored content. Ultimately, though, the core aspects of teaching still require people.
Kiera: What is the strongest relationship you see between technology and human rights? Do you see technology impacting civic rights, social rights, or cultural rights in any way?
Tulsi: While this is not my area of expertise, I think human rights comes into play mostly around the frameworks for “best practices,” which have been created for companies and products. It is about the underlying models and approaches behind products. For example, if you have a human rights approach to data protection, this will be very different than a utilitarian approach (i.e., whatever produces the greatest good for the greatest number). One issue, though, is that human rights tends to get jumbled as one giant thing; we don’t tend to parse out the ideologies and approaches underlying various aspects of human rights. We need much more of that, because there are numerous different human rights involved.
Kiera: Can you talk about gender and technology, particularly about equality?
Tulsi: You see a lot of studies today that say technology is bridging the gender gap, that tech is giving women access to certain freedoms they would otherwise not have access to. But I think it’s much more nuanced than that. I did a lot of my research during my Master at Oxford on mobile phone usage in India from the perspective of what that looked like for parents. Yes, in many ways, tech does offer more freedoms to women than before; in the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, for example, many mothers use YouTube as an educational tool. They can learn skills, search recipes (for example, if they want to learn to cook pizza for their families), and more. These women are very resourceful and use tech to learn these things at home. But at the same time, what oftentimes happens is that tech actually amplifies the existing inequalities in the society. For example, in many societies, it is traditional for a daughter-in-law to be heavily scrutinized, and that scrutiny, in fact, increases with mobile phone usage, because a woman can be monitored and judged through a mobile phone. So on one side, a woman may have new power that she didn’t have before, but on the other, she may also have many more restrictions placed on her. So yes, in some ways, tech can lift women up, but we shouldn’t exclude that many of these are very structural inequalities and sometimes tech can actually exacerbate those inequalities.
Kiera: You’ve written before about the tech industry’s “Move Fast and Break Things” attitude. Yet, there is also now this whole movement of “Tech for Good” and “Responsible Tech.” Can you tell us what “Tech for Good” and “Responsible Tech” is? Do you see these as solutions to any of the problems we’ve been discussing?
Tulsi: I think the “Responsible Tech” and “Tech for Good” movements evolved as a response to that old “Move Fast and Break Things” model in the tech industry. Broadly, people have realized that this model has not really worked in the long term, and today, given the scale at which these technologies can impact society and the extent to which people are aware of their own rights, this old model is no longer suitable. So instead, we have a new wave of start ups and innovations that are now really putting privacy and social impacts at the centre. You can see the change on the surface with the biggest companies, for example, Facebook, Google, etc. now have ethics boards. And even if these might be just for show, the tides are indeed turning. For example, after the announcement by Black Rock last year about reshaping finance in terms of climate change, big businesses followed, announcing that focusing solely on profit alone is no longer enough and that, instead, they need to think about social and environmental impacts. There seems to be a shift, a growing sense of responsibility that when we create technology and try new solutions, we must be aware of the impacts on society. However, at the same time, while it’s great that we have people who care, we also need to avoid falling into the trap of “green washing” or “ethics washing.” Beyond the big companies, individuals will always face challenges living within a system and relying upon parts of the system even when the system doesn’t align with your values, for example, needing to buy from Amazon when you can’t access things elsewhere. But there are many new innovations coming up, and I truly hope there is more space emerging for living according to values.
ICTC’s Tech & Human Rights Series:
Our Tech & Human Rights Series dives into the intersections between emerging technologies, social impacts, and human rights. In this series, ICTC speaks with a range of experts about the implications of new technologies such as AI on a variety of issues like equality, privacy, and rights to freedom of expression, whether positive, neutral, or negative. This series also particularly looks to explore questions of governance, participation, and various uses of technology for social good.
