Feminist IT eXchange

FIX Vienna #1
7th March 2025

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Feminist IT eXchange

FIX Vienna #1, 7th March 2025



Slides are here:

https://tantemalkah.at/2025/feminist-it-exchange

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under a Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 4.0 International License.
The feminist technoscience logo on the waiting queue slide is an adaptation of a public domain image.

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Schedule

  • 18:00 ★ Arrival and open chatting
  • 18:30 ★ Overview over feminist initiatives related to IT
  • 18:45 ★ Facilitated collection of ideas
  • 19:45 ★ Outlook
  • 20:00 – 21:00 ★ Informal chatting and mingling

Overview

About feminism:

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.

— Marie Shear

And who it is for:

Feminism is for everybody.

— bell hooks

Feminisms

Rosser, Sue V. 2001. “Are There Feminist Methodologies Appropriate for the Natural Sciences and Do They Make a Difference?” In The Gender and Science Reader, edited by Muriel Lederman and Ingrid Bartsch, 123–44. Routledge.

There are a lot of feminisms out there, e.g. liberal feminism, marxist-feminism, socialist feminism and African-American feminism, essentialist feminism, existentialist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, radical feminism, lesbian separatism, etc. but the important point is:

"all feminist theory posits gender as a significant characteristic that interacts with other characteristics, such as race and class, to structure relationships between individuals, within groups, and within society as a whole. However, using the lens of gender to view the world results in diverse images or theories" (Rosser 2001, p. 126)

... in IT / computer science

Evans, Claire Lisa. 2018. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. New York, New York: Portfolio/ Penguin.

“Female mental labor was the original information technology, and women elevated the rudimentary operation of computing machines into an art called programming. They gave language to the box.” (p.3)

“Computer science has always marginalized people that are interested in users“ (Cathy Marshall, interviewed by the author, p.165)

“We had this big raging debate about: Is the Internet about information or is it about community? And I’m looking at this whole argument, going, duh. Both. At a certain level of intensity in an either/or argument, the fact that it has reached that intensity is the indicator that the right answer is and.” (Naomi Pearce, interviewed by the author, p. 208)

awesome-tech-feminism

Collection

  • Sociogramme:
    • your name
    • your current main work/content focus
    • other meetups/community contexts related to IT and/or feminism, you are part of
    • other meetups related to IT and/or feminism, you are organising
  • Post-it clustering:
    • who should participate?
    • how often would i want to be there?
    • which topics should we discuss?
  • Open discussion on forms and formats

Outlook

  • Observers share
    • which topics sparked most discussion
    • the more neglected topics
    • possible next steps
  • Closing Sociogramme:
    • how likely would you attend more feminist it exchanges?
    • how much would you like to (help) organise further exchanges?