Tartu
The final day of CATaC 2006 is upon us, and we're getting started with a session on gender and identity. Marisa D'Mello is the first speaker, focussing on global software organisations in India. How do these firms create an environment for their employees, and how do the workers create an identity for themselves? But what is global software work? It is a form of knowledge work which is highly volatile and dynamic, very diverse in its staffing, location, and project schedules, and it deals with intangible, heterogeneous and mobile products - this creates highly mobile career trajectories for IT workers. (And Marisa worked as an HR manager for such a company herself.)

Typical workspaces are relatively peaceful and quiet, using open office spaces which facilitate teamwork and face-to-face conversations - so trust and relationship building is very important, but this is difficult in an environment where workers stay with the same company for six months on average. Social events (like marathons) are organised to facilitate such team-building. Gender and culture (as socially constructed concepts) are relevant in this context. The IT industry in India is closely intertwined with the global economy, is relatively free from state controls, uses highly educated mobile workers, and has a unique work culture which claims to use meritocratic and gender-neutral policies and management practices.

Notions of professionalism refer to 'ways of being' a worker in this context (global, international, professional), but at the same time, in knowledge work workers are conceptualised as resource, talent, and manpower. This raises questions of belonging and family - often, the company is constructed as 'home' and 'family' in its work policies, but workers' response to this is mixed - while some agree, others take a purely professional approach to their relationship to their workplace. Additionally, in global software work, relational 'soft' skills (empathy, listening) are increasingly emphasised - and these are often associated with women (as bringing a 'female touch'). But this also means that such skills disappear in the daily life - they are marginalised as a domain of female employees. Finally there is also a question of mobility for female employees - it is a measure for gender relations as women's mobility and flexibility remains more limited than that of men.

Gendered Use of Non-Standard Speech in Lithuanian and Croatian IRC

Asta Zelenkauskaite is the next presenter, for a paper with Susan Herring who is connected to us remotely via Skype. Asta begins with a pointer to the differences in which men and women present language - especially also users of online chat systems. This may be in their use of pronouns, and nicknames, for example. Non-standard typing is a general feature of such forms, however - this might be used to save keystrokes or add further expressivity. However, such studies have been done mainly in English language: there is little work elsewhere - and the present study therefore focusses on Internet Relay Chat conversations in Lithuanian and Croatian. While these languages are etymologically unrelated and use Roman script, they also involve some characters which cannot be expressed using basic ASCII letters.

How is non-standard typography distributed across genders in such environments, then? To begin with, gender was identified using nicknames and morphological criteria (in both languages, gender-specific suffixes are used in verbs and/or adjectives, for example). This generated figures on gender representation - and in both languages males were roughly twice as frequently represented as females overall, while at the same time some specific channels female users were more prominent than in others (males were dominant in almost all channels, however).

In terms of typography, two types of non-standard use can be distinguished. Some of it are conditioned by technology (where language-specific characters like š/ž/č cannot be represented and are replaced by workarounds) - and interestingly, the s/z/c variants appear to be preferred by females, while males prefer sh/zh/ch, and this applies across both languages. Non-standard typography can also be voluntary, too - for example to soften words in a kind of 'baby talk' or create other effects like 'cool talk'. Females use fewer conditioned non-standard forms, then, and a greater variety of voluntary variations, especially for 'baby talk'; males tend to focus more on 'cool talk'. This confirms previous findings on gendered CMC use differences from other languages, even though the study focussed on two completely unrelated languages.

Feminist Hacker Ethics

Alison Adam is the third speaker. She notes three types of CMC ethics: a freedom of speech ethics, an egalitarian ethics, and a work ethics in computer-mediated communication. To this, perhaps a feminist ethics needs to be added, to address power differentials and offer an alternative model. An ethical decision maker is traditionally seen as 'coming from nowhere' - but perhaps they need to be situated more specifically in order to address inequalities. This might also feed back more generally into feminist ethics, and make feminist ethics more applicable to science and technology areas.

The job of feminist ethics is to criticise traditional ethics and develop a new ethics which may be more women-centred or at least values more highly the feminine experience. This has been done especially in the area of an ethics of care, has employed an emphasis on emotion and highlighted the key role of mothering that has often been ignored by traditional ethics. But such an ethics is difficult to apply to the sciences and technology.

The critical potential of feminist ethics appears more powerful than the potential for new forms of ethics, but perhaps it needs to look beyond roles such as mothering to take on a much more subversive element. Cyberfeminism might provide this - it stems from the notion of the cyborg as blurring the human/machine boundary and a utopian view of women in control of the Internet, and this also signals a move away from previous technophobic ecofeminist tendencies towards a technophilic cyborg feminism.

An example here is hacker ethics. Hacking can be defined as enthusiast programming and system break-ins, and there is some interest in finding women hackers - these appear to subvert standard hacker ethics to some extent. Such ethics tend to say that 'bogus' criteria like age, race, position do not matter, and that all information should be free, and they follow an any time, any place work ethic. However, this dismisses an important part of people's identities, does nothing to include excluded groups, and assumes that removing physical barriers is enough.

What could a feminist hacker ethic look like? Some female hackers actively campaigned against online pornography, and this might indicate the presence of an ethic of care and emotion, and they are often involved in political campaigns and hacktivism; their technical mastery accords with cyberfeminist aims of being in control and using the Internet to feminist ends.

Overall, though, the lack of engagement of feminist ethics and technoscience is a problem for ethics and technology - but the example of hacker ethics is a start to the application of feminist ethics to science and technology, as well as to the augmentation of care ethics so that women are not always cast in a self-sacrificing role. This may be at least a little, and perhaps a lot, subversive.

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