Women & Technology: History & Future
Evidence is increasingly showing women play a vital role in the creation and development of technology. A look back to see the future.
That todays technology industries from software to hardware is largely dominated by men is an accepted state of affairs. Much of the recent social dialogue around technological creation and evolution has largely been attributed to men. This is unfortunate and only reflects one side of the story.
Slowly, we are beginning to, as a society, uncover and celebrate women’s contribution to technology. These are often more recent references. As techno0logy is a part of what it means to be human, I believe it is important that we find a more balanced view. We cannot consider what it means to be human without fully considering the masculine and the feminine. While also understanding that concepts of multiple genders have also long featured as a part of being human.
So while there are some much vaunted and brilliant women contributions to technology in recent decades, we should not think of these inventions and developments as something new. Nor should they at all be surprising.
As we begin to go beyond the narrow confines of Western European thought in understanding humanity, more recent anthropological and archeological research and thinking is beginning to understand the role of women and technology in being human. This is much needed.
Most visual and written stories about humans inventing technology, such as banging stones together to create tools features male hominids, usually as Homo Sapiens. Evidence is increasingly suggesting though, that our human ancestors may well have taken the idea of tool use and fire from Neanderthals, Denisovans or perhaps other hominid species. Maybe we Homo Sapiens aren’t quite as special as we like to think.
Most recent research challenging the male-centric view of human development of technology has focused on hunting. We know now for instance, that in many, if not all (we don’t have enough evidence), hunter-gatherer societies, women were equal as hunters. It’s time to dispel the myth that men hunted and women gathered.
We know now that women and men were also equal as warriors in many past cultures and are proving to play a role again today. Women were equal as warriors in Viking, Celtic, Scythian and Native American tribes. And many others.
It is more than likely then that women invented new tools for hunting and perhaps preparing meat for consumption, such as knives. Both men and women likely fashioned new tools for new purposes over time. There is no scientific evidence that men are better at technology invention than women.
Do Women Adapt To Technology Better?
Recent research would suggest that women do in fact, adapt to new technologies and existing ones, better than men. One recent study in the aviation industry has shown that women adapt better to technological advancements than men. Especially with regard to knowledge transfer.
Another study more focused on our current Digital Age also shows that women are proven to be more adaptable to new digital technologies than men and even gain greater social capital.
While in a short article as this I can only summarize at best, we can logically infer that women, who tend to be more social and play a more pivotal role in knowledge sharing within cultures, more than likely invented some of humanity’s key technologies. While we are unlikely to ever know for sure, there is nothing to suggest that a woman didn’t invent the wheel.
Perhaps too, it was women that played a key part in the creation of language and writing as technologies. Men it seems, aren’t as adaptive to new technologies. An important consideration with so many revolutionary technologies coming at us all at once.
The Importance of Women In Our Technological Future
Over two decades as a digital (cultural) anthropologist, I’ve helped a lot of companies, some I worked in, to bring technology products to market, both hardware and software. And done a lot of ethnographic research for technology product companies. In all cases, where women were sometimes the inventor or played key roles in product development, those technologies have been more successful in the market.
The body of evidence has grown enough and is continuing to grow, that is proving beyond any doubt that women play an equal role and in some ways, more valuable role in the successful development and adaptation of technologies into human sociocultural systems.
While we cannot say for sure that Artificial Intelligence will entirely reshape human society, it is having a profound impact. We have enough evidence that human culture enters the code we write and therefore, biases enter the code. As the development of AI has mostly been male driven, it is little wonder that male biases have dominated AI development. How can a technology that is supposed to be somehow reflective or representative of humanity be dominated by one gender?
Digital technologies such as AI, software, genetic engineering, robotics, are all reflections of being human. I don’t believe we can consider what it means to be human and how humanity will evolve, without clearly equal representation of men and women. And other genders.
These technologies are profoundly shaping sociocultural systems around the world. Their successes, failures and evolution are ultimately decided by culture, as they have been for thousands of years. Culture is not dominated by any one gender. Never has been in the end.
The upshot is that women are increasingly playing a part from computer scientists to philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists in the development of new technologies. It is still for women, an uphill battle and enormous struggle, but I have much hope for the future.
Note: I am more than aware that I am a middle-aged white male writing this article and come from a place of current societal privilege. Hopefully I have taken a balanced few to present such an argument in a very short summary article.