Traveling Inequalities: A Feminist Analysis of Aspirational Technologies in Women-Empowerment Programs

• In Event: Technology, Inequality, and Social Justice - II

Abstract

United Nations has recently announced that efforts to end the gender digital divide and to achieve gender equality (Sustainable Development Goal 5) are mutually reinforcing. They define the gender digital divide as involving two kinds of disparity: a disparity of access (use) to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and a disparity of participation (making) in ICT education, employment and other socioeconomic pursuits.

In this paper, I explore the politics of "aspirational technologies” that are embedded in international development programs using technology to empower women. I analyze two case-studies of transnational women-empowerment efforts situated in rural India using data from immersive ethnographic research done as a participant and an interviewer. This paper brings into conversation three kinds of literature, socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff,) feminist ethnographies of development in Global South (Ramberg, Hodžić, Ahmed,) and the recent discussion of aspirations-based design of technologies in Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) (Toyama, Kumar,). Through the case studies, I begin to articulate how aspirations of gender-equality travel internationally (between countries in the Global South) and locally (urban to rural) to shape the idea of women-empowerment and its relationship with technology. Each of these cases speak to the different registers of gender digital divide – one to access and use of technology by women, and the other to participation of women in making technology. Instead of presenting a story from a critical-distance (Latour,) I present stories of both feminist sisterhood (Visweswaran) and the logics of empowerment (Sharma) that become salient through different technologies used in gender-equality efforts in rural India.

Author

• Palashi Vaghela, Cornell University