‘Gender in Technology Research’ as Entry Point for Structural Change?

• In Event: Disrupting from the Inside: Towards a Research System Change - II

Abstract

The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (Forschungsfördergesellschaft, FFG) has been funding gender-relevant technology research for ten years. Three outcomes have been named in an evaluation study as desired impact of this funding programme (FEMtech): tying gender to application-oriented research, increasing quality of research, and raising awareness for gender in research organisations (Wroblewski 2016).
Another Austrian research funding scheme with gender-focus (FemPower by ZIT) resulted verifiably in positive career effects for women researchers in life sciences and technology research (Hofstätter & Thaler 2014).
Thus, ‘gender in technology research’ could be assumed as entry point for structural change in research organisations. Beside the obvious bonus that gender research can help winning research grants, including gender in technology research with a ‘mutual shaping approach’ (Rohracher 2006) can produce more robust and user-centred innovation:
“Indeed, feminist research has been at the forefront of more general moves within STS to deconstruct the designer/user divide, and that between production and consumption, emphasising the connectedness of all phases of technological development” (Wajcman 2010, p.149).
However, it is crucial that such a perspective is not reinforcing gender stereotypes (van Oost, 2003), but incorporates the performativity and fluidity of gender (Butler 1993, Landström 2007).
I will present results from interviews and participatory observations from two on-going research projects, a European Union project about gender equality in science and research (‘CHANGE’) and an Austrian FEMtech project (‘VITAPATCH’), to discuss if and how (far) gender research can be used as entry point to realize structural changes in research.

Author

• Anita Thaler, IFZ - Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture