Gender & Technology
Welcome to our digital exhibit on Gender and Technology. This page is a companion to the physical display in the Harvard Kennedy School Library, available through December 2025. Harvard affiliates can request books via HOLLIS, for pick-up at the library of your choice.
Each year, UN Women hosts the campaign 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. In 2025, the campaign's theme is #NoExcuse for Online Abuse. The UN estimates that 1 in 3 women experience gender-based violence, and 16-58% of women and girls face digital violence. More on the 2025 campaign theme from UN Women:
"Online and digital spaces should empower women and girls. Yet every day, for millions of women and girls, the digital world has become a minefield of harassment, abuse, and control.
What can start small, on screens – a message, a comment, or a post – can quickly spiral into a torrent of threats and violence in real life. Private photos are stolen without consent. Lies spread in a matter of seconds. Locations are tracked. AI is weaponized to create deepfakes designed to shame and silence women." --UN Women.
To foster awareness of these issues at HKS, the books in this display explore the many dimensions of technology-mediated gender violence, the challenges women often face working in the tech sector, and the wide-ranging efforts to make online spaces safer for women and girls.
Acknowledgements
HKS students first envisioned this display, led its curation, and offered key insights at every stage of its creation.
Harvard Resources
- Office for Community Support, Non-Discrimination, Rights and Responsibilities (CSNDR) -- "CSNDR works with the Harvard community to foster an environment free from discrimination, interpersonal violence, and the impacts of such harm."
- SHARE Confidential Support -- Confidential support services for Harvard community members who have experienced gender-based harm, as well as those supporting others and those who may have caused harm.
- Local Title IX Resource Coordinators -- Those with specialized experience at each Harvard school in responding to disclosures of sexual harassment and other sexual misconduct.
Harvard Library Research Guides
Book List
Click on the circular "i" icons to view book descriptions. Click on the Harvard shield icons to access ebooks (HarvardKey required).
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Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy
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This book argues that the rampant hate-filled attacks against women online are best understood as patterned resistance to women’s political voice and visibility. This abuse and harassment coalesces into an often-unrecognized form of gender inequality that constrains women’s use of digital public spaces, much as the pervasive threat of sexual intimidation and violence constrain women’s freedom and comfort in physical public spaces. What’s more, the abuse exacerbates inequality among women, those from racial, ethnic, religious, and/or other minority groups, are disproportionately targeted. Drawing on in-depth interviews with women who have been on the receiving end of digital hate, Credible Threat shows that the onslaught of epithets and stereotypes, rape threats, and unsolicited commentary about their physical appearance and sexual desirability come at great professional, personal, and psychological costs for the women targeted—and also with underexplored societal level costs that demand attention. When effective, identity-based attacks undermine women’s contributions to public discourse, create a climate of self-censorship, and at times, push women out of digital publics altogether. Given the uneven distribution of toxicity, those women whose voices are already most underrepresented (e.g., women in male-dominated fields, those from historically undervalued groups) are particularly at risk. In the end, identity-based attacks online erode civil liberties, diminish public discourse, limit the knowledge we have to inform policy and electoral decision making, and teach all women that activism and public service are unappealing, high-risk endeavors to be avoided.
ISBN: 9780190089306Publication Date: 2019 -
Criminalizing Intimate Image Abuse: A Comparative Perspective
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Intimate image abuse is a recent, endemic phenomenon which raises multiple legal issues and presents a significant challenge for the traditional institutions of law and criminal justice. The nature of this phenomenon requires considering the traditional complexities of regulating privacy, sexual offences, and cybercrimes, alongside the social and cultural issue of what may be considered 'intimate', 'private', or indeed 'sexual'. Since the harm experienced by victims of intimate image abuse is particularly serious and involves disparate legal interests, criminal law has been invoked as one of the solutions, but it is unclear what its role and limits should be. The law's approach should avoid any moralistic attitude, trying to achieve a balance between sexual autonomy and the protection of sexual privacy. At the same time, the needs of criminalization must be balanced with the traditional principles of criminal law. Criminalizing Intimate Image Abuse strives primarily to generate new conceptual and theoretical frameworks to address the legal responses to this phenomenon, by bringing together a number of scholars involved in the study of intimate image abuse over recent years. This volume compares the solutions developed in different legal systems. The perspective is mainly focused on the comparison between the Anglo-American criminalization model and that of continental Europe, but there are also overviews of the criminalization trends in Asian and Latin American countries. Once the criminalization of intimate image abuse, as well as its theoretical and practical limits, have been established, the analysis focuses on possible new legal strategies, complementary or alternative to traditional criminal justice, such as restorative justice. Finally, in order to achieve an effective safeguard for victim-survivors, the book deals with the role of Internet Service Providers and bystanders in preventing intimate image abuse.
ISBN: 9780198877813Publication Date: 2024 -
The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
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This book offers a critical analysis of the contemporary and global tech culture and exposes the gender bias of masculine tech ideology and stereotypes. Is the place of 'women in tech' immovable from masculine leadership practices? And what are the cultural, social, personal and economic consequences of gender as a point of difference in the context of work in the tech sector? Mariann Hardey examines the rise of entrepreneurial work and leadership, the contemporary urban setting of global tech work, and specifically women's place in tech clusters. The book engages with attempts by women to establish and then sustain their professional status and long-term careers, despite predatory social media trolling and inappropriate sexualized behaviour. Based on a series of commentaries from research undertaken by the author about workers located within 'tech cities' in the UK, USA and East Asia regions, the work exposes the serious problem of women's position in the industry. While this study continues to be critical of the conceits of masculine tech ideology, prejudices and stereotypes, the work contributes to recent calls to help find solutions and ways forward.
ISBN: 9781789734263Publication Date: 2019 -
Cyberfeminism and Gender Violence in Social Media
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Cyberfeminism and Gender Violence in Social Media is a timely and essential book that addresses the increasing violence against women on social media platforms. With the rise of digitalization and the advent of social media, women have been subjected to various forms of violence such as cyberbullying, trolling, and body shaming. This volume compiles research works on the topic of how women fall prey to social networking sites and possible remedial actions to prevent such issues. The book provides an interdisciplinary approach, making it relevant to a wide range of fields such as social science, humanities, technology, and management. It creates awareness among people, especially women, about the prospects of cybersecurity and its impact on their wellness. This book enriches readers about the impact of social media on the general public and how cyber security education can make people more aware of their security and well-being while online. This book is ideal for researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in new and innovative techniques for the safety of people irrespective of their gender. It is a significant contribution to the ongoing conversation on women's rights and violence against them in the digital age.
ISBN: 9781668488959Publication Date: 2023 -
Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations
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This groundbreaking book argues that the fundamental issues around how victim-survivors of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSVs) are abused can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics, constructions, positioning and logics. The book builds upon Hall and Hearn's previous work, Revenge Pornography, but has been substantially reworked to examine other forms of DGSV such as upskirting and sexual deepfakes, as well as the latest research and debates in the field. Facilitated by developments in internet and mobile technologies, the non-consensual posting of real or fake sexually explicit images of others for revenge, entertainment, homosocial status or political leverage has become a global phenomenon. Using discourse and thematic analytical approaches, this text examines digital, survey and interview data on gendered sexual violences, abuses, and violations. The words of both the perpetrators and victim-survivors are presented, showing the impact on victim-survivors and the complex ways in which phallocentric power relations and existing hegemonic masculinities are reinforced and invoked by perpetrators to position girls and women as gendered and sexualised commodities to be traded, admired, violated or abused for the needs of individual men or groups of men. Hall, Hearn and Lewis explore their research in a broader social and political context, evaluating and suggesting changes to existing legislative frameworks, education, victim support, and practical and policy interventions against DGSV, along with wider political considerations. This is a unique resource for students, academics and researchers as well as professionals dealing with issues around digital gender-sexual violations.
ISBN: 9781003138273Publication Date: 2022 -
Digital Technologies and Gendered Realities
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The book explores the varying experiences and engagement of youth with smartphones and digital technologies in India and South Africa. It examines the process of meaning-making (identity construction) garnered through smartphone technology - specifically relating to notions of love, sex, and sexuality.
ISBN: 9780367479695Publication Date: 2024 -
Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the Internet Era
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In chapters examining a broad range of issues--including sexuality, politics, education, race, gender relations, the environment and social protest movements--Digitized Lives argues that making sense of digitized culture means looking past the glossy surface of techno gear to ask deeper questions about how we can utilize technology to create a more socially, politically and economically just world. This second edition includes important updates on mobile and social media, examining how new platforms and devices have altered how we interact with digital technologies in an allegedly 'post-truth' era.
ISBN: 9781138309548Publication Date: 2019 -
Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies
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This volume explores urgent questions surrounding the bidirectional relationship between feminist philosophy and emerging technologies. It underlines the exigency of feminist philosophical reflections on the design, use, and understanding of emerging technologies and at the same time accentuates how emerging technologies can uniquely impact the shape of future feminist critique and intervention.
While feminist philosophers have attended to problems posed by a few specific technologies that emerged in the previous century—especially reproductive technologies—broader philosophical questions concerning the challenges various new technologies present to feminism have yet to receive the sustained, critical attention they deserve. Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies responds to this problem. It is divided into two sections. Section 1 provides theoretical considerations about the links between feminist philosophy and philosophy of technology (broadly construed) by developing—against the background of emerging technologies—methodological approaches and guidance for bringing those two fields of philosophical research together. Section 2 is dedicated to analyses of specific emerging technologies and user trends, their relation to extant structures of oppression, and to bringing to the fore various ways in which a feminist philosophy of technology can impact the design of current and future technologies.
Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies is an excellent resource for scholars and advanced students working in feminist philosophy, philosophy of technology, ethics, political philosophy, feminist theory, gender and cultural studies, and science and technology studies.
ISBN: 9781003275992Publication Date: 2024 -
Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture
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Gamers have been troublemakers as long as games have existed. As our popular understanding of "gamer" shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. In Gamer Trouble, Amanda Phillips excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that difference gets baked into its technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems. By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal and Mass Effect, Phillips adds essential analytical tools to our conversations about video games. She embraces the trouble that attends disciplinary crossroads, linking the violent hate speech of trolls and the representational practices marginalizing people of color, women, and queers in entertainment media to the dehumanizing logic undergirding computation and the optimization strategies of gameplay. From the microcosmic level of electricity and flicks of a thumb to the grand stages of identity politics and global capitalism, wherever gamers find themselves, gamer trouble follows. As reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world.
ISBN: 9781479870103Publication Date: 2020 -
Geek Girls: Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley
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Why is being a computer "geek" still perceived to be a masculine occupation? Why do men continue to greatly outnumber women in the high-technology industry? Since 2014, a growing number of employment discrimination lawsuits has called attention to a persistent pattern of gender discrimination in the tech world. Much has been written about the industry's failure to adequately address gender and racial inequalities, yet rarely have we gotten an intimate look inside these companies. In Geek Girls, France Winddance Twine provides the first book by a sociologist that "lifts the Silicon veil" to provide firsthand accounts of inequality and opportunity in the tech ecosystem. This work draws on close to a hundred interviews with male and female technology workers of diverse racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds who are currently employed at tech firms such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and at various start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. Geek Girls captures what it is like to work as a technically skilled woman in Silicon Valley. With a sharp eye for detail and compelling testimonials from industry insiders, Twine shows how the technology industry remains rigged against women, and especially Black, Latinx, and Native American women from working class backgrounds. From recruitment and hiring practices that give priority to those with family, friends, and classmates employed in the industry, to social and educational segregation, to academic prestige hierarchies, Twine reveals how women are blocked from entering this industry. Women who do not belong to the dominant ethnic groups in the industry are denied employment opportunities, and even actively pushed out, despite their technical skills and qualifications. While the technology firms strongly embrace the rhetoric of diversity and oppose discrimination in the workplace, Twine argues that closed social networks and routine hiring practices described by employees reinforce the status quo and reproduce inequality. The myth of meritocracy and gender stereotypes operate in tandem to produce a culture where the use of race-, color-, and power-evasive language makes it difficult for individuals to name the micro-aggressions and forms of discrimination that they experience. Twine offers concrete insights into how the technology industry can address ongoing racial and gender disparities, create more transparency and empower women from underrepresented groups, who continued to be denied opportunities.
ISBN: 9781479803828Publication Date: 2022 -
Gender, Technology and Violence
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Technological developments move at lightening pace and can bring with them new possibilities for social harm. This book brings together original empirical and theoretical work examining how digital technologies both create and sustain various forms of gendered violence and provide platforms for resistance and criminal justice intervention. This edited collection is organised around two key themes of facilitation and resistance, with an emphasis through the whole collection on the development of a gendered interrogation of contemporary practices of technologically-enabled or enhanced practices of violence. Addressing a broad range of criminological issues such as intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, online sexual harassment, gendered political violence, online culture, cyberbullying, and human trafficking, and including a critical examination of the broader issue of feminist 'digilantism' and resistance to online sexual harassment, this book examines the ways in which new and emerging technologies facilitate new platforms for gendered violence as well as offering both formal and informal opportunities to prevent and/or respond to gendered violence.
ISBN: 9781138217232Publication Date: 2017 -
Gender and Innovation in the New Economy: Women, Identity, and Creative Work
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This book provides a thorough and novel examination of the gendered nature of innovations in the new economy. It tracks the contemporary shift from heavy industry to game industry and how this has altered relationships between gender, identity, corporate culture, creative work, and the future of business. Through empirical research and theoretical analysis, the authors present their own carefully contextualized cases and conceptual frameworks relating themes of innovation and gender to recent theories concerning globalization and transnationalism. This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary text provides readers with insightful entries on what innovations are and the ways innovation processes become gendered. It explores the business landscape based on creative work and offers a wealth of information for scholars of entrepreneurship, management, sociology, cultural studies, and communication.
ISBN: 9781137527004Publication Date: 2017 -
Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online
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Cybersexism is rampant and can exact an astonishingly high cost. In some cases, the final result is suicide. Bullying, stalking, and trolling are just the beginning. Extreme examples such as GamerGate get publicized, but otherwise the online abuse of women is largely underreported. Haters combines a history of online sexism with suggestions for solutions. Using current events and the latest available research into cybersexism, Bailey Poland questions the motivations behind cybersexist activities and explores methods to reduce footprints of Internet misogyny, drawing parallels between online and offline abuse. By exploring the cases of Alyssa Funke, Rehtaeh Parsons, Audrie Pott, Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and others, and her personal experiences with sexism, Poland develops a compelling method of combating sexism online.
ISBN: 9781612347660Publication Date: 2016 -
How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back
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When Nina Jankowicz's first book on online disinformation was profiled in The New Yorker last year, she expected attention but not an avalanche of abuse and harassment, predominantly from men, online. All women in politics, journalism and academia now face untold levels of harassment and abuse in online spaces. Together with the world's leading extremism researchers, Jankowicz wrote one of the definitive reports on this troubling phenomenon. Drawing on rigorous research into the treatment of Kamala Harris - the first woman vice-president - and other political and public figures, Nina also uses on her own experiences to provide a step-by-step plan for dealing with harassment, abuse, doxing and disinformation in online spaces. The result is a must-read for researchers, journalists and all women with a profile in the online space.
ISBN: 9781350267602Publication Date: 2022 -
Internet and Gender in Kazakhstan: A Decolonial Perspective on Women's Roles in the Digital Age
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This book offers an empirically rich and theoretically compelling analysis of how the Internet is influencing societal attitudes towards women's roles and agency in Kazakhstan. It will be of interest to media studies, women's rights, LGBTQ+, feminist activism, gender-based violence, and Central Asian Studies.
ISBN: 9781032744667Publication Date: 2024 -
It's a Man's World (Wide Web): A Critical Analysis of Online Misogyny and Hate Speech
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Abusive posts on social media target women engaged in online conversation with words and images that affirm patriarchal ideologies and fixed gender identities, to maintain cyberspace as a man's world. This book investigates online misogyny as a pervasive yet little-researched form of hate speech. By focusing on six cases of cyber harassment directed at women in Australia, Italy, and the United States, this qualitative analysis reveals specific discursive strategies along with patterns of escalation and mobbing that often intertwine gender-based harassment with racism, homotransphobia, xenophobia, and ageism. The author provides a taxonomy of negative impacts on targets that integrates findings across cases and indicates pathways from hate speech to harms. The study suggests an urgent need for effective measures against the threat posed by misogynistic hate speech to individuals and to an open, respectful forum for online communication.
ISBN: 9788869236136Publication Date: 2020 -
Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology, and Harassment
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Mediating Misogyny is a collection of original academic essays that foregrounds the intersection of gender, technology, and media. Framed and informed by feminist theory, the book offers empirical research and nuanced theoretical analysis about the gender-based harassment women experience both online and offline. The contributors of this volume provide information on the ways feminist activists are using digital tools to combat harassment, raise awareness, and organize for social and political change across the globe. Lastly, the book provides practical resources and tips to help students, educators, institutions, and researchers stop online harassment.
ISBN: 9783319729169Publication Date: 2018 -
Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History
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Misogyny Online explores the worldwide phenomenon of gendered cyberhate as a significant discourse which has been overlooked and marginalised. The rapid growth of the internet has led to numerous opportunities and benefits; however, the architecture of the cybersphere offers users unprecedented opportunities to engage in hate speech. A leading international researcher in this field, Emma A. Jane weaves together data and theory from multiple disciplines and expresses her findings in a style that is engaging, witty and powerful. Misogyny Online is an important read for students and faculty members alike across the social sciences and humanities.
ISBN: 9781473916005Publication Date: 2017 -
More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech
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When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch-it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. The word "glitch" implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery-what if they're coded into the system itself? In the vein of heavy hitters such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Cathy O'Neil, and Ruha Benjamin, Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More Than a Glitch how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable. Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples- from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences. Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as "other" to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.
ISBN: 9780262047654Publication Date: 2023 -
The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny
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Misogyny is being hardwired into our future. Can we stop it? We like to believe we're moving closer to equality, riding the wave of technological progress into a brighter, fairer future. But beneath the glossy surface of innovation lies a chilling truth: new technologies are not just failing to solve age-old inequalities--they're deepening them. In The New Age of Sexism, acclaimed author and activist Laura Bates exposes how misogyny is being coded into the very fabric of our future. From the biases embedded in artificial intelligence to the alarming rise of sex robots and the toxic dynamics of the metaverse, Bates takes readers on a shocking journey into a world where technology is weaponized against women. This isn't a dystopian warning about what might happen. It's a harrowing account of what's happening now and the dangers we face if we don't act. With clarity and urgency, Bates reveals how these advancements are dragging society backward, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, and jeopardizing decades of progress in the fight for gender equality. Eye-opening and empowering, The New Age of Sexism is a rallying cry for awareness and action in a world where the battle for equality has entered a dangerous new frontier.
ISBN: 9781464234361Publication Date: 2025 -
New Digital Feminist Interventions: Speaking Up, Talking Back
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This volume proposes “speaking up” and “talking back” as new theoretical access points for studying feminist activism in digital spaces. Drawing on the influential work of bell hooks, it highlights social justice interventions by feminist/queer/decolonial actors, groups, and collectives who recover the digital as a space for activist organizing and campaigning. In presenting a variety of sociocultural issues, such as gender violence, queer discrimination, or migrant hostility, the book centers empowerment practices in their digital forms, showcasing interventions in Asia, Europe, and the Americas—thereby critically examining the conditions for marginalized voices to speak up, talk back, and be heard in digital publics. In focusing on activist practices, formats, experiences, and scholarship, the contributions analyze many facets of digital feminist contention, including resistance storytelling, hashtag activism, grassroots journalism, or diaspora podcasting.
ISBN: 9781003492412Publication Date: 2025 -
Sexual Harassment Online: Shaming and Silencing Women in the Digital Age
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Women who use social media are often subjected to blatant sexual harassment, facing everything from name calling to threats of violence. Aside from being disturbing, what does this abuse tell us about gender and sexual norms? And can we use the Internet to resist, even transform, destructive misogynistic norms? Exploring the language of shaming and silencing women in the cybersphere, Tania Levey addresses these questions and also considers how online attempts to regulate women's behavior intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, and class.
ISBN: 9781626376953Publication Date: 2018 -
Sexual Violence in a Digital Age
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This book examines how digital communications technologies have transformed modern societies, with profound effects both for everyday life, and for everyday crimes. Sexual violence, which is recognized globally as a significant human rights problem, has likewise changed in the digital age. Through an investigation into our increasingly and ever-normalised digital lives, this study analyses the rise of technology-facilitated sexual assault, 'revenge pornography', online sexual harassment and gender-based hate speech. Drawing on ground-breaking research into the nature and extent of technology-facilitated forms of sexual violence and harassment, the authors explore the reach of these harms, the experiences of victims, the views of service providers and law enforcement bodies, as well as the implications for law, justice and resistance. Sexual Violence in a Digital Age is compelling reading for scholars, activists, and policymakers who seek to understand how technology is implicated in sexual violence, and what needs to be done to address sexual violence in a digital age.
ISBN: 9781137580467Publication Date: 2017 -
Technology and Equality
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We live in a world of rapidly growing gaps between rich and poor. In the rich parts of the world, new resource-consuming devices are launched every year. But at the same time, about a fourth of the world's population does not have access to clean drinking water, and more than half lack safely managed sanitation. What role does technology have in these growing global inequalities? Is technological development the root cause of inequality? Or is the unequal distribution of technology just a mirror of social inequities that have other causes? And can new technologies be instrumental in making the world less unfair? In Technology and Equality, these issues are addressed from a wide range of perspectives by scholars in disciplines such as history, sociology, gender studies, anthropology, economics, law, ethics, and philosophy. Case studies highlight technology-related inequalities for instance in climate mitigation, public transport, access to water, waste management, sanitation, air pollution, healthcare, digital communication, and law enforcement. The more theoretical chapters provide tools and concepts that are helpful for analyzing and understanding the relationships between technology and inequality in other applications and in more general perspectives.
ISBN: 9781538184998Publication Date: 2025 -
Time to Reboot: Feminism in the Algorithm Age
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Technology is radically transforming society. From social media to artificial intelligence, our world is now governed by algorithms, powerful tools that not only predict human behaviour but affect how we look at each other, and ourselves. At the same time, we are seeing hard-fought-for women's rights being recontested and women feeling increasingly threatened. In America, Roe v Wade has been overturned, while in Australia, the number of sexual assaults reported to police has increased year on year for the past decade. Could it be that the digital revolution is killing feminism? Time to Reboot explores the new digital gender divide. It shows how the algorithms favoured by Big Tech, designed to respond to and reinforce group characteristics, are dramatically recasting our relationships and our personal values. AI trained on biased data is generating a new wave of male privilege, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant. In the 2020s, the 'virtual rape' of female players in online gaming is rarely commented on, while feminist values are in record decline among a younger generation swayed by an online ethos that promotes tech libertarianism and rewards the obsessive cultivation of self-image. This book unpacks the uncomfortable parallels between a digital and tech consumer culture we find impossible to resist and the nascent decline of gender equity. It questions whether the technology that is meant to both guide us today and show us the future is, in fact, pushing women backwards--and if so, how we can fix this.
ISBN: 9781922979490Publication Date: 2024 -
Your Computer Is on Fire
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Technology scholars declare an emergency- attention must be paid to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm- we can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism, or even techno-neutrality. We should not be reassured by such soothing generalities as "human error," "virtual reality," or "the cloud." We need to realize that nothing is virtual- everything that "happens online," "virtually," or "autonomously" happens offline first, and often involves human beings whose labor is deliberately kept invisible. Everything is IRL. In Your Computer Is on Fire, technology scholars train a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.
ISBN: 9780262539739Publication Date: 2021
