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Comparative Essay

Question - is there a deeper, natural connection between women and technology, particularly between women and software? Does software have a gender?

Selected texts:

   The Future Looms - Sadie Plant
   When Computers Were Women - Jennifer Light

Abstract:

Women have been involved in software, in one form or another, from the beginning. Was their introduction into the technological workforce simply a matter of necessity during the Second World War, or were they always meant to be working with computers? Looking back at examples from Ada Lovelace to the women who worked on the ENIAC computer in the 1940s, this essay looks at the connection between women and technology and whether a deeper meaning can come to light from it.

This essay is meant to compare and discuss two different texts relating to women in computing. Both essays were written by women, and both were published in 1999. The first text considered here is 'When Computers Were Women', by Jennifer Light, an essay discussing women's contribution into the technology world during and after the second World War. The second essay is 'The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics', by Sadie Plant. In this case, the author looks back at the computational icon of the 19th century, Ada Lovelace, and draws the relationship between women and computers through the practice of weaving.

The main thesis of this essay relates to the idea that women and software are somehow interconnected. The two texts take two different approaches to the 'feminine' aspect of software development. One deems it inherent to the female spirit, while the other looks at gendering an occupation, a process that diminished its importance in the eyes of the general public and the media. It is important to note that, even though both texts were written by women, they often present the points of views of the men that were also present in the same context.

To begin with, it should be mentioned that both essays make reference to two real-life examples of women working in technology. Plant focuses her essay on the well-known Ada Lovelace, today an icon of women in computing, who worked with Charles Babbage in the 1800s on his Analytical Engine, a computer that could perform simple calculations. Respectively, the second essay presents the work of women in technology during and after the second World War, particularly on the ENIAC computer, which calculated ballistics trajectories. In both cases, women with great mathematical skills were assigned the software side of the project, while the men were in change with designing and building the hardware. In the case of the ENIAC, a large number of recent female graduates were hired due to the shortages in male workforce. This was a consequence of men being sent to war, a purely practical economical reason for women to replace men in their previous positions. Ada Lovelace, on the other hand, was a highly privileged woman with a natural affinity to mathematics and computing, which led to her involvement with the Analytical Engine. Therefore, we are looking at women from different time periods and contexts, who got involved in technology for very different reasons. Here, we can also highlight an important distinction between the viewpoints of the two essays—the first one looks at the relationship between women and software from a philosophical perspective, the second one focusing on a more material viewpoint.

The idea that software and women are interlaced is developed in both texts, although from very different perspectives. Sadie Plant dives deep into history, looking at how weaving, a very sophisticated and programmatic practice of arranging threads into a particular patters, has always been associated with women. Rather than being dismissed as "women's work", as it is in the case of ENIAC, the importance and complexity of weaving is clearly recognized. Moreover, the design of Babbage's Analytical Engine is based on the design of the first automated loom, which used punch cards to record patterns of weaving, much like the algorithms used in programming. Plant states that, since weaving came so naturally to women throughout history, programming should have the same kind of connection.

In contrast, the programming work women were doing during World War Two, even though just as intricate, was seen as less important than whatever men were working on. The assumption that software simply reproduces the same notions and computations over and over again is clearly meant to suggest that the work that is put into programming is menial and of less importance than that of building hardware. The male engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics considered that doing computational work was a waste of their skills and time, and that these tasks should be assigned to women instead. Thus, women and software both were considered to be working in the service of men, the software being a subordinate of the hardware.

Both weaving and computational work required, then more than now, working in a particular rhythm. Mechanization has generally transformed the natural rhythms in which women were weaving and making calculations by hand, and machines have taken over production in many areas where women used to work manually. When such developments occur, the manual work that came before, and ultimately helped this development take place, is often overlooked. This was the case of ENIAC, whose software was based on, and built through the manual work of women. The machine's achievements were ultimately praised completely independently of all the labour behind it. The software was seen as an invisible layer, hidden inside the physical machine build by the men, working in the interest of the man and his machine. Surprisingly, in the case of Ada, her legacy lived on way further than that of Babbage, through the ADA programming language used by the US Defence Department.

To conclude, it can be said that the two perspectives of the relationship between women and software are extremely different. On one hand, the complexity of software development is inherent to the way in which women have always worked. This viewpoint recognizes the work of women at the level of excellence at which they were performing, as well as the abstract aspect of their work which made it less approachable for men. On the other hand, the repetitive aspect of programming is seen as a form of clerical work with less value than engineering in Light's essay. In this case, "women's work" is no longer considered complex and abstract, but rather menial and unimportant, compared to the work that men were performing, and therefore pushed into anonymity. In both perspectives which look at women's work in software, the work is given a gender, female. I believe the conceptualization of software as weaving is more than a metaphor, but a view based in reality. An example here would be the women working on the Apollo software which was hand-woven to contain all the 0s and 1s necessary for takeoff into space. Dismissing the work of women as simple and repetitive is a gross underestimation of the complexity of the patterns they create. By comparing the two selected essays, the answers remain unclear whether software is inherently female, but one thing that is clear is that the work women have done in the development of software has been grossly overlooked.

Bibliography:

Light, Jennifer S.(1999). When Computers Were Women. Technology and Culture 40(3), pp. 455-483.

Plant, Sadie(1999). The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics. Body and Society 1(3-4), pp. 45-64.

Synopses

The Future Looms by Sadie Plant

The future looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics - Sadie Plant

Sadie Plant begins her paper with the beginnings of women in technology, personified through Ada Lovelace. Plant puts Lovelace at the center of her work, with which 'the histories of computing and women's liberation are first directly woven together'. In fact, only a century after Ada's death did women first make their way into the software scene. As the author beautifully puts it, after the 1940s 'both women and computers begin to escape the isolation they share in the home and office with the establishment of their own networks'. Moreover, these networks of women in computing only began to come together in the 90s, bringing the beginnings of cybernetic feminism. The symbolic thread that bounds together women and computers brings forward the idea that the history of the computer comes from the history of the loom, of weaving. Stories and texts and code and networks are woven just as threads and fabrics, and the future of women and computers 'looms over the patriarchal present'.

Ada's brilliance and commitment to her work shine through in a number of letters and notes written by and about her. She came to know and began to collaborate with Charles Babbage after going to see his Difference Engine in 1833. She often contributed to his work, her work ethic and perseverance far surpassing his. She found her role as wife and mother to be reductive, and would sometimes mention her disinterest in that part of her life. Even though her health was often frail, leading her to be considered, among other things, hysterical (she had cancer), she looked at the inability of her body to be healthy from a philosophical perspective, considering it a peculiar addition to her being, rather than a defect.

The computer as loom

The complex interlacing of threads in a loom relates to the complexity of data that needs to be fed into a computer in order to perform even the simplest of operations. The first automated loom, build by Jacquard in the 19th century, used a system of punch cards that worked as a software which stored the information and allowed only one human to work on the loom. Babbage's Analytical Engine was also inspired by the punch card system, in which the machine would select the cards it needs to perform a certain operation: the first simulation of memory. The first programmable computer to reach the attention of the military was based on Babbage's designs, and programmed by Grace Hopper, the women who wrote the first high-level language compiler.

The connection between women and weaving can be traced back as far as Greek Mythology. As Margaret Meade describes in her study of Tiv women, Weaving was part of the identity of being a woman, as imposed by patriarchal societies. The bodies of women and were deeply connected with the movements of the loom, where the rhythm of a woman's hand dictated the weaving. So, when a woman cannot, or does not have to weave anymore, what does she become? Perhaps, a computer programmer, a weaver of data.

The woman as software

Despite their undisputed importance in the development of humankind, the role of women in history has been largely overlooked. The woman was always the provider for the man, his mirror, his medium, his servant. Ada Lovelace's work started as annotations, translations and elaborations on the work of men, 'Weaving her influence between the lines'. In this sense, the software is also a tool used by the man in his interests. And perhaps there is no wonder that the women's liberation movement has developed interconnected with the growth of software technologies, the latter giving the former a platform to branch out on and create a global network.

Looking at the works of Freud on femininity, of women as merely imitators, and the feminist work of Luce Irigaray, Plant draws a connection to the symbol of the man who denies the materiality of cyberspace, the world behind the veil of pixels, the womb behind the machine, the woman behind the man. The material conceals the immaterial because it is flawed and complicated. Behind the veil, the immaterial continues to evolve and multiply, going further away from man's control, becoming a dangerous woman. She goes further by saying that 'Misogyny and technophobia are equally displays of man's fear of the matrix.' The women, as the immateriality of cybernetics, can no longer be contained. Ada Lovelace's legacy lived on further than the men's she worked with, in the immaterial shape of a software, ADA, hidden deep inside of a military machine.

Conclusion: The connections made by the author between the woman behind the veil and the software behind the computer are fascinating and deeply relevant. They talk about the way history is more than often presented through the eyes of the man, with many less obvious details being concealed or simply forgotten.

After the future: n Hypotheses of Post-Cyber Feminism by Helen Hester

Helen Hester, who is a member of the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks, provides a critical approach to early cyberfeminist theories, while attempting to provide new methods of applying them to today's context.

Hester explores the practices and debates that appeared in the relationship between gender and technology, in the idea that they are still necessary and relevant today, even though taking them for granted is not advisable. Her first criticism of cyberfeminism comes from semantics. Quoting Susanna Paasonen, Hester makes the point that the word 'cyber' is too outdated and unappealing, and cannot be applied to today's 'domestication' of digital use. The term 'cyber' seems to describe a future in the world of technology, as seen three decades ago, and does not have much significance for contemporary technology users.

The work of Sadie Plant, 'Zeros + Ones' in particular, is at the base of this debate. Plant links the development of technology to the introduction of women in the workplace. The typewriter, viewed as a disruptive element in the work field, dominated by a monolith of white, cis males, which allowed women the power to manipulate information through tactile intervention. The women behind the typewriters are compared to a legion of zeros, against the male 'one'. Hester is slightly critical of Plant's insistence on blurring the boundaries between psychoanalysis, labor theories and gender as disruption, while being unable to provide a clear strategy for political action. As Alberto Toscano notes, this work promotes the idea that change can come from individual users of technology, on a micro level, rather that organizing together against the power structures.

A new approach to cyberfeminism includes the desire of creating self-organized networks, online and offline. There is also a tendency towards decentralization and inclusion, which can be translated in cyberfeminists reluctance to agree on a set definiton for the term cyberfeminism. In recent years, a large number of variations on feminist groups have appeared, throughout which one's identification as feminist or as woman is not enough of a link between individuals.

Therefore, the concept of disidentification has been put forward. One of the most significant examples from cyberfeminist approaches is the Old Boys Network's '100 anti-theses of cyberfeminism'. Represented by a list of 100 anti-definitions, the work maps the concept of cyberfeminism through what it is not, rather than what it is. While these anti-definitions are an attempt to break the limits and remove any labels from the movement, it does not offer much clues regarding its direction or purpose, thus preventing a collaborative action that could arise from commonalities between individuals. Refusing to settle for an identity can have a double impact: first, it can provide anyone an entry point into the culture, without implying the need for previous affinities or knowledge; second, it restricts the potential for association based on common interests and values, since it does not offer any indication of these ideas or values in the first place.

To conclude, Hester suggests ways to bring these concepts into a more relevant approach. She claims that, since the political context has largely changed since the end of the 20th century, the approaches also need to change. A suggested method of 'reanimating cyberfeminism for the 21 century' is to take the risk of moving beyond disidentification, and creating instead a definition that does not restrict, but is fluid and invites collaborative practices. She further suggests the creation of 'n hypotheses' as a reconfiguration to the '100 anti-theses', an unlimited series of positive statements that can invite further exploration and political action. She concludes by offering her own version of a definition: 'Xenofeminism is a gender abolitionist, anti-naturalist, technomaterialist form of post-humanism, building upon the insights of cyberfeminism. Its future is unmanned'

Cybernetics and Ghosts by Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino begins his essay from 1967 by describing the beginnings of language. Humans in prehistoric times started using speech to describe their daily activities, establish rules for the community, create relationships within and outside their clan. He imagines the archetype of 'the first storyteller' as the creator of complex language, experimenting with combinations of words, associating words with real objects and beings. From a very limited set of notions available to the prehistoric human, a form of language was created by repeating the same sounds and gestures and adapting them to various contexts. Stories began to emerge through various permutations between the limited activities and characters known to humans.

A more complex version of these proto-stories is represented by folk stories, which every culture has developed in a desire to explain the world and phenomenons that surround them. Russian philologist Vladimir Propp proposed the idea that all folk stories follow the same structure in his work 'Morphology of the Folktale', claiming that 'all such tales were like variants of a single tale, and could be broken down into a number of narrative functions.' This does not mean that international folklore is not incredibly complex, but purely introduces the idea that it is the result of infinite permutations between a finite set of elements passed down through oral history. Claude Levi-Strauss took this idea one step further when working with the folk tales of Brazil, treating these elements through the lens of mathematical processes. The idea that literature can be broken down into functional segments has also been debated within linguistic and literary groups such as Russian formalists, the semiological school of Roland Barthes, as well as Oulipo. The group of French linguists looked as literature as a structure that can be deconstructed into pieces that can be analyzed in relation to the socio-cultural environment in which the work has been created, but also reconstructed almost to infinity by rearranging the pieces.

Since literature can be processed from a mathematical approach, made up of a finite number of elements and their permutations, Calvino starts drawing a connection to computer 'brains' which could potentially do the work of producing literature and be successful at it. He proposes the idea that writers do nothing more than follow the set of rules that they have already tested empirically, which is inevitably based on paths established by previous writers. Writing, in his view, is not a product of divine inspiration, or a talent that cannot be described in terms of logic. This idea dismantles the concept of the author as superior creature gifted with attributes unavailable to the average man. And since the process of writing is no longer idealized, he poses the question of having machines replace poets and authors. This hypothetical machine would be fed information, literature, and produce, in turn, literature. In his view, a perfect literary machine, after being forced to produce classical literature as output, would eventually reprogram itself to produce a much needed human disorder, expressed through avant-garde literature situated at the intersection between culture, language and probability.

In order to further strengthen his arguments, Calvino proposes an opposite view. Literature, instead of conforming to norms of language, is actually striving to free itself from them, in order to express what has previously been hidden, obstructed, concealed. Literature is an expression of the social or individual unconscious. In literary history, every literary current is born from the 'ghosts' of previous conceptions, revealing what was previously hidden, and discovering surprising new concepts in the process, far from our previous ideas of logic and rationality.

The topic of artistic creation as a set of permutations is then developed further, with the example of puns and word-play. Freud seems to have had a particular interest in this area, which only strengthens Calvino's association with the unconscious. The main idea is that word-play is simply a game of combining words in new, unexpected ways, until we reach a funny combination. In this sense, poetry or painting are also the result of countless permutations between words and rhymes, or between colors and brush strokes. Writing, as well, is a process of combining existing syntactical structures and notions, until a deeper meaning can be extracted from the right combination. This meaning could not have been revealed through traditional, rational practices, but is simply a meaning produced by the unconscious. Here, Calvino's two apparently opposing arguments come together to better prove his point. Writing is a game of combinations, a set of rules that is at the base of the work, but the combinations and rules, when arranged in the right order, reveal an unexpected meaning, extracted deep from the unconscious.

The scent of a woman's text - Are women writers really inferior? by Francine Prose

In an article appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1998, Francine Prose takes a critical approach to the alleged differences between female and male writers.

In an age when whatever Oprah Winfrey reads becomes an instant success, Prose looks at the gender imbalance that still, somehow, exists in the literary field. On what literary awards are concerned, the battles are still being fought by a majority of men, even though every year more and more high quality books written by women appear. In the area of non-commercial fiction, critical reviews are essential for a writer to be recognized and, ultimately, sold, and women often suffer from „critical neglect”.

Since statistics show that works by women are less represented than works by men, Prose asks a few questions: „Is fiction by women really worse? Perhaps we simply haven't learned how to read what women write?”. Author Diane Johnson argues that men are not accustomed with the topics that women might write about. Do women and men approach writing differently, or do we, as readers, have different expectations from a written work, based on the gender of its author? Some readers might assume that a work by a female author might not deal with „serious” topics, a claim that Virginia Woolf also refers to in „A room of one's own.”

Even though today most people will deny that they have any gender preconceptions regarding writing, past critics have not been shy to express their opinions on female writers. One such example is Norman Mailer, who famously claimed that he doubts „if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.” Thus, the only stories worth telling by women, in his view, would still be on their experiences with men. Other examples of men generalizing women's writing based mostly on their gender are presented, from Edmund Wilson claiming women writers complain constantly or Bernard Bergonzi's opinion that women novelists „like to keep their focus narrow”. Therefore, it is not much of a surprise that female authors throughout history have hidden their true selves under male pseudonyms, such as George Eliot or the Bronte sisters.

Following a quote from Cynthia Ozick's essay „Previsions of the Demise of the Dancing Dog”, where she presents some texts to students who later claim they can identify a female writer by the style of her „sentimental” writing, Prose gives us her own examples of male and female authored texts, in a blind-taste attempt. She offers examples that turn the assumptions on their head, with male authors with a narrow focus and sentences filled with emotions, to cold, rational paragraphs conceived by women. Another characteristic believed to be specific to female writers is their focus on interiors, family stories and, in general, private topics that care less general than the men who write adventurous works of fiction. Prose quickly destroys this assumption with examples that state the opposite.

Male writers are rarely criticized in the same terms as women. Men authors are often praised for expressing anger or other emotions, for tacking complex plots, focusing their stories in a single location, or spreading their writing in hundreds of pages, while women get criticized for doing the same.

To conclude, Prose imagines a future in which gender will be forgotten, at least in the literary world. Since there is little truth in the assumption that women and men write differently, when authors will no longer be put into gendered categories, writing will simply be good, or bad, regardless of who is behind the words.