How do gender and technology shape each other? What kinds of emancipatory possibilities reside in technologies, be they medical, social, communicational or architectural technologies, or perhaps larger infrastructures or mundane everyday objects? Can we take hold of technologies to provoke a rupture in the cycle of gender production? What kinds of strategies do we need to thoroughly change the mechanisms and algorithms by which the binary heteronormative society is working?

We are feminists, researchers, teachers and activists from Helsinki, and we are inviting you to participate in the discussion on gender and technology. The starting point for this conversation is a Gender and Technology course that we organised at Aalto University in Helsinki in 2020 and 2021. The course was born out of a desire to introduce for discussion how feminism has contributed to social studies of technologies, science and design. We felt that there was a need for a university-level course, where students would learn to critically evaluate the consequences of technologies for diverse groups of people, especially those in marginalised and vulnerable positions. Through reading academic texts and discussing them in small groups, we sought to make visible that science and technology do not evolve according to an inherent technical or scientific logic but are shaped by diverse social factors like gender, race, and class. As the majority of the students were future makers of technology, we invited them to critically examine their own field and its practices as well as to observe different power structures and power dynamics related to science, technology and the constructed environment more broadly.  

In this article, we want to explore the course itself as a technology and at the same time share our various ‘design’ choices and some of the challenges related to teaching a course on this topic in the university context. 

The quotes in the article are from Jessica Eboreime’s learning diary. Jessica attended the course in 2022.

The Gender and Technology course relied on and was inspired by science and technology studies, especially work done in the field of feminist technology studies and the sociology of technology. There were already similar feminist technoscience courses at other universities, and we used those references when we started drafting the course.

The course lasted six weeks and it was open to all students at Aalto. It turned out to be very popular and managed to attract people from a variety of fields – e.g. design, engineering, computer science and business. Around 40 students were selected for the course in both years based on a motivation letter.

As neither of us was experts in this exact topic, we positioned ourselves more as facilitators and co-learners rather than teachers in a traditional sense. The structure, methods and content of the course were shaped by our own interests and backgrounds. Due to Covid-19, the first course had to be organised completely over Zoom. In the second year, the sessions were mostly face-to-face but partly online.

The learning sessions consisted of peer-to-peer learning, reading and discussing academic articles, different kinds of speculative exercises, artists’ visits and small lectures. Judy Wajcman's book TechnoFeminism and her other works guided us in selecting the readings for the course. Just as Wajcman has identified five distinct phases in the development of thinking about feminist technoscience, we utilised this categorisation to plan the evolution of our sessions, though not in exactly the same way.

The course was described as a facilitated reading circle. In practice, this meant that each student had to read one article per week, deliver a small exercise about the text before the class, and discuss thoughts that the text evoked in a small group. Each group was asked to create a poster, a memo or an Instagram post based on the discussion.

To pass the course, the students had to read the articles and deliver the small exercise related to each reading, participate in group work, and deliver questions for the visiting artists and researchers before each visit. The students were asked to keep a learning journal throughout the course.

As mentioned previously, reading and discussing academic and other types of articles related to gender and technology formed the core of the course. The texts raised and analysed questions like why the workload of women has increased despite the development of domestic appliances are technologies actually a project of domination by men over women, is the connection between technology and masculinity as natural as it seems and is the division of labour in society actually a gender hierarchy.  Furthermore, by becoming familiar with the seminal studies from the field of science and technology studies, we learned about the gendering processes of a microwave oven, gendering the division of labour in the development of pap smear screening and how discourses of the natural body shaped the contraceptive pill. We also became familiar with the cyberfeminism movement by reading the cyborg manifesto and works by Sadie Plant. We also questioned the objectivity of scientific facts with the help of Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory and Donna Haraway’s ideas about situated knowledge.

Legacy Russell writes that “[...] [T]he early history of cyberfeminism mirrored the early history of AFK feminism in its problematic reapplication of first and second-wave feminist politics [...]. The public face of cyberfeminism was regularly championed and fetishised as one of white womanhood [...]. This white cyberfeminist landscape marginalised queer people, trans people, and people of color aiming to decolonise digital space by their production via similar channels and networks.” We wanted to take Russell’s critique seriously and broaden the analysis of gender and technology to cover also other intersecting factors that contribute to social hierarchies and oppression. On the other hand, technology presents emancipatory potential to many, and we can observe 1990’s cyberfeminism’s enthusiasm and optimism in many contemporary discourses about gender and technology.

What the syllabus of the course was trying to show, is that the topic of gender and technology is not new. Nevertheless, the popularity of works like Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez, 12 Bytes by Jeannette Winterson, Glitchfeminism by Legacy Russell, Xenofeminism by Helen Hester, and Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin along with the popularity of the course shows that it might be more timely than ever, and that larger groups of people have begun to ask questions related to the politics of technology.

Even though the understanding of gender has evolved, expanded and diversified in society at large, it is less clear how and to what extent this development has taken place in the IT sector. The Tech industry’s discrimination problem has been discussed for some time already, and the rate of discrimination based on gender and other factors seems still worrying – 38% of women and 56% of people from ethnic minorities report experiencing discrimination in the past 12 months while working in European tech companies. The disparities related to gender and other intersecting forms of discrimination, still very much influence our technological landscape. Change does not happen in a linear fashion or at the same pace in different parts of society. We think it is important to deliberately create new spaces for discussing technology and actively bring marginalised or silenced voices into this discussion and in dialogue with the developers and designers of technology.

Already before the first course, we anticipated that the discussions on the intersection of gender and technology will be highly sensitive, personal and political, and that is one of the reasons why the course started by building the rules for a safer space. The use of a safer space has travelled from activist communities to academic circles, with the University of the Arts in Helsinki leading the way in Finland.

In the first year, we built the principles by becoming familiar with the existing UniArts safer space guidelines and discussing them in small groups using Zoom chat rooms. Based on the discussions, the groups wrote down the principles that were most important to them and these were shared with the whole class. We asked the students to return to the principles throughout the course and to contact us if they had any questions or concerns regarding them.

We decided to develop the process a little in the second year as we were afraid that the small group discussions ended up limiting the conversation too much as groups sought to form a consensus and many might not want to share their fears and limitations with their classmates. In the second year, we asked the students to write a short text in the form of a letter as homework about what a safer learning environment meant for them. We, teachers, read the assignments and curated a selection of  principles for a shared anonymous document. The students were able to comment on the document, which they actively did, and all the comments were left visible for the rest of the course.

Nevertheless, not everyone agreed with the writing-based approach, and we soon learned that navigating this topic requires time, sensitivity, and strategic facilitation, which is easier said than done within the limitations of a university course.

While we were building the starting points of the safer space, we also discussed whether it makes sense to read texts that are decades old when some discussions have changed alongside the mainstream understanding of gender as a concept. By building the safer space principles collectively we sought to cater for students with varying needs and wishes, but we also wanted to show how the course itself is a technology that we shape together, throughout the course.

After reading and getting to know the topic and each other, we started drafting different futures and alternative histories for gender and technology. We tried to ask if it is even possible for us to think about gender and technology in an alternative way, is it even ethical to try? A key speculative tool was a live-action role-play (LARP) as it is defined in the book Borrowing Positions. In the book, LARP is described as a game that is close to the performative arts, but it is played out without an external audience. During the LARP, students physically and verbally embodied their fictional characters and enacted a plot, where the relationship between gender and technology played a central role. The game was based on a fictional backstory that defines the setting. In the first year, we organised the LARP online and in the second year, we played it physically in the school. As a warm-up exercise for the LARP and the larger group work, we used a slightly modified version of The Thing from the Future imagination game. As the final work, students were developing outcomes in small groups. They had to choose one or more outcomes with the group and expand and/or modify them. They continued the work by preparing a small Sci-Fi lecture around the topic of gender and technology that was presented as part of the last session that was set in a LARP setting.

There was a lot of reading in the course and going through long theoretical texts felt laborious to many of the students. Speculative methods also brought a bodily counterweight and playfulness to the reading and the discussions that often touched quite complex and emotional topics.

Technology is often created by a very homogeneous group of people with a possibly limited imagination. To find new perspectives and unexpected views on the future, we invited a group of artists and researchers to talk about their work. Artists have always looked at the relationship between matter, body, and humanity in different ways and we wanted to invite art practitioners and visiting thinkers, whose work gender and technology play a central role, to share their practice with us. We will mention a few of the visitors here:

Sara Kaaman is a Stockholm-based graphic designer, who has studied the gendered nature of bookmaking presented in the work Natural Enemies of Books – A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography. Mindy Seu is a designer, educator, and researcher based in New York City. Mindy opened up about why and how he has built an online archive of readings, research and art related to Cyberfeminism. Artist Artor Jesus Inkerö shared their practice. Their field of art is their whole body, through which they explore the Western notions of masculinity that shape the overall culture. Teo Ala-Ruona gave a lecture on trans-masculinity and his practice working with performance. He focuses on queer speculative fictioning, mainly in the forms of performances and texts. Anna Nurminen talked about dildos from the perspective of Paul B. Preciado's books that she is translating at the moment. During the course, we also visited the architecture museum, where an exhibition examining architecture and gender was organised around the anniversary of architect Wivi Lönn. In connection with the exhibition, the museum organised a lecture, where Dr Katarina Bonnevier talked about the work of the queer architecture group Mycket.

The course was organised as a part of the University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) programme at Aalto University. Experts and practitioners also outside the university were able to propose and teach courses throughout the programme. The idea was that UWAS courses would provide “all Aalto students an opportunity to explore critical practices and processes beyond disciplinary boundaries.” Despite the opposition of the staff and especially the students, in connection with other cuts in the art sector at Aalto University during the last spring, the UWAS programme was shut down and at the same time, the Gender and Technology course was organised for the last time. However, we want to continue the conversation.

During these two years, it has become clear that critical discussion about technology is needed as well as welcome – both among engineering students who are actually designing technologies in the future and among those looking at the topic more from a distance, but who are nevertheless users of technologies and affected by them. There are no passive bystanders in technological revolutions, and therefore everyone should have an equal say in this conversation. We need spaces where we can openly and critically discuss how technologies are designed and marketed and how their development is influenced by different social structures and the backgrounds and prejudices of the developers and what kinds of consequences they have in society and among different groups of people. We also learned that this discussion requires careful facilitation and orchestration so that everyone feels that their voice is heard.

We have been viewing this course as a technology. Its planning and implementation is an iterative and slowly evolving process, which is influenced by assumptions about the students' backgrounds, wishes and needs. A successful course develops as cooperation between students and teachers. It is also important to talk openly about the resources and power structures that determine the boundary conditions of the course. When the course is viewed as a technology and is planned and implemented openly and carefully, the agency of everyone involved becomes visible. We can together take responsibility for the shape of the course without the teachers pushing their teaching responsibility onto the students' shoulders.

We want to invite you to this conversation, where technology is allowed to be talked about differently, softly, inquiringly, and with curiosity. Together, we can change how technologies are discussed and the practices in which technology is designed. We also want to expand the group of people who feel included in the conversation about technology, who feel that their experiences and viewpoints are relevant to this discussion and who feel courageous enough to imagine alternative technological futures. You are warmly welcome.