After reading Caroline Criado’s ‘Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed by Men’, I reached for my phone and tried to stretch my thumb across it to touch my middle and index fingers and realized how the design of my phone made it so that I was not able to stretch across. It floored me to realise the extent to which the world is not designed for women, unconsciously and consciously signalling that they do not belong despite the steps that have been made to address women’s participation in the world at large. I now feel that it should have been obvious to me having experienced gender-based inequality for years at that point. Learning that women were in more danger in every way purely due to design gaps pushed me to start addressing the subject in my research work.
To try and thread through the history of gender inequality and how social stratification leads us to the present day ‘technoprecarity’ is to cultivate the skill of paying attention. It demands constant vigilance, which often is the work of those in danger of being preyed upon. It is scrutinizing the landscape constantly, being aware enough to ensure that the innocuous-seeming landscape does not contain unseen eyes that wait for the vigilance to be lowered if only just a little, seizing the opportunity to strike. To attempt to do this in research is to read between the lines, it is to question the questions, the researchers, the data, the laws, the world at large, and most of all, to question yourself.
Taking note of the impacts of embodied experience studying disembodied technology seems a task akin to the ouroboros. Unpacking the minutiae of research practice and giving each its due consideration is a process which I would like to expound on below, consisting of; great rage, in realizing just how much damage has been done and how much is being done still; a great opportunity to create meaningful change; and great resilience, ploughing on each time recommendations, policies and laws go overlooked and underutilized.
Great Rage
But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy.
To rage at the constant indignities perpetuated against women and girls, the world over is to learn to channel. From little acorns, so the saying goes, and so kernels of rage can transform law, can change the status of women as they have over time. Progress is not even and where the information is needed most, in accurate research, often tends to perpetuate greater falsehoods. The famed scientists, those who designed research as we know it, are not spared from perpetuating gender inequality. To conduct research is to be a game developer, a player, a character, a non-player character (NPC). To design that, which has layers of design embedded into it, is the work of not only uncovering the inherent absurdity of discrimination, but also channelling that rage into overturning every system that seeks to reproduce its indignities on the world. It is defining history both in acknowledgment and honour of those who have not been allowed to do the work.
To draw on histories of exclusion without drowning in sorrow and rage for the sisters that have fallen behind us requires putting that energy to the plough and tilling a much healthier future for us all. I can only hope that 50 years from now, the feminists of that time will look back upon us in pity and horror that we endured such indignities. We do the work for ourselves, we do the work for the decisions that will be made about us, whether we are worth listening to, protecting, paying.
Great opportunity
In April 2020, I learned that I had been accepted into Women Deliver’s class of 2020. This was, in my imagination, an opportunity to further my change agenda. Not long after the announcement was made official, a series of Twitter posts by current and former employees of Women Deliver told the story of a discriminatory culture fuelled by microaggression and mistreatment. The months of investigation that followed, several town halls, large and small group discussions, led me to question all the spaces which I took for granted would be safe. Despite the disappointment associated with the organizational culture in Women Deliver, I was introduced to lively, vivacious men and women who were doing incredible work across the globe and whose immediate response was to mobilize in support of the employees that had faced discrimination. Their response was to create spaces for us to freely air our grievances, to introduce us to their work, to involve us in their projects, and to lend their support to ours in turn, to give us chance after chance to create the community to work in total harmony as changemakers.
Creating opportunity is, at times, the effort of scrounging out possibilities where none seems to be. It is unfortunate that the extent of gender inequality means that there are many stones to be turned over, and many layers of sediment under those stones. It is also a chance to stretch across the disappointments and find in those opportunities, the pieces to overturn the tide.
Great Resilience
We start, all of us, always, in the middle of ongoing histories of inquiry.
At this point in my research, I often encounter the question ‘Is the system broken, or is it working exactly as intended?’ It is sometimes baffling to encounter accidents of design that seem so obviously skewed to discriminate against women and time and time again, I must remind myself that this is a marathon, that progress is being made with the steady practice of tuning and fine-tuning my research practice. Acknowledging that there is no transcending our lived embodied experience unless we transcend corporeality itself is an act of bracing ourselves for the long haul. The fabric of memories, experiences, perspectives, and relations that shape who we are can, on one hand, blind and distort reality leading, in part, to the current status quo. On the other hand, it can create breakthroughs in research, revealing discrimination in prior research studies and practices.
Resilience is an act of maintaining hope, of picking and choosing strategies to guide research, and, in the long haul, of changing lives. It is also, in many ways, a call to rest meaningfully, to pause and survey the landscape, to re-orient, and to reflect and prepare for the work to come. Resilience means continuing to challenge a world where the term doctor is coded male, where women in science fiction show up as domesticized or otherwise in service to a male protagonist, in redefining online spaces that more often than not hold up a sign reading ‘women not welcome’.
This reflective piece was written by Mitchel Ondili, Research Assistant at The Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT), Nairobi, Kenya, as part of her engagement in a Gender at Work’s action learning process in the context of our work with IDRC Cyber Policy Centres.
Image by Luisa Brando for Creative Commons, via The Greats.
