There is a very annoying perception in society that women don’t “do” technology. Look at a picture of an app designer, a welder, an aircraft engineer or a rocket scientist, and you are probably looking at a man. That is irritating, but I think it is only half the problem. The other half is that we do not ever think of women’s activities as technology, even when that is exactly what they are.
“Technology,” as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is the practical application of knowledge, especially in a particular area, and a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods or knowledge. Men do not have a monopoly on working out how to use the available tools to do something practical, either in current society or historically.
Ada Lovelace, whose work in the 19th century inspired the first modern computer, and whose life is celebrated every year on Ada Lovelace Day, which takes place next week, is a worthy role model. Yet there are so many more closer to home.
DOMESTIC TECHNOLOGIES
My Polish grandmother had a Singer treadle-powered machine, built into a small wooden table with decorative legs. I loved it because it was mechanical and you could see how it worked. I have it now and I like it for the same reasons that I like massive steam engines. It is ingenious. I know how to sew and I like making things out of fabric. That is ingenious, too.
It was years before I realized that most of society put loving the mechanics and loving the sewing in different categories. Mechanics involves levers and wheels and gears, and everyone knows that is technical. However, sewing is associated with women, and so it mysteriously and quietly slides out from under the umbrella of technology and slinks off into obscurity.
Next time you are doing your laundry or tidying your coat rack, have a proper look at how your clothes are made. This is technology in action. The cloth must be cut in the right orientation relative to its threads, so that it hangs and stretches correctly. Flat pieces of cloth must be fitted together to make an object that fits a three-dimensional moving person. Fabric can be joined together with different stitches that do different jobs. And then all that construction work is hidden away, so that it is never the first thing you notice.
Labeling these practical activities as “male” or “female” is purely cultural. It has got nothing to do with the skills necessary to do the job. As I saw the technical skills involved and not the cultural implications, I never worried about whether something was for “boys” or “girls.”
WELDING MADE EASY
The women in history who made an impact in all-male fields were also typically in a position where they did not have to worry much about what other people thought. Lovelace, the daughter of a famous poet and clever mother who went on to marry an earl, came from a privileged background that exposed her to the new mathematical ideas of the day. She could do what she liked, so she did. My grandmother could sew and so can I, but I have also been free to pursue a career as a physicist, an opportunity she did not have as a woman in the 1940s.
If you look back through history, you will see that many of the tasks traditionally done by women are technological. Earlier this year, I had to learn how to arc weld while filming a BBC program about the sun. The old-school professional welder in Arizona who taught me was astonished that I learned so quickly and even more astonished when I explained that this was because it was almost exactly like icing a cake. The pose you adopt is the same (left hand closer to the nozzle, right elbow high up in the air), the method of controlling the speed of either icing or welding metal is the same (squeezing) and the overall aim is the same: depositing a thin stream of liquid in a controlled manner. One might involve slightly more molten metal at 3,000C° and slightly less sugar, but they are essentially indistinguishable.
EXAMPLES ‘IN PLAIN SIGHT’
We do not have such a large barrier to overcome here; we have got the track record to prove that we can do this. We just have not seen it that way. History is full of examples hidden in plain sight. It is not just the female “computers” who did the calculations that helped break the Enigma code, or the seamstresses who made NASA’s first spacesuits. Sewing, knitting, cooking and jewelry-making should logically be labeled as technology.
Did anyone else notice that the appearance of the male celebrity chef coincided with
the appearance of kitchen mixers and blenders made of brushed steel? The machine is the same, but when you make it out of an industrial-looking material, it is suddenly easier for a man to own the kitchen. This is about appearance, not substance. We all eat food. There is no reason why one gender should be better than the other when it comes to preparing it.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs