41 Misogynistic Technology: How Contemporary Technology Supports Sexism and Endangers Wome

Keywords: self harm, misogyny

The culture and products of the tech industry have been manipulated or designed to perpetuate violence against women. The outcome of misogyny in our modern tech industry comes from a plethora of areas; from the fraternity effect that comes from a lack of diversity within a given professional field, to how men and women are socialized to see women as lesser (Barker, Scheele, 2019), to the broader sociological structures of rape culture. Within the confines of this op-ed, I hope to show the worrying effect that our modern technological world has on reinforcing and perpetuating misogyny within the 21st century.

Through examining both the culture within the tech industry as well as the applications that they create I hope to better understand how misogyny becomes reproduced through such technology. To begin let’s examine a popular application made by the corporation Meta. The application Facebook perpetuate profit driven abuse to young women and girls that directly cause mental and physical harm (Wells, et al., 2021). This gender based societal violence is especially noteworthy within Facebook, and other applications owned by Meta. As pointed out by Adrian Daub (2021) in his work How sexism is coded into the Tech Industry, the current system of algorithmically based systems, and user created data pools relies heavily on the unpaid and unregulated labour of countless millions of individuals, who all reflect the socialisation of and social structures of our contemporary society. Within these user created databases, any biases such as transphobia, misogyny or homophobia can be recreated through these systems. Within these algorithms, Meta and its products such as Facebook and Instagram create a traumatising and continued attack on every one of their user’s mental health, especially the mental health of women. For example, a regular aspect to Metas applications is how the algorithms regularly perpetuate toxic thought specifically tailored to its female demographics; be it promoting body dysmorphia, self-harm or other types of content that is damaging to women’s self-esteem (Wells, et al. 2021).

There are also specific and separate ways that Meta perpetuates gendered discrimination within the nonbinary and non-gender conforming communities that use its platform. In regard to this very issue of, Facebook’s history of failing communities within the LGBTQIA+ communities Bivens, (2017) states that

[T]he issue at hand is not supplying advertisers and marketers with better data about gender. Since corporate data collection comes with serious risks, including surveillance of marginalized populations, our efforts should not be geared toward creating more “authentic” and “real” data sets by programming more inclusive (and granular) categories on surface or deep software levels. Facebook’s attempt to ally with trans and gender non-conforming communities resulted in programming practices that actively misgender them. This misgendering reinforces hegemonic regimes of gender control that perpetuate the violence and discrimination disproportionately faced by these communities. The capacity for software to invisibly enact this symbolic violence by burying it deep in the software’s core is the most pressing issue to attend to. (Bivens, 2017, P. 323)

The production of applications that Meta has created are incredibly troubling when it comes to how they negatively affect young people’s mental health, specifically young women and girls (Wells, et al., 2021). The negative mental health effects are even more daunting when looked at through a lens of intersectionality, where women of countless intersections of operation within our white supremacist, heteronormative, misogynistic capitalism must deal with overlapping operations in relation to the negative mental health outcomes of Meta’s products (Wells, et al., 2021). The denigration of female users’ mental health which Meta is fully aware of is simply the largest example of gendered based violence that the corporation exhibits. This is on top of issues of child trafficking and political and hate related harassment that regularly target women within Metas applications (Wells, et al., 2021). “The documents also show that Facebook has made minimal efforts to address these issues and plays them down in public (Wells, et al., 2021, What Facebook knows, para 2)”. This mental health crisis of women (that relates to countless other gender-based crises) that Meta has helped to profit from is directly related to how tech companies utilise already tangible aspects to societal misogyny to increase profits (Wells, et al., 2021).

Similar to all the other large tech companies investigated within this op-ed, the Taxi like service, Uber has also consistently been shown to create a toxic work environment for women (Masters, 2017). Reports of a toxic work environment and regular sexual harassment from upper management, came early on for Uber (Masters, 2017). Uber has done more than create a sexist working condition for its office staff, the actual applications that Uber creates have been utilised countless times for stalking and harassment purposes.

You might assume that having untrained drivers who are heavily incentivized into working long hours often late into the night would lead to the largest public safety issues being that of vehicle related deaths, but in actuality by far the largest threat to the public that Uber poses is that of sexual violence to both customers and drivers. “The most striking statistic — almost 6000 incidences of sexual assault.17 The sexual assault figures reflect both Uber riders and Uber drivers as victims1 (Turnball, 2022 p.279)”. Within these same safety statistics fatal car accidents only make up 97 total fatalities within the same time frame (Turnball, 2022). Making sexual assault 61 times more likely to happen to drivers and passengers in an Uber than a fatal car accident (Turnball, 2022). I’m sure we are all aware that these statistics on sexual assault are guaranteed to be drastically under reported, especially when the rapist may have knowledge of where you live. The statistic of 6000 assaults does not even begin to show the true nature of Ubers applications and their disregard for women’s safety. This statistic does not cover any sexual harassment which also plagues the ride sharing industry (Wall, 2022).

This staggering sexual assault statistic is the living embodiment of our current misogynistic tech industry, where frat culture is allowed to run rampant, thus creating a product that does not care about women’s safety. These applications (like many in the tech industry) fail to create protections against harassment as well as failing employees when they do come forwards (Turnball, 2022). Simple solutions, such as optionally matching female drivers to female riders as pointed out by Wall (2022) could create safer usage for both groups of women. Additionally, having further safeguards such as background checks for drivers would create a safer environment for passengers. All of these obvious answers to passenger and driver safety that Uber refuses to implement would slightly undercut the quarterly profits for the company, so we are unlikely to see them implemented anytime soon.

The capability of misogynistic violence against women to be perpetuated by large tech companies applies outside of the world of the internet and the practices of online sexism. A specific example would be the creation of Apple’s new air tags (Matei, 2021). A device that could easily and discreetly track anything, be it your car or your child’s backpack (which came in handy for my family when my 5 year old nephew decided to get on the bus with his school friend and ended up in Maple Bay). But the air tags were immediately utilised for stalking behaviour against women upon their release (Matei, 2021). Apple has since tried to address this glaring misogynistic application of their product by letting customers who own an iPhone be notified of the presence of an air tag. This still does not address the fact that most humans do not own an iPhone (Matei, 2021). This real-world technological innovation fails to properly address how it can be utilised for the advancement of misogynistic violence. A direct product of the fraternity styled leadership within the tech world, where men (usually white and straight men) fail to realise how communities that lack their privileges might be drastically harmed by their actions. This same principle of being able to track someone’s whereabouts, can be seen throughout Silicon Valley. The worst example in line with that of Apple air tags would be that of the app Snapchat and its Snap Map, which utilises location settings to track your friends in real time and know exactly where someone is.

Cyber sexism has real, noticeable, and usually devastating repercussions on the safety and security of women and girls (The Economist, 2019). Additionally, online misogyny violates the rights of women and girls to equality and freedom from discrimination. It also contributes to the normalization of violence against women within our culture. More specifically this violence is disproportionally normalised within different internet cultures leading to misogynistic violence becoming extremely normalised in some radical corners of the internet. (Kirkpatrick, 2017). “In America, women hold just 25% of jobs in computing, and leave the tech and engineering sectors at twice the rate of men (The Economist, 2019 para 1)”. Similar statistics exist throughout the Western world showing the degradation that women face within the tech sector. This exploitation of women within tech is particularly noteworthy within the confines of the video game sector.

There are problems of misogyny in countless industries from around the world but the workplaces within the video game industry are literally a cesspool of misogynistic corporations that refuse to change leadership, hire women and promote them to prominent roles, or address their blatant misogyny in any meaningful way. The worst example of this in recent months comes from one of the largest production companies in the industry, Activision Blizzard. Activision Blizzard was recently investigated by the California Attorney General and had massive fines levied against them for their disgusting and dehumanising work culture.

[As reported by the New York Times] In one case, the lawsuit said, a female employee died by suicide during a business trip, as a result of her sexual relationship with her male supervisor. Before her death, male colleagues allegedly shared explicit photos of the woman, the lawsuit said (Browning, 2021, Para 5).

This case study of Activision Blizzard shows us the scope at which current workplace harassment exists within the field of tech. Activision Blizzard is one of the single largest producers of video games, with some of the fields largest products, having the two top selling games of 2020 in the U.S.(as reported by GameStop, 2021) and are known for some of the largest franchises in gaming such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. This abuse and attack of female staff within the video game industry is as mainstream and as systemic as any abuse can be. We can clearly see that today’s heads of industry have been socialized for decades into a system of toxic masculinity, one that exists on countless levels of different tech industries.

In Graeme Kirkpatrick, (2017) work How gaming became sexist they examine how video games culture developed between 1981 and 1995, which showcases video game culture before and after its sexist transformation.

Gaming culture was formed at this time, but it did not inherit the sexist values of the pre-

existing technical culture. It was in the context of establishing itself as a discrete realm

within and against the technical milieu that gaming acquired an idea of itself as avowedly masculine (conclusion para 2).

Within my own life I have come face to face with the conceptual idea of “video games being for boys only” that gaming is a section carved out for heteronormative version of masculinity and that gamers and gamer culture can be vitriolic towards women and oppressed minorities.

Something else that sets Silicon Valley apart is the entrenched belief among the powerbrokers that they are not only changing the world but changing the world “for the better.” That confidence creates a sense of moral exceptionalism and arrogance that distances Silicon Valley from real-world people and problems. In fact, the tech industry faces many of the same issues that other industries face with sexism, racism and ageism, but is blind to it, which means there is even less of an urgency to change Silicon Valley itself for the better (quoted by Emily Chang in the Economist, para 6 of interview, 2019).

It is incredibly important for sociologists to recognize the need to research how technology drives our society and opens up different avenues of understanding within any given milieu. I believe that the current conglomeration of massive tech giants is incentivizing the continued sexism within our society.

In 2014, information concerning Google’s hiring practices of women and people within the BIPOC community became public (Mundy, 2019). The statistics were staggeringly awful. Soon after, other large tech corporations “including LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, eBay, and Apple [followed suit releasing their own numbers] (Mundy, 2019, para 15)”. Despite the dismal results, the businesses have now pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars enhancing the working conditions of these marginalised employees (Mundy, 2019).

This shows us how progress is made through placing operations and practices of marginalisation into the light; it allows these practices to slowly be dismantled. The money that these tech monopolies are putting into better hiring practices won’t end the misogyny of the online world and in my opinion will likely not raise the diversity of the upper echelons of these corporations by much, but it will help to slowly weed out the most blatant aspects of the fraternity-based culture that exists within these tech giants. Over time with these misogynistic cultures dissipating, true change will slowly come to these tech giants, who will be pressured to make changes to address the poisonous misogyny that they help to fester online.

There is no simple answer to fixing the misogyny within our contemporary tech industry. It is an issue that has been growing for decades and may take decades to undo. As a start, having women throughout corporate entities, especially within the higher echelons of leadership, will begin to unravel the frat house style of management that has filled the tech industry with the fumes of toxic masculinity for decades. Additionally recognizing the fact that these tech companies remain profitable through supporting violence against women is key to creating the necessity for new corporations that work to end these principals of violence, thus undercutting the profitability of these misogynistic corporations.

Bibliography

Barker, M.-J., & Scheele, J. (2019). Gender: A graphic guide. Icon Books, Limited.

Bivens, R. (2017). “The gender binary will not be deprogrammed: Ten years of coding gender on Facebook.” New Media & Society; 19(6)880-898, ©. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.

Browning, K. (2021). Activision Blizzard is sued by California over workplace culture. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/business/activision-blizzard-california-lawsuit.html#:~:text=The%20lawsuit%20says%20women%20at,a%20culture%20of%20sexual%20harassment.

Daub, A. (2021). How sexism is coded into the Tech Industry. The Nation, from https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gender-silicon-valley

Kirkpatrick, G. (2017). How gaming became sexist: a study of UK gaming magazines 1981–1995. Media, Culture & Society, 39(4), 453–468. https://doi-org.ezproxy.viu.ca/10.1177/0163443716646177

Makuch, E. (2021). Top-selling games and consoles of 2020 revealed for the US. GameSpot. Retrieved from https://www.gamespot.com/articles/top-selling-games-and-consoles-of-2020-revealed-for-the-us/1100-6486361/

Masters, B. (2017). gets Online criticism on sexism under Uber’s skin. FT. Com, https://ezproxy.viu.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/online-criticism-on-sexism-gets-under-ubers-skin/docview/1881018397/se-2

Matei, A. (2022). ‘I was just really scared’: Apple AirTags lead to stalking complaints. The

Guardian. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/apple-airtags-stalking-complaints-technology

Mundy, L. (2019,). Why is Silicon Valley so awful to women? The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/

The Economist. (2019). The vile experiences of women in Tech. The Economist. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/05/03/the-vile-experiences-of-women-in-tech

Turnbull, A (2022) “Onlife Harms: Uber and Sexual Violence”19:2 CJLT 277.

Walls, A. (2022). Women working for apps like uber and doordash often ‘brush off’ harassment. UBC News. Retrieved from https://news.ubc.ca/2022/05/05/women-working-for-apps-like-uber-and-doordash-often-brush-off-harassment/

Wells, G., Horwitz, J., & Seetharaman, D. (2021, September 14). Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739