30 Years of Research on Gender, Equality, and Diversity at the MIT Media Lab
This year, as the Media Lab celebrated its 30th anniversary, our alum Megan Smith gave the keynote speech describing the amazing history of women at MIT and the importance of supporting research on issues of bias and discrimination . As a Media Lab PhD candidate who studies these questions, it’s flattering to hear the CTO of the United States advocate for my research agenda. The truth is that I’m far from alone. For the last 25 years, dozens of faculty members and students at the Media Lab have achieved a remarkable range of projects to advance our understanding of gender and support equality in society.
In this blog post, I share over 70 works of research connected with gender, equality, and diversity from researchers at the Media Lab. I’ve included research in the list where it intentionally engages with those issues, either within the work itself or as an underlying motivation. To keep the list manageable, I’ve mostly omitted work by alums after they have left the Media Lab. I’m sure I’ve missed some projects, so let me know in the comments, and I’ll add them to the post.
Epistemological Pluralism: Diversity in Tech
Many researchers throughout the Media Lab’s history have worked to understand how best to support women in technology. Work on computers and learning in the 1960s by Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon and Marvin Minsky had a gender-inclusive vision of computers, with both girls and boys on the cover of Seymour’s influential book Mindstorms. Seymour’s and Cynthia’s 1971 paper on Twenty Things to Do With a Computer included activities that both girls and boys might enjoy. These ideas were later formalized by Sherry Turkle and Seymour in 1990, with “Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture.” This article draws from sociology, feminist science/technology studies, and computer science to make these deeply influential claims:
Equal access to even the most basic elements of computation requires an epistemological pluralism, accepting the validity of multiple ways of knowing and thinking [….]
As a carrier for pluralistic ideas, the computer holds the promise of catalyzing change, not only within computation but in our culture at large.
In the 25 years since Sherry and Seymour’s article, Many Media Lab researchers have embraced this idea of adapting computers to the interests and ways of seeing of marginalized groups, as a vehicle for wider social change. In the early 2000s, David Cavallo, who co-led the Media Lab’s Future of Learning lab, led many projects to broaden access to programming through poetry, dance, and other media-making. In the mid-2000s, Leah Beuchley led the High-Low Tech group to create new kinds of technology learning systems, building on her Arduino Lilypad project to support new engineering and design communities among marginalized groups, including young women.
In the early 2000s, Justine Cassell led the Gesture and Narrative Language research group to do extensive work on gender and design. In books like From Barbie® to Mortal Kombat, Justine and her colleagues researched “how assumptions about gender, games, and technology shape the design, development, and marketing of games as industry seeks to build the girl market.”
Mitch Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten group have also carried out substantial work on girls and technology; the original grant application for MIT Scratch focused on understanding how to underrepresented groups in tech, including girls and young people from economically disadvantaged communities.
The Media Lab has also led projects that supported young people to take an active role in social change, including a Junior Summit that gave young people a voice in the G7. In his PhD, Leo Burd worked with the World Bank and the Brazilian government on “computer and citizenship” schools to foster creative learning and social empowerment.
Here is a list of Media Lab research I’ve found that fits within this tradition of epistemological pluralism and equality through educational technologies:
Coding for All: Interest-Driven Trajectories to Computational Fluency. Proposal to the National Science Foundation, 2013 (modified version funded 2014–2016).
Basu, A. (2003) Full-Contact Poetry (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Basu, A., & Cavallo, D. (2003a). Children as Designers of Full-Contact Poetry. In Proceeding of the Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE) Conference, 2003 (Vol. 9, p. 328). Fraunhofer IRB.
Basu, A., & Cavallo, D. (2003b). Full-Contact Poetry: Creating Space for Poetic Collaboration. Computer Support for Collaborative Learning.
Buechley, L., & Hill, B. M. (2010). LilyPad in the wild: how hardware’s long tail is supporting new engineering and design communities. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 199–207). ACM.
Buechley, L., Peppler, K., Eisenberg, M., & Kafai, Y. (2013). Textile messages: Dispatches from the world of e-textiles and education. Peter Lang Publishing Incorporated.
Buechley, L., & Perner-Wilson, H. (2012). Crafting technology: Reimagining the processes, materials, and cultures of electronics. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 19(3), 21.
Burd, L. (2007). Technological initiatives for social empowerment : design experiments in technology-supported youth participation and local civic engagements (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cassell, J. (1998). Storytelling as a nexus of change in the relationship between gender and technology: A feminist approach to software design. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, MIT Press. 298–326.
Cassell, J. (1998). Chess for girls?: Feminism and computer games. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, MIT Press.
Cassell, J., & Jenkins, H. (2000). From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: gender and computer games. MIT Press.
Glos, J. W., & Cassell, J. (1997, August). Rosebud: a place for interaction between memory, story, and self. In Cognitive Technology, 1997. Humanizing the Information Age. Proceedings., Second International Conference on (pp. 88–97). IEEE.
Cavallo, D., Sipitakiat, A., Basu, A., & Bryant, S. (2004). Opening pathways to higher education through engineering projects. AGE, 9, 1.
Cavallo, D., Sipitakiat, A., Basu, A., Bryant, S., Welti-Santos, L., Maloney, J., … Ackermann, E. (2004). RoBallet: exploring learning through expression in the arts through constructing in a technologically immersive environment. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Learning sciences (pp. 105–112). International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Eisenberg, M., Elumeze, N., MacFerrin, M., & Buechley, L. (2009). Children’s Programming, Reconsidered: Settings, Stuff, and Surfaces. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 1–8). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Freed, N., Qi, J., Setapen, A., Breazeal, C., Buechley, L., & Raffle, H. (2011). Sticking together: handcrafting personalized communication interfaces. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 238–241). ACM.
Jacobs, J., & Buechley, L. (2013). Codeable objects: computational design and digital fabrication for novice programmers. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1589–1598). ACM.
Jacobs, J., Resnick, M., & Buechley, L. (2014). Dresscode: supporting youth in computational design and making. In Proceedings of Constructionism 2014 Conference. Vienna, Austria.
Junior Summit at MIT lets kids speak out on technology. (1998). Retrieved November 10, 2015, from http://news.mit.edu/1998/summit-0916
Papert, S., & Solomon, C. (1971). Twenty things to do with a computer.
Perner-Wilson, H., Buechley, L., & Satomi, M. (2011). Handcrafting textile interfaces from a kit-of-no-parts. In Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (pp. 61–68). ACM. Retrieved from
Qi, J., & Buechley, L. (2010). Electronic popables: exploring paper-based computing through an interactive pop-up book. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (pp. 121–128).
Qi, J., & Buechley, L. (2012b). Animating Paper Using Shape Memory Alloys. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 749–752). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., … & Kafai, Y. (2009). Scratch: programming for all.Communications of the ACM, 52(11), 60–67.
Roque, R. (2012) Making Together: Creative Collaboration for Everyone. Masters Thesis, MIT Media Lab
Roque, R. (2014, August). Family Creative Learning Facilitator Guide. MIT
Rusk, N., Resnick, M., Berg, R., & Pezalla-Granlund, M. (2008). New Pathways into Robotics: Strategies for Broadening Participation. Journal of Science Education and Technology, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 59–69.
Rusk, N., Resnick, M., & Cooke, S. (2009). Origins and Guiding Principles of the Computer Clubhouse. In Kafai, Y., Peppler, K., and Chapman, R. (eds.), The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities. Teachers College Press.
Sethi, S. (2015). Making serendipity stick : translating short, live online interactions into meaningful relationships (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Turkle, S., & Papert, S. (1990). Epistemological pluralism: Styles and voices within the computer culture. Signs, 128–157.
Zigelbaum, J., Millner, A., Desai, B., & Ishii, H. (2006). BodyBeats: Whole-body, Musical Interfaces for Children. In CHI ’06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1595–1600). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Gender and Identity Online
Media Lab and affiliated researchers were part of an early wave of scholars researching gender on the Internet. Sherry Turkle’s book, Life on the Screen, included a chapter on gender in multi-user online roleplaying games. Amy Bruckman, at that time a PhD student at the Lab, published an early study on gender-swapping on the Internet. Bruckman, now a senior figure in social computing and computer science, has gone on to advise a generation of students who do remarkable work on gender and technology. Questions of identity and gender have also been central to the work of Judith Donath, an alum who led the Sociable Media Group, which carried out some of the earliest examples of computational social science, and who often asked questions about gender, relationships, and identity online. Judith has been especially influential through alums who have gone on to positions of substantial influence in social computing, including Fernanda Viegas, danah boyd, Andrew Fiore, and Karrie Karahalios. At the Center for Civic Media, our PI Ethan Zuckerman worked with Erhardt Graeff to conduct out research on how women and people of color use the Internet to organize and advocate for their rights.
Here is a selection of Media Lab research on gender and identity online:
Bruckman, A. (1996). Gender swapping on the Internet. High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, 317–326.
Cassell, J. (2002). Genderizing HCI. The Handbook of Human–Computer Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 402–411.
Donath, J. (2014). The social machine: designs for living online. MIT Press.
Donath, J., & Boyd, D. (2004). Public displays of connection. Bt Technology Journal, 22(4), 71–82.
Donath, J., Karahalios, K., & Viegas, F. (1999). Visualizing conversation. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 4(4), 0–0.
Donath, J. S. (1999). Identity and deception in the virtual community. Communities in Cyberspace, 1996, 29–59.
Fiore, A. R. T. (2004). Romantic regressions: An analysis of behavior in online dating systems. (Thesis) Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Fiore, A. T., & Donath, J. S. (2005). Homophily in online dating: when do you like someone like yourself? In CHI’05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1371–1374). ACM.
Graeff, E. (2013). Binders Full of Election Memes: Expanding Political Discourse. Presented at the Digital Media and Learning Conference.
Graeff, E., Stempeck, M., & Zuckerman, E. (2014). The battle for “Trayvon Martin”: Mapping a media controversy online and off-line. First Monday, 19(2).
Karahalios, K. G. (2004). Social catalysts: enhancing communication in mediated spaces. (Thesis) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the Screen. Simon and Schuster.
Zinman, A., & Donath, J. S. (2007). Is Britney Spears Spam? In CEAS ‘07.
Bias and Discrimination
Some Media Lab research focuses directly on issues of bias and discrimination. While I’ve been consistently focused on these issues, I’m not the only one. After Karrie Karahalios graduated and started her own research group, her students created visualizations of meeting conversations, building on the social psychology of discrimination against women in deliberative meetings. Karrie’s research re-invigorated the Media Lab through Charlie DeTar, whose PhD on consensus technologies drew lessons from Karrie on building systems to address bias. Karrie and Charlie have influenced my own research, advised by Ethan Zuckerman, on gender discrimination in the news, social media, and large-scale online cooperation.
Just this year, CMS and Civic Media grad student Chelsea Barabas just finished an amazing thesis on algorithmic hiring and efforts to overcome bias with computation in HR. She’s now a senior advisor to the Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative, where she initiated a bitcoin hackathon with Girls Who Code. Other researchers also care about these issues, with Ben Waber and Sophie Chou doing great work on bias and discrimination in corporations and machine learning.
While at the MIT Media Lab, my own research has investigated how data, design, and experimentation can help us better understand and respond to gender discrimination and bias. Together with Bocoup and the Knight Foundation, we’ve designed tools that have been used all over the world to monitor and respond to gender bias, we’ve organized workshops to spread those methods more widely. I’ve also collaborated with over a dozen for-profit, non-profit, and advocacy organizations to develop new approaches to gender discrimination online.
The following projects on bias and discrimination have been done by people connected to the Media Lab or using technology created at the lab:
Barabas, C. (Chelsea M. (2015). Engineering the American dream : a study of bias and perceptions of merit in the high-tech labor market (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Bergstrom, T., & Karahalios, K. (2007). Conversation Clock: Visualizing audio patterns in co-located groups. In System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 78–78). IEEE.
Chou, S. (2015). Race and the Machine: Re-examining Race and Ethnicity in Data Mining. Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange.
DeTar, C. (Charles F. (2013). InterTwinkles : online tools for non-hierarchical, consensus-oriented decision making (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Evans, L., Cherny, L., & Matias, J. N. (2012, September 7). Women’s representation in media: the best data on the subject to date. Guardian Datablog.
Hill, B. M., & Shaw, A. (2013). The Wikipedia gender gap revisited: characterizing survey response bias with propensity score estimation. PloS One, 8(6), e65782.
Hill, D., & Batheja, A. (2014, March 12). Interactive: Gender Wage Gap in State Agencies. Texas Tribune
Lafrance, A. (2013, September 30). I Analyzed a Year of My Reporting for Gender Bias and This Is What I Found. Medium.
Matias, J. N. (2013). Networked tactics for gender representation in the news. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Thesis) Program in Media Arts and Sciences.
Matias, J. N. (2012, August 16). Did Global Voices Use Diverse Sources on Twitter for Arab Spring Coverage? PBS IdeaLab.
Matias, J. N. (2014, February). Gender Binaries and the Ideological Affordances of Data Activism. MIT Symposium on Gender and Technology.
Matias, J. N., Agapie, E., D’Ignazio, C., & Graeff, E. (2014). Challenges for Personal Behavior Change Research on Information Diversity. Presented at the CHI 2014 Workshop on Personalizing Behavior Change Technologies.
Matias, J. N., Diehl, S., & Zuckerman, E. (2015). Passing On: Reader-Sourcing Gender Diversity in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1073–1078). ACM.
Matias, J. N., Hyland, A., Ros, I.. (2013, March 8). What does it take to create a news organisation that publishes a diversity of women’s voices? The Guardian.
Matias, J. N., & Evans, L. (2012, October 23). Women’s representation in media: readers preferences for online news revealed. The Guardian.
Matias, J. N., & Szalavitz, S. (2014, March). Filters, Bias, and Collaboration. SXSW.
Matias, J. N., & Wallach, H. (2015). Working Paper: Modeling Gender Discrimination by Online News Audiences. In Computation + Journalism.
Ros, I., Hyland, A., & Matias, J. N. (2012). Open Gender Tracker.
Waber, B. (2014, January 30). Gender Inequality in the Workplace: What Data Analytics Says — Businessweek. Bloomberg.
Online Harassment
Many in the Media Lab have done research on the experiences of women and other marginalized groups online, starting with Amy Bruckman’s early work on “deviant behavior in virtual communities,” Drew Harry’s PhD on large-scale conversation systems, and work by Karthik Dinakar, Birago Jones, and Henry Lieberman on cyberbullying. I’ve been continuing that tradition in the last year, with work (so far outside the Media Lab) to understand the experience of harassment on Twitter, research at Microsoft on Reddit moderators, and an upcoming collaboration with Hollaback to support research by Jill Dimond on peer support for people experiencing online harassment.
Bruckman, A. (1998). Finding one’s own in cyberspace. High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs. Ed. Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 15–24.
Bruckman, A., Curtis, P., Figallo, C., & Laurel, B. (1994). Approaches to managing deviant behavior in virtual communities. In CHI Conference Companion (pp. 183–184).
Dinakar, K., Reichart, R., & Lieberman, H. (2011, July). Modeling the detection of Textual Cyberbullying. In The Social Mobile Web.
Dinakar, K., Jones, B., Havasi, C., Lieberman, H., & Picard, R. (2012). Common sense reasoning for detection, prevention, and mitigation of cyberbullying. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS), 2(3), 18.
Graeff, E. (2014). Tweens, Cyberbullying, and Moral Reasoning: Separating the Upstanders from the Bystanders. Communication and Information Technologies Annual (Studies in Media and Communications, Volume 8) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 8, 231–257.
Harry, D. (2012). Designing complementary communication systems (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Keegan, B.C., Matias, J. N. (2016) Actually, It’s About Ethics in Computational Social Science: A Multi-party Risk-Benefit Framework for Online Community Research. AAAI Spring Symp. on Observational Studies through Social Media and Other Human-Generated Content.
Lieberman, H., Dinakar, K., & Jones, B. (2013, April). Crowdsourced ethics with personalized story matching. In CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 709–714). ACM.
Matias, J. N., Benesch, S., Earley, P., Gillespie, T., Keegan, B., Levy, N., & Maher, E. (2015). Online Harassment Resource Guide. Wikimedia Meta-Wiki.
Matias, J. N., Johnson, A., Boesel, W. E., Keegan, B., Friedman, J., & DeTar, C. (2015). Reporting, Reviewing, and Responding to Harassment on Twitter. arXiv:1505.03359
Matias, J. N. (2015a, June 8). The Tragedy of the Digital Commons: Advocates for fairer, safer online spaces are turning to the conservation movement for inspiration. The Atlantic.
Matias, J. N. (2015b, June 28). Were All Those Rainbow Profile Photos Another Facebook Study? The Atlantic.
The Editorial Board. (2015, May 1). Enlisting Bystanders to Fight Online Abuse. The New York Times.
Other Research and Design on Gender
In addition to the above themes, Media Lab researchers have done other provocative and influential work to shape how we understand issues of gender in society and scholarship. Here are some of them:
Hasegawa, A., Izaki, H., & Makimura, A. (2015). (Im)possible Baby [Design Fiction]. (also a Japanese television show)
Afraz, A., Boyden, E. S., & DiCarlo, J. J. (2015). Optogenetic and pharmacological suppression of spatial clusters of face neurons reveal their causal role in face gender discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(21), 6730–6735.
Nijhuis, M. (2014, September 24). Hacking the Breast Pump. The New Yorker. (about an amazing initiative at the Media Lab that brought together companies with MIT students and parents to re-imagine the breast pump)
Looking Beyond Research
In this blog post, I share over 70 research projects on gender or equality from the history of the Media Lab. The lab has hosted a remarkable collection of women who do groundbreaking work, from protecting women from honor killings and developing technologies for sexual assault survivors, to showcasing what women of color can do to make their cities sustainable. Our greatest impact is often created by people whose work goes unrecognized by scholarship — the leaders who support people and communities directly. As a PhD student, I’m constantly inspired by the contact I get with these principled practitioners.
What have I missed? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll add them to the post.
