by Flávia Doria
Abstracts:
This paper seeks to address the relationships between the maintenance of historical silencing and invisibilization of women in cyberspace with their alienation from fields of knowledge around the Internet, networks, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), taking the gender bias in Wikipedia as an example.
Keywords: Cyberspace, Cyberfeminism, ICTs, Wikipedia.
Introduction
The relationship between women and technology has been explored by feminism practically since the first signs that computers would become an integral part of our existence. The male monopoly of this sector has been observed and criticized by several female authors. They have identified the lack of technological knowledge as one of the factors of female dependence and its source of power. Many of these works have presented themselves as critical of technology as a tool for maintaining male dominance (Wajcman, 1991).
Based on the ideas of Manuel Castells (2002) that the Internet and ICTs (Information Communication Technologies) have changed not only social relations but the structures of capitalism, whose bases are grounded, more and more, founded on the value of information. This paper intends to investigate the relations between the presence and participation of women in cyberspace – a place predicted by Pierre Lévy as "humanity's main communication channel and memory support from the beginning of the next century." (Lévy, 1999 p. 93). To do so, it will review women's historical relations with these technologies and use Wikipedia, the most extensive online encyclopedia, as an example.
Cyborg Feminism
When Donna Haraway (2009) wrote the Cyborg Manifesto, she opened a window into the utopian imagination of a feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, post-gender technology. Unlike the dystopian science fiction narratives of the time that featured the machine versus man dualism, she defined the cyborg as not only a hybrid part human, part machine, but as a being that rejects the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. We can relate the cyborg to all of us: with our cell phones in our hands, symbolic yet real extensions of ourselves.
In her works, Haraway has deconstructed the idea of naturalism. This cyborg being is evidence of the non-existence of the natural in human experience and seems to expose a kind of accommodation of the naturalist discourse. For the author, science and technology are not masculine, white, and heterosexual per se. Therefore, from this perspective, it is possible not only to build a feminist epistemology based on localized knowledge but to be able to name the masculinist bias when it exists. (Haraway, 1995) . If science still takes the white male gaze as the norm and the gaze of any other group that dares to produce knowledge as an exception, it is because it is embedded in a patriarchal and Eurocentric structure that constructs it according to, and through, its capitalist and neocolonialist interests.
The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (Haraway, 2009, p. 8)
From this perspective, we can point out that the same happens with the Internet, this technology that has forever changed the way we live, altering political, social, and economic structures. Daughter of military research during the Cold War, the Internet was appropriated and re-signified by college students of the American counterculture to meet the demands for individual freedom and knowledge sharing - characteristics of this cultural movement (Castells, 2001, p. 25). Its origin, therefore, indicates to us who it serves and, at the same time, its potential infidelity to its creators.
A Brief History of Women in ICTs
Cyberspace is the body of networked information and the material infrastructure that enables digital communication. It affects the urban and the organization of territories, being itself comparable to one. The "cybercity" or "digital city" (Levy, 1999, p. 186-190) has the potential to decentralize large urban centers and new ways of distributing economic activities; or conversely, to increase the control capabilities of traditional power centers. If the Internet is a "cybercity," who are the "architects" and "architects" responsible for planning it?
Investigating the place of women in cyberspace beyond their presence, considering their position in the planning and development of this space, seems fundamental in times of reaffirmation of the power of Information and Communication Technologies (Castells, 2002). Especially, when the five most valuable companies in the world are all from this sector [1], and profit not only from our consumption but also from our presence in social networks as user-products.
To understand the white male domination of ICTs, we have to go back to the history of these technologies and their social and economic impacts, taking into account the place of women in this trajectory. If today the place of creation and direction of these areas is full of faces similar to those of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, while women represent only 30% of these companies, the truth is that it has not always been like this. In the post-war scenario, they were a majority in computer science and computing, dissenters from a course also, at the time, dominated by women: mathematics. (BBC Brazil, 2018)
The division of labor's origin in computing into hard and soft has its roots in the gender division of these tasks. The term hard designated the engineering jobs related to the physical effort of those who built the machines, which, at the time, were the most important and were left to men, and soft were the secondary jobs such as programming, which were in the hands of women. (Esmenger, 2010 apud Lima & Merkle, 2013). It was a repetitive and undervalued job for which women were the perfect labor force.
In this period, they were pioneers, both in the development of computing as NASA's "human computers" like Janez Lawson: who programmed the IBM 701, or Katherine Johnson, who planned the trajectories of the agency's first space missions - both black women - and in the creation of programming languages, like Grace Hopper, the US Navy admiral who created the first high-level language (more like English) and the first program that allowed to convert these codes to low-level (zeros and ones).[2]
Over time, there was a shift in the importance of the role of software in computing. Thereby, the consequent reconfiguration of programming activity from a job considered essentially female to a male job. The image of ICTs ceased to have female faces from the mid-1980s, when, thanks to personal computing - when computers arrived in people's homes - their programs became products. Therefore, the period in which these markets began to represent substantial profits coincided with the women's exclusion from these professions. (Esmenger, 2010 apud Lima & Merkle, 2013)
The same sexism that has kept them out of manufacturing and creation has also excluded them from the whole computing universe from the moment computers were introduced to the market, being sold as an entertainment product for boys and focused on games. Therefore, the privilege of early childhood contact with digital literacy is supported by binary gender stereotypes that socialize boys through play with tools of power and dominance such as cars, guns - and electronic devices - and girls of domestic care through dolls and housewares. (Felisberto, 2012)
"Technology is shaped through a complex social process in which different groups select and define certain characteristics for a particular item. Features of a particular device can provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power. One of the limitations to the potential impact of women as tech consumers lies in their distance from the production and design process." (Cockburn, 1997 apud Felisberto, 2012 p. 20).
In this line of thought, one could problematize how the women's dismissal as creators – which also dismissed them as consumers – impacted the constitutive policies and tools of cyberspace by establishing a gender bias.
Wikipedia - the act of writing and inscribing in cyberspace
The wikis are one of the principal examples to explain what is called web 1.0 [3]. In them, the user's participation isn't only fundamental, but they are the ones who develop it, collaboratively modifying its content and structure directly from the browser. Unlike other information sites and the recent social networks, in wikis, any user can be a developer.
The most famous of these, Wikipedia, is an online encyclopedia, with versions in 277 languages, each of which is an independent community. Its content is created, edited, and revised by anyone willing to contribute voluntarily to the project. While its use in academia and schools still generates mistrust, its credibility only increases. In 2020, the platform partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) to disseminate reliable and up-to-date information about COVID-19 [4]. It is now one of the most accessed sites on the entire web [5] , and it is popularly saying: "if it's not on Wikipedia, it doesn't exist." But then what happens when women are not in Wikipedia?
The gender bias in the digital encyclopedia has been discussed in recent years by the Wikimedia Foundation itself, the non-profit organization behind the site [6]. The topic is also an article on the platform: it addresses the gender disparity among editors and the number of articles about women and related subjects versus articles about men. Less than 13% of Wikipedians are women [7]. The most optimistic surveys put it at less than 20% [8]. Furthermore, according to the Wikidata Human Gender Indicator (WHGI), as of May 2020, only 18.36% of Wikipedia biographies in Portuguese are dedicated to women. The Lusophone version is in 72nd position, with about 43 thousand women's biographies, against almost 193 men's thousand [9] .
There are initiatives to increase the proportion of articles about women, as the Wikipedia initiative called Woman in Red [10] - a reference to the color of links to articles that have not yet been written. With a multilingual version, the project aims to increase the number of women's biographies on Wikipedia. But by itself, it does not solve the problem of women's absence in the collective construction of this platform, nor does it expand the discussion to gender non-conforming people or focus on issues of intersectionality. These are feminist groups' works like the international Art+Feminism or the Portuguese Wiki Editoras Lx through "editatonas," editing marathons to recruit new people within these groups in the interest of increasing their representation and visibility [11].
But if anyone can edit, why does the problem persist? Sue Gardner, a former executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, in an article (2011), named the main reasons why women do not edit on Wikipedia, according to themselves. Among them, practical issues such as patriarchal structure development: women have less free time than men do. But the principal reason revolves around a macho environment and low confidence in the tools and dynamics needed to edit on an open platform in a community dominated by a male presence. They point to issues such as the interface not being user-friendly, the need for confidence to write in an encyclopedia and the sexist bullying that their contributions suffer and are often reversed or deleted.
That is because editing work depends on interaction with other users, in, according to Gardner, an aggressive environment. Although Wikipedia has no fixed rules, there are five founding pillars: editing interaction is one. The others are its rules of conduct, free-licensed content, impartiality, and encyclopedic character [12]. Decisions about what an article should or should not be, or how that article should be written, edited, categorized, illustrated, any editorial policy are built through debate within the community. Though, there is no equal decision-making power. There are hierarchical levels that allow special actions such as deleting pages, blocking a user, or voting rights. And there is an influence on the credibility of those editors [13].
At the same time, Wikipedia carries the utopian promise of being a model of decentralized participatory democracy, while being based on encyclopedias: a category of knowledge that has its historical roots in colonialism that imposes the limits on what can be added and by whom, according to pre-defined norms and logics. (Burke, 2012 apud Ford & Wajcman, 2017)
Those who are able to master Wikipedia´s technocratic system of representation, with an emphasis on facts and other modular pieces of verifiable information, emerge as power brokers within this environment. Those who fail to master this system, either because their knowledge of the world does not fit with what Wikipedia recognizes as knowledge or because negative social interactions on the platform have led to their leaving it, will remain on Wikipedia´s edges, unable to contribute and have their knowledge represented.” (Ford & Wajcman, 2017 p. 13)
Conclusion
In this way, it is possible to relate Haraway's work regarding the experience of knowledge production to the example of Wikipedia, where the disproportional male domination of the platform reflects in the gender bias of its content and policies. We also note that the author's criticism of the idea that the field of technological knowledge is naturally male is grounded in social and historical processes that have excluded women from these places of power, and this dismissal echoes in their underrepresentation on the Internet.
We can conclude that despite the efforts around the inclusion of women and gender non-conforming people in the platform, the difficulties in breaking this cycle are in the very foundations of Wikipedia. Its technical and political infrastructures are created and constantly maintained under a hegemonic and hierarchical vision where the knowledge of the dominant group – male and white – pushes away editors from other groups and thus the possibility of including other knowledge.
From these ideas, this article aimed to raise a reflection on the importance of the appropriation of technological knowledge by women and other marginalized groups for the occupation and participation in cyberspace as a place of power. Moreover, it sought to leave room for the optimistic image of the construction of platforms, tools, languages, and digital policies built this time with a feminist bias.
Notas
[1] - Available at https://exame.com/tecnologia/apple-se-mantem-como-marca-mais-valiosa-do-mundo-veja-ranking/
[2] - Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html
[3] - The term was made popular by the American company O'Reilly Media in 2004.
[4] - Available at https://www.publico.pt/2020/10/22/sociedade/noticia/oms-wikipedia-anunciam-colaboracao-combater-desinformacao-coronavirus-1936394
[5] - Available at https://www.alexa.com/topsites
[6] - Available at https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/addressing-wikipedias-gender-gap/
[7] -Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html
[9] - Available at https://whgi.wmflabs.org/gender-by-language.html#bokeh-alltime-plot
[10] -Available at https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Red
[11] - Available at https://gerador.eu/com-todas-as-maos-se-abre-a-historia-projectos-feministas-contemporaneos/fbclid=IwAR2ros37oOCjDFWxdEDkhyZhVtMEkoDu_faNhhoqKpyoATxerN7IEGZ_6Ps
[12] - Available at https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki%C3%A9dia:Cinco_pilares
[13] - Available at https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia#Estrutura_de_poder
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Author: Flavia Doria - Social Communication - Journalism, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
About the Author: Flavia Doria has a degree in Social Communication and Journalism from FACHA in Rio de Janeiro. She lives in Portugal since 2016 and currently writes about feminism on her blog and Medium. She is part of the Lisbon-based publishing group, Wiki Editoras Lx, which aims to decrease gender inequalities on Wikipedia.