Reading Response: Rosser

I found Rosser’s first chapter in Women, Gender, and Technology to be an incredibly useful guide to understanding some basic, yet deeply powerful ways that technology influences our daily lives, specifically in how it has been harnessed as a tool to reinforce oppressive social and political constructs. I’m also grateful for the double-function it serves by providing readers with a brief synopsis of some popular forms of feminist theory, especially in how they intersect and depart from one another.

Similarly valuable is Rosser’s emphasis on the historical flaw of technology being shaped by men and for men. In other words, despite the reasons for male dominance of the industry, i.e. biological or social, technological designs and their practical uses over time have been disproportionately created both to satisfy patriarchal constructs, as well as to reinforce them. This point is crucial because it helps explain why women have struggled to gain a solid footing in the world of technology invention, creation and application. When one considers, for example, how much we take for granted in our basic conceptions of science as an objective field, the methodologies we employ in creating our collective knowledge base may seem subsequently less reliable. Positivism, which Rosser quotes Jaggar as implying that “all knowledge is constructed by inference from immediate sensory experiences,” for example, is not a universally accepted philosophical system of thinking (Rosser 16). Socialist feminists and African American/womanist or racial/ethnic feminists reject positivism as lacking objectivity because the very “basic categories of knowledge are shaped by human purposes and values” (Rosser 17). Furthermore, considering the historical dominance of males in the public sphere, we must also note the connection between these supposedly “objective” approaches and the masculinity of the thinkers that purport them. That is to say, it may not be enough, as liberal feminists might claim, to attack the “gender-stratified labor market” by removing “overt and covert barriers that prevent women from entering engineering education and remaining as practicing engineers” (14). Simply redistributing responsibility and financial compensation within the labor market is not enough to defeat discrimination based on gender. The problems lay deeper, as Rosser points out, in the ways we conceive of technological application. We need new perspectives altogether on how technology may serve society.

Socialist feminist and African American/womanist or racial/ethnic feminist perspectives, which aim to take in to account a wider range of intersection, i.e. race, class, gender, age and ability, understand that liberation and equality for marginalized groups requires more than inclusion; it requires the complete revamping of our conceptions of difference and how it influences our everyday lives (Rosser 20-21). It requires new models of analyzing how to best serve the “common good” (Rosser 19). Again, regardless of whether differences between masculine and feminine perspectives of the world are rooted in biology or socialization, technology has been dominated by those perspectives that are characteristic of men who fall under the hegemonic definition of masculinity, which sociologist Erving Goffman defines as, “young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and recent record in sports…”[1] While it is obvious that some of these traits carry more weight than others, it is important to note how pointed the ideals society projects on people can be.

Rosser also introduces a compelling defense of integrating women into the field of technology by highlighting Knut Sorenson’s point that “‘women have a care, other-oriented relationship to nature and to people, an integrated, more holistic and less hierarchical world-view, a less competitive way of relating to colleagues and a greater affinity to users’” (Rosser 28). In other words, their particular position of oppression and subordination women with a greater sympathy to how a wider range of institutions may be employed to oppress a wider range of people, which in turn makes them more considerate and capable allies to humanity at large.

While there is still much disagreement about why gender distinctions are so powerful in society, progress towards understanding how they affect different people in different ways is becoming an increasingly important issue to address. Similarly, progress towards understanding how to combat such oppressive power structures is becoming an increasingly relevant lens in which to look at a variety of arenas of everyday life. It seems to me that only by broadening focus in terms of difference and intersectionality will we be able to enfranchise those who don’t satisfy the hegemonic definition of masculinity, or, in other words, most of the people on this planet.