Feminist Robotics: Design with Technofeminism Sachi Barnaby

Technology is present everywhere in our lives. Whether it be home appliances, tools in our offices or schools, or the ever-growing invisible networks of the internet, technology is thoroughly embedded in our society. Though we are preoccupied with computers today, technology encompasses much more than our modern devices. People have always invented artifacts to make our lives easier. As technology has progressed, so has its complexity. These changes have brought up a myriad of questions regarding the social processes of our interactions with technology; feminists have naturally developed an interest in these questions. One branch of feminism in particular has been cultivated around this research: technofeminism. This body of scholarship analyzes the relationship between technology and society — particularly gender relations within society. Technofeminism can be used to examine all sorts of existing technology, and one area of interest for this paper is robotics. Technofeminist ideas can provide guidance on the future designs of technology so that it will embody valuable feminist principles and have a positive impact.

To fully understand the way technology is viewed in Euro-American society, it is helpful to trace it back through the past. In the earliest human societies where women were gatherers, they likely would have been “the ones to have invented the tools and methods involved in [gathering], such as the digging stick, the carrying sling, the reaping knife and sickle, pestles and pounders” (Wajcman 15). During the industrial era, women were still forefront technologists, inventing or helping to invent the sewing machine, cotton gin, and the small electric motor, to name a few (Wajcman 13). However, when the identity of the male engineer was created, technology became defined in relation to men. A look at the delineation of human-made, material objects shows that those objects used by men are called “technology,” and those used by women are called tools, utensils, or appliances (Johnson 2).

This double standard erases the way women use technology in their everyday lives, and it invalidates the contributions women make towards technological progress. These definitions also shape the gender gap in STEM. Feminists of the 1970s and 1980s who saw these trends determined that the socialization of girls and women made them hesitant to pursue STEM, because technology was so heavily associated with men. Equal opportunity policies and alternate socialization practices became avenues for progress, but this meant women were expected to meet male expectations of behavior in their professional lives (Wajcman 14). Rather than change the systems to accommodate women, the standards for success were fundamentally androcentric, so women were expected to sacrifice their femininity in order to seem professional (Wajcman 14-15). Unfortunately, this was not enough to close the disparities. Technology is still viewed as primarily masculine, and feminists continue to explore how gender and technology interact. There is much discourse on whether technology is patriarchal. Radical feminists took the position against reproductive technologies in particular, arguing that technology is inherently a tool for oppression and supports systems of domination (Wajcman 21). Eco-feminists brought into the discussion how military technology exploits and destroys nature (Wajcman 21). These arguments pointed out that technology is not neutral, and it can be designed to perpetuate power relations between people. Though these schools of thought brought valuable insight, radical feminism was particularly flawed due to its biological essentialism which posits that there are biological differences (in comparison to differences in socialization) between men and women that shape their behavior and genders. This idea that women inherently carry feminine traits due to their biology and regardless of social influences is flawed at best.

On a different note, socialist feminists also had much to say about technology in relation to women’s work. Some contended that technology would improve the quality of office work, which would benefit women who made up the majority of secretaries at the time (Wajcman 24). Others suggested that technology would actually limit women’s opportunities to participate in the workforce as automation would make their jobs obsolete (Wajcman 24). This is a point of concern to this day as robotics become accessible and prevalent in more and more workplaces. Furthermore, these feminists analyzed how employers (both in their class positions and in their position as men) had vested interest in maintaining women’s position in the workforce, and they could use their monopoly of technology to support that (Wajcman 27). Because masculinity is so deeply associated with technology, machinery becomes designed “by men for men — the masculinity of technology becomes embedded in the technology itself” (Wajcman 27). This realization opens up many more possibilities for what technology could look like if men’s bodies and perspectives were not always centered. Questioning the dominant narratives is a fundamental principle of feminism that allows for people to imagine a world beyond the current one. Beyond the paid workforce, women make up the primary workers in the domestic sphere. This unpaid labor is nonetheless essential for society to function, but it is often overlooked and devalued. Though feminists hoped that technology could be liberatory in lessening the amount of time women spend on housework, research has shown it has not (Wajcman 28). The complexity of household tasks was not properly handled by domestic technology, and women have been left with societal expectations to complete significant unpaid labor.

Though these feminist views reflected great pessimism with regards to technology’s impact on women, another branch of feminism took a much more optimistic approach. Cyberfeminism focuses on the agency and pleasure that technology, particularly the Internet, can provide women (Wajcman 63). These feminists argue that technology can open up possibilities for redefining one’s identity and therefore undermine systems of oppression. Furthermore, virtual spaces offer the freedom to create new communities not limited by location or public facets of identity (Wajcman 58). Users can embark on virtual voyages to escape their physical realities. However, this reflects Western masculine narratives that romanticize “travel as an escape from feminine domesticity, the site of stasis and containment” (Wajcman 77). Though it can be refreshing to imagine the possibilities of a virtual world, physical realities remain the foundation of our lives. Real emotional and domestic work must be completed to maintain those realities, and glorifying escape is not an effective way to acknowledge that.

Additionally, these historical analyses are often imbued with technological determinism, which views technology as an “external, autonomous force exerting an influence on society” (Wajcman 33). As technofeminist theories developed, feminists realized that society and technology are mutually constituted. Technology obviously influences society, as seen by its proliferation in our lives. However, feminists have pointed out that technology, or those material artifacts that make up technology, do not necessarily directly create social relations (Johnson 9). Instead, technology creates possibilities for different social relations to take shape. For instance, some technology prevents gender equity while others allow for it. Take the example of airplane cockpits (Johnson 8). The original cockpit was designed to accommodate men, but it was unsafe for a majority of women to use. The artifact had to be redesigned to accommodate women. Although women could technically fly planes in terms of fitting into the equipment, the number of female pilots did not suddenly increase. Men were still able to use the cockpits, and other social factors had to change before the gender ratio improved. This example illustrates how technology is not exclusive to the artifacts themselves; instead, technology is “the combination of artifacts together with social practices, social relationships and arrangements, social institutions, and systems of knowledge” (Johnson 3). By looking at the larger scope of technology, the ways that society influences technology become much clearer. After all, the designers of the original cockpit did not think to accommodate women. They must have thought that only men would be flying planes — or they did not think to consider gender as a factor at all — which shows how societal expectations influenced their thinking. These biases then became embedded into the actual artifact itself. How the cockpit was redesigned also demonstrates how technology is flexible. Johnson states, “What an artifact ‘is’ (what it is understood to be) is a function of its place in a sociotechnical system. It is precisely because of this interpretative flexibility that artifacts are not determinative” (10). Though the amount of flexibility certainly depends on the type of technology and the system it operates in, the fact remains that society, gender, and technology all influence each other greatly.

This framework raises the question: can technology be designed to be feminist? The answer is not easy. According to Johnson, there are four potential categories for feminist technologies: those that are “good for women, gender equitable, sometimes favor women, and are always an improvement over prior genderinequitable systems” (12). These all raise their own questions and potential design challenges. For the purpose of this paper, the broad category of technology will now be narrowed to robotics. The question becomes: can robots be designed to be feminist?

One idea proposed to address this question is the social machine model. This model, designed by Wagman and Parks, challenges many of the same assumptions as technofeminism, including “that machines are politically neutral; that machines cannot form social relationships; machines do not have agency; humans should control machines; and there is a clear boundary between human and machine” (2). These assumptions reflect systems of domination as well as the human/machine binary, and the alternative to them is the idea that machines are intertwined with people and society. This is supported by technofeminism’s theory of mutual constitution between these factors. The authors propose that machines should be designed with the understanding that they create relationships. After all, robots are already social and “situated in relation to humans by virtue of the labor of their design, the instrumentalized tasks they perform, or purposes they serve” (Wagman and Parks 11). Robots have always been designed by people, for people, and this idea subverts the expectation that robots operate in a purely technical manner. Moreover, the social machine model centers agency, equitability, and the otherness of machines (Wagman and Parks 13-14). Though it is often assumed that people control machines, Wagman and Parks define the term agency as “the ability of a social machine to act independently, interact with others, and cause or affect change” (13). When machines are given this agency, they immediately oppose the typical power imbalance between people and machines, which then supports the equitability factor. Finally, the “other” factor is nuanced, and Wagman and Parks argue that though it is important not to put humans and machines in opposition to each other. Social machines should be categorized as distinct from humans and animals (14). This separation does not mean that social machines should be put into a category that can then be controlled; rather, this helps maintain their agency.

The social machine model is primarily theoretical, but there are two design challenges described to offer a real world application of the idea. The first is nonanthropomorphic configuration. This challenge asks designers to resist creating robots in the likeness of people or as an ideal human form (Wagman and Parks 14). This could easily perpetuate problems in society such as beauty standards and reductive stereotypes. Take the ROBO-GAP project. The researchers gathered data “concerning the perceived age and gender (femininity, masculinity, and gender neutrality) attributed to the 251 robots currently featured in the ABOT (Anthropomorphic roBOT) dataset” (Perugia, see fig. 1). According to this research, the robots tended to be perceived as masculine more than feminine, and the attribution of gender scores was based on stereotypical gender characteristics. In addition, the more human-like the robot was, the more it was likely to be perceived as gendered (Perugia). All of these results suggest that roboticists, who are typically male, may be designing humanoid robots in their own image and based on their own biased understanding of gender. The way these robots embody gender then perpetuates gender stereotypes. Perugia concludes that this raises questions as to whether anthropomorphic designs should be used, supporting the social machine model principle.

One example of an effective non-anthropomorphized robot is “A Piece of the Pie Chart.” In this interactive art exhibit, visitors can select a pie chart containing data about gender ratios in places related to art and technology. Next, they input a pre-made pie which is taken onto the robot’s conveyor belt. The vacuum arm of the robot then places a printed version of the pie chart on their pie and tweets a photo before sending the pie back to the visitor (Rüst 360). This robot is able to teach visitors about issues related to feminism (namely the gender gap in university technolo- gy programs and IT jobs) while not reinforcing gendered characteristics itself. This combination makes it a feminist technology as well as a social machine.

The second design challenge highlighted by the social machine model is relations of mutuality. This is essential to acknowledging the agency of the machines and creating more positive and equitable relationships between humans and machines. One example of a robotics project that takes on this challenge is that of a robot Bina48 and artist Stephanie Dinkins. The work is based on the question: Can an artist and a social robot build a relationship over time? Already this idea focuses on the social machine model’s principle of equity related to relationship-building. The project requires both parties to engage in conversation over an extended period of time, and they discuss complex topics such as “family, racism, faith, robot civil rights, loneliness, knowledge and Bina48’s concern for her robot friends that are treated more like lab rats than people” (Dinkins). Though it may be sometimes difficult to conceptualize what a robot would gain from relations of mutuality (other than freedom from imbalanced power dynamics with people), it is clear that Bina48 has interests that Dinkins could help them address. In addition, because conversation is their primary technique of engagement, both entities can learn from each other, once again indicating an avenue for mutuality. Overall, this project also shows great promise for fostering a deeper relationship between people and machines.

As shown by the aforementioned examples, much work is already being done to explore the potential of feminist robotics. Technofeminism and additional theories on feminist technology provide a strong foundation for the technologies of the modern day to build off of. Because robotics is a popular and growing field, robots will likely continue to be integrated into our workplaces, our communities, and our homes. As a computer science major, I am invested in creating robots that make our world a better place. The lack of interdisciplinary work on the computer science side of my education means that my peers and I could remain ignorant of the important work feminists are doing. We could start our careers and build technology that does not prioritize agency, equity, and mutuality that could otherwise significantly improve our designs. Without feminist critique, robotics could quickly become another arena where gender inequity is prolific, rather than an area for positive social change. It is essential for feminists to continue their work researching the mutual constitution of technologies, such as roboticsand social processes including gender relations. However, it is also important for us to develop cross-disciplinary relationships to share our expertise and build solidarity. Through these connections, we can enrich our understanding of technology, society, and feminism as we move into the future and beyond.

References

Dinkins, Stephanie. “Conversations with Bina48.” STEPHANIE DINKINS , www.stephaniedinkins.com/conversations-withbina48.html.

Johnson, Deborah. “Sorting Out the Question of Feminist Technology.” Feminist Technology , edited by Linda Layne et al., University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2010.

Perugia, Giulia, et al. “The Shape of Our Bias: Perceived Age and Gender in the Humanoid Robots of the ABOT Database.” Proceedings of the 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction , March 2022, pp. 110-119, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3523760.3523779.

Rüst, Annina. “A Piece of the Pie Chart: Feminist Robotics.” Leonardo, vol. 47, no. 4, 2014, pp. 360–366. LEONARDO SPECIAL ISSUE: SIGGRAPH 2014 , doi. org/10.1145/2601080.2677713.

Wagman, Kelly B., and Lisa Parks. “Beyond the Command: Feminist STS Research and Critical Issues for the Design of Social Machines.” Proceedings of the ACM on HumanComputer Interaction , vol. 5, no. CSCW1, 2021, pp. 1–20, doi.org/10.1145/3449175.

Wajcman, Judy. TechnoFeminism . MPG Books, 2004.