Nothing will just come out in the wash
For technology to be a revolution, it needs to include all bodies
Last week, I attended a women-in-tech event, the kind for a general audience that is supposed to inspire and fill the audience with self-empowerment. It was, as these things almost always are, fine in the kind of way that confirms to me that I am not the target audience.
It’s refreshing to hear women talking about big innovations, like an engineer working on hybrid and electrified powertrain projects.
It was nice to hear talks from women working in virtual reality, and at least acknowledging that with a market that is mostly made up of men, men are still setting the agenda, but it has so much potential outside of that.
It was all very nice.
Later, when I tried a Samsung Gear VR headset, it was too wide for my skull, even on the smallest setting, which meant I had to hold it on with both hands, and the headphones didn’t fit at all. It was apparently the ‘holiday gift of the year’ for 2016, and it was cool; it just would have been more fun if I could have physically used it.
Women need to be — and are — involved with revolutionary technology at all levels, if only to remind men (or whatever species of giants built these headsets) that for technology to be revolutionary, it must work for all bodies. Not only to remind men of this, but even that would be a start.
The importance of encouragement into participation, of role models, of women in leadership, and of networks can’t be understated for women who want to get ahead in the industry. But when asked by a workshop facilitator at the event to think about someone we admire, I thought of my friend Sinead Redmond of Parents for Choice, who speaks with resolve, brilliance and political bravery — all with her toddler on her back, pulling at her hair. I admire her for that, and also for being a successful software engineer.
I think about women I know and love who work in areas like internet security and don’t — sometimes can’t — often get public credit for what they do. They are activists in internet freedom and experts on the law. Or they’re women who have switched careers mid-life, been or simply felt forced to move countries out of something other than desire for adventure. They design and build things, or they maintain systems because technology doesn’t work without maintainers.
There is more to technology than founders, investors, and startups, and there is more to role modeling than financial success.
All of our role models extend far beyond tech, but even within it, mine are mostly women, partly by coincidence but also because men are emulated plenty, and women not nearly enough. My role models are leaders in ways that aren’t defined by financial success (even though some are also financially quite successful); their integrity and openness make them leaders, even if they aren’t in charge of companies. And they don’t ignore the structural inequalities that make life harder for women, whether or not those women will ever work in private equity, create a startup, or become engineers.
They aren’t afraid to say, “You aren’t alone, and this isn’t your fault.”
The washing machine doesn’t exist in a vacuum
Women must be in on technology because we need to keep building the things that work for us. That’s why when I sat in a room with perfectly positive women telling nice stories, as my friends in Ireland marched to demand the right of basic bodily autonomy, it was hard not to think about the washing machine.
One of the earliest washing machines, a clothes wringer, was invented by a Black woman named either Ellen Eglin or Eglui, and was featured in Woman Inventor magazine in 1890. She also sold her patent for $18 because, as she said, if white people knew it was invented by a Black woman, they wouldn’t use it.
There is more to technology than founders, investors, and startups, and there is more to role modeling than financial success.
The home washing machine liberated more of women’s time than any other innovation of the 20th century. I watched a talk by the late (sadly) Hans Rosling about this: he credits his family’s washing machine with creating time for his mother to read to him, eventually setting him on the professorship track.
It’s not lost on me that someone who credited his intellectual development (and not simply ‘loving kindness’) to his mother grew up to be a genuinely challenging voice in the world.
In 2009, on International Women’s Day, a Vatican newspaper called it the most important invention for women, bigger than the Pill or the right to work outside the home (of course they did). Two months later, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, published a report that included some of the abuses suffered in by women incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries.
In case you needed confirmation of the value of the washing machine and the Pill, last year, Breitbart ran an article by you-know-who, demanding that both be ‘uninvented’ so women would get back into our rightful domestic sphere (of course they did, and of course I’m not linking to it).
In Ireland, the rise of the home washing machine coincided with changing attitudes about women, increased financial support for single mothers, and the decline of the Magdalene Laundries. These were business ventures that were built on moral terrorism, and run for profit on the backs of women’s forced unpaid labor. They weren’t phased out only because they weren’t profitable, but that most likely accelerated their decline, which still took several decades; the women of the Gloucester Street Laundry in Dublin did the laundry for the men of Mountjoy Prison until 1996.
But the end of the laundries didn’t mean that women were suddenly equal. Single parents, especially mothers, are still more likely to live in poverty, and they and their children bear the brunt of austerity, not just in Ireland, but around the world. Just because it’s better than being in a laundry doesn’t mean we should call it liberation.
Machines, disruptively innovative or incrementally so, don’t exist in a cultural or political vacuum, so to separate the success of women or our role in technological developments from the world where those things are created and the lives we lead around them is to miss a much larger audience whose empowerment isn’t caused by technology.
That can only be helped along by it if we care about their full humanity, and don’t simply dismiss each other for being demanding about things other than venture capital. The model of innovation is built around an image of men allegedly solving the world’s biggest problems, but those consequences are disproportionately borne by women, who are addressing them every day.
How can we absorb and internalize advice telling us to take leaps of faith, when so many women are pushed?
Getting women into technology isn’t enough if it isn’t safe to be credited and visible if we are the ‘wrong’ kind of woman, and it isn’t a panacea against barriers that aren’t about a deficit of inner strength, including reproductive rights, public morality, and racism.
It’s only now that the stories of women innovators, especially women of color, are being heard by wider audiences.
But women users of technology matter as much as women makers of it, and it’s not only important to include all of these voices as backdrop images or inspiring quotes, we need to include all of these bodies. That’s especially true as the body increasingly becomes the physical place for technology.
Liberating time is only revolutionary if the body can follow
One of the myths about women in tech and business, offered as explanation for our smaller share of the world’s wealth and an embarrassingly (for men) low level of venture investment, is that we aren’t risk-takers.
Before we even get to this idea that success is equated with entrepreneurship, and especially with venture investment (which is a bullshit success metric across the industry, and not just for women, but that’s an article for another day), it was difficult to hear arguments about women’s risk aversion when I was following the march in Dublin on my phone. That’s where you could find the women I heroize for their fortitude and their willingness to speak up about how much that bravery breaks them down.
That is nothing if not risk.
We risk our careers every time we mention structural inequality or injustice, even among other women because being touched by politics can be dangerous.
Every time we tell more than our closest confidantes that we were harassed out of a job we love, we risk being seen as troublemakers, or being suspected of blaming patriarchy for our failure to achieve.
Speak up, and you might get heard, but fewer and fewer gatekeepers will ever let you past. Men can more safely associate taking a stand with getting power, but women have to choose. I’m taking a risk just by writing this.
As Mary Beard talks about here, the models for our power remain narrow and based on masculine templates, which few women truly relate to. They too often show success for women as dependent on only on shedding a few last vestiges of patriarchal symbolism. The Medusa myth, especially, still persists for women who speak up.
If it’s true that women are less likely to actively seek risk, it’s because we spend so much of our lives trying to mitigate risks we didn’t ask for.
And globally, women are more likely to live in or at perpetual risk of poverty, at persistent risk of men’s violence, and suffer the greatest impacts from climate change.
Women are more likely to work in unstable or unsafe employment, and even in Europe, we aren’t far removed from a long religious tradition of institutionalized forced labor and punishment camps for women who did nothing wrong and still suffered repeated and maximum injustices. The washing machine helped drive down the revenues, but the lid still isn’t fully lifted on the cruelty, and it hasn’t gone away.
How can we absorb and internalize advice telling us to take leaps of faith, when so many women are pushed?
I want to cheer technological innovation; it’s truly exciting to be part of it, from software to appliances, transportation and infrastructure. I want to expand our view of what technological innovation and access are, to make sure we include washing machines and the people who dream of owning them, and make them matter at least as much as, if not more than, virtual reality technology.
Hans Rosling’s talk is entertaining and funny, but also very serious, and it’s positive without being the kind of unrealistic bright-siding we hear from companies claiming to be solving the ‘world’s biggest problems’ while pretending inequality is merely a financial or technical issue that will work itself out in time.
As electrical goods become more accessible, freeing up more time in the domestic sphere, which is disproportionately run by women, and economic growth helps more women lift themselves and their families out of extreme poverty, there will be innovation in green energy to power the next billion washing machines, and this will liberate even more women’s time, and help the planet.
It also matters who does that work, and that they can do it in an environment where they don’t have to choose between harassment and discrimination, and doing the exciting work they’re good at.
That’s why I also want political role models and users of washing machines and people who fight for bodily autonomy to matter as much as the model tech citizens in private equity, VR, and infrastructure engineering. Technology and politics intersect across our lives in so many ways that we can’t keep forcing narratives that keep them apart for the sake of positivity. Because without that, women don’t even get credit for their inventions until after they’re gone, and if they have multiple marginalized identities, perhaps it will be never.
How can we absorb and internalize advice telling us to take leaps of faith, when so many women are pushed?
General-audience women-in-tech events are fine, and of course, success stories can inspire people who feel success is largely a matter of dreaming harder and choosing from a range of positive options. And again, perhaps I’m not the audience, much as I’d like to be, but neither are a lot of women who aren’t just left out of the industry, they aren’t even fully visible in the world until they are seen as a target market.
If even someone with a slightly small head is too much of an edge case to really experience virtual reality — and that’s just a mildly annoying incidental example — we are still far from anything more than “just fine.” If we don’t talk about external barriers because they’re too political, then we aren’t just shouldering the blame for structural and systemic issues that affect our comparatively comfortable lives and careers, we’re leaving billions — literally — of women out.
There’s no reason we need to expect these billions of women to wait a few generations for the washing machine to trickle down, to only benefit their descendants, especially when it won’t liberate anything more than time. Oppressive policies and actions can and will continue to constrain their bodies, with or without it.
I want us to think at least as much about the women all the way down as we do the women at the economic top because without doing that, all technology does is relocate the sites of oppression.
This article is a much-extended piece based on one of my columns in the Sunday Business Post. If you are in a position to do so, I encourage you to make a donation to The Abortion Support Network, which helps women from Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man access safe and legal abortions, which are unavailable in these places.
