`There’s a number of ways to approach cyberfeminism, but one of them is to think how different the computer is to any other sort of machine. It is not a single-purpose machine as previous technologies were. Computers don’t just do one thing, they can in principle do anything. They are general purpose and multi-functional systems. In a sense this multi-purposeness is both the advantage and the disadvantage that women have had historically. Women, like computers, have been denied the possibility of having a single role or identity. They too, have had to assume a number of different roles, wear a number of different hats, as mothers, wives, workers and so on, all at the same time. Performing all these various tasks simultaneously is one immediate connection between women and computers, I think.”
Meet Sadie Plant, 31, British cyberfeminist and former lecturer on cultural studies. Her gender-based technophilia began when Plant sat down in front of her first Apple Macintosh computer six years ago. Here at last, she told herself, was a machine that thought like a woman. It was different from the old style computers and word processors she had used to write her doctoral thesis in philosophy. This was a machine that didn’t require a special language or code. It had grinning icons to welcome and pointing fingers to guide her. Most of all, the computer had multiple screens or windows that you could work on simultaneously, a function that reminded her of a patchwork quilt.
Plant felt a connection to the Mac she hadn’t experienced with any other machine. It seemed to think like she did. It wasn’t just user-friendly, it was female-friendly. It was, Plant went on to argue, the most woman-friendly, intuitively designed technology in history.
“During my Ph.D. I had an Amstrad word processor. I don’t even know if that counts as a computer anymore. When I arrived at Birmingham University as a lecturer in cultural studies, I got my Macintosh. That’s when I realized that this computer is a different kind of machine than any other sort of machine I’d ever come across. I remember sitting down at the Mac and finding it so easy to use, so intuitively programmed.
“I think that a lot of women who do get involved with computing realize quite quickly that it’s not as difficult as they may have been brought up to believe,” Plant said. “A lot of women find a very intimate connection with computers.”
From that first encounter with the Mac, Plant became convinced that there was more to the woman-friendliness of the computer than met the eye. Her excitement with the user-friendly technology helped generate new theories about women and computers.
“These new computers just seemed to suggest all sorts of relationships between the way that your brain works and the way that the computer works. I was really fascinated by it. I began to wonder what technology really was. Is it something that’s out there, separate from us, or are we in a more symbiotic relationship with it?”
Over the past six years, first as a lecturer in cultural studies and more recently as the founder of the Center for Research in Cybernetic Culture at Warwick University, Plant has helped develop a new field called cyberfeminism.
“I coined the term myself in about 1992, around the same time as women in Australia started using it too. I think a number of people were starting to realize that there is something of an affinity between women and computers or indeed all new technologies that develop out of computers themselves. The cyberfeminist in the first instance just identifies that new connection.”
Plant pointed out that computer scientists are studying another traditionally female virtue: intuition. “The way in which computers are now developing in the field of artificial intelligence is beginning to take the notion of intuition very seriously. This again is something that has been ascribed to women in the past.”
Plant argued that in more traditional forms of technology intuition took a back seat to logic. With the advances in computer technology scientists are realizing that mere logic is not enough. Understanding the once-denigrated female virtue of intuition is now seen as crucial for any further advance in computer technology.
“Neural networks for example are modeled on the way the brain works, and scientists are interested in how the mind can make lateral, intuitive leaps,” Plant said.
For Plant it’s hardly surprising that computers are so tuned in to the way women think. She said a woman, Ada Lovelace, was one of the pioneers of computer technology. When it came to finding a way to store information, Lovelace, together with her scientist partner Carl Babbidge, took as her model the traditional female trade of weaving.
“The early development of the computer really happened in the 19th Century with Carl Babbidge and Ada Lovelace, who we can call the first computer programmers. Their work predates the actual computer by about 100 years. They worked on a number of calculating or thinking machines, and they drew their research directly from the automated Jacquard loom, one of the first automatic machines of the early Industrial Revolution. The Jacquard loom worked on the basis of punch-card programs that stored information, and that fed into 20th Century computer technology very directly. It’s ironic that Freud tried to denigrate women’s role in society by saying that the only thing that women have invented is weaving. Now it turns out that saying women invented weaving is a big thing because weaving led to the development of both the hardware and the software of the computer.”
The legacy of that computer pioneer was honored by one of the first software programs, called Ada, and, some argue, even in computer parts such as the motherboard.
“Beyond that, certain types of computer programs are often compared to knitting in that you have long strings of information. If you make a mistake in writing a computer program or you have some kind of glitch, it’s very much like dropping a stitch and you have to go back and pick it up.”
As computer technology continues to develop, programmers come up with more analogies to needlecraft. “Computer manufacturers now talk about the newer forms of parallel programming in terms of patchwork. It means you can have a number of different work patches happening at the same time, so it’s less linear than the old way of storing information.”
Plant compared her computer encounters with what she sees as the old-style masculine machines she grew up with.
“I’ve always been interested in machines,” she said. “My dad was an engineer, and he used to buy me Meccano construction sets instead of dolls. He’d make me extra components to add to the set. So I was brought up with machinery, in the old industrial sense of the word. This was of course long before home computing.” Her parents ran a small engineering company in the Midlands in England.
Plant is optimistic that the generation of students that she is now teaching has even less reason to fear technology than she had.
“Men, and to some extent feminism, have conspired to make women believe that technology is something alien and hostile to them. But I think that the new generation of women haven’t grown up with that ideology. And I think that they come to computers very fresh. And it seems that even though there are still big discrepancies in terms of how many women are on internet or girls playing computer games, it seems that the situation is changing very fast. I don’t think computer-literate women will be in the minority for much longer, especially as computers are halving in price every year and also getting much easier to use. A lot of the old barriers are fading away, and cyberspace is becoming more accessible.”
Plant also said cyberspace can offer women the possibility of being in a gender-equal environment.
“I think there is something of a battle going on at the moment. I think that a lot of the existing social relationships do tend to reproduce themselves in cyberspace. They’re not switched off. But on the other hand, I think that an increasing number of women are beginning to say `I’m actually eight foot tall,’ or `I’m an Amazonian and I’ve got a big gun, go away,’ and harass back. I think that’s partly to do with women’s confidence and as women get more confident, then harassment becomes less of a problem. Certainly the 18 year olds I teach have no time at all for the victim mentality.”
