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Traditionally, women were in charge of computers. Until the invention of electronic computers, the word “computer” meant a female worker who teamed up with many other workers to perform hundreds of thousands of calculations. The 2016 film “Hidden Figures” is proof of this reality. The film follows several black computers working at NASA, whose jobs are threatened by the advent of electronic computers. The women negotiated with male management to allow them to retrain as computer programmers and were able to keep their jobs, heralding a new era in which programming would become a women’s job. It’s almost impossible to imagine a time when most programmers were women. Today, we see posters and events (such as Hack(H)er) encouraging girls and women to code and program in schools and universities.
The gender relations in the early computer industry are why hardware is called hardware and software is called software. Before computers, the word “hardware” usually referred to metal tools and utensils such as hammers, bolts, and nails that could be purchased at a hardware store. The bonds created by a patriarchal society are clear. Men create hardware, women create software.
However, this gender-segregated system will not last long. Since the 1980s, women’s participation in the computer industry has declined rapidly, leading to the current situation. According to NPR, the inflection point was around her 1984, and NPR hypothesized that this inflection point was due to the proliferation of home computers, which were often marketed to boys.
After all, the history of computer science is a history of primitive accumulation. Perhaps the most specific is the history of Turtle Island. There, European colonizers dispossessed indigenous peoples, imposed Western notions of land ownership, and tore African people from their homelands and enslaved them on plantations. In other words, capitalism consistently expands into traditional non-capitalist areas of production in order to make profits. Computer science has profited from efforts to ignore or hide women’s contributions and to replace them with cheaper sources of labor, such as through automation and the masculinization of computer-related jobs. This is because they tried to exploit women by doing so.
This long and sordid history of excluding women from the computer industry is perhaps why the current technology landscape is so bad. Social media companies like Facebook and X are led by some of the most annoying men, violating our privacy and selling our data. Generative AI companies compare themselves to industrialists who are constantly displacing traditional female textile workers. Advocate AI talks about replacing the artist, but can only show grotesque fusions, and the tools used also peddle the stripping of women and girls’ clothes.
Patriarchy in computer science is not unique in its exploitation of women. There is nothing that leads to the typical patriarchal tendencies of computer science. The problem is broader: Western science is patriarchal. Anarchist criticism of science challenges the idea that science is objective. In Ruth Kinna’s essay “Anarchism and Politics: History and Antiscience in Radical Thought,” she summarizes anarchists’ critique of Western science. It is a tool of the elite, Christian in spirit, and because the nature of science is woven into the dominant social system, it embodies prejudices that already exist. “At a time when science was already embroiled in an authoritarian political system and exploited by interests built on prejudiced exclusion and structural inequality.”
For example, medicine has a long history of progress through experimentation on non-white people, especially women. James Marion Sims was a doctor who conducted experiments on enslaved black women with funding from plantation owners and is called the father of gynecology. This is by no means a unique event in the history of science. Science has traditionally strengthened the power and authority of dominant groups over all others.
Patriarchy in computer science is thus simply a consistent reflection of the science’s history of exploitative knowledge gathering. But what does this mean for the future of technological development? Are we doomed to this vicious cycle of persistent bias? Many technology companies seem to think so. For example, OpenAI oxymoronically preaches the need to develop AI due to the “existential threat” that undeveloped AI could pose, which he believes will only be possible if you think about it for more than a second. makes sense. The imagination of technology industry leaders shows that the development of technology is still tied to a history of social privilege, and thus suggests that in the future technology will increase the power and wealth of elites and men. is imagining.
The situation described here is quite depressing, but it is not inevitable. We can still prevent our future from resembling the dystopian worlds we imagine in our darkest moments. But to do that, you must first recognize how deep your problem is and work to solve it. Whether we have the humility to even acknowledge the systemic problems we face remains to be seen.
Benjamin Zhou can be contacted at: [email protected]
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