Technology Matters

Introduction

Society is shaped by technology as technology is shaped by society [1]. Sometimes it shows up in obvious places like our speech patterns and movement. Imagine trying to explain doom-scrolling to a time traveller as you flicked through your feed on a high-speed train. Even if that time traveller appeared from the recent past, those phrases and movements would seem abnormal and untrustworthy. The mutual shaping also shows up in less obvious places like in time and perception. Whether it was an attempt to explain your use of it or how you divided up your day between work and not-work, this would also appear bizarre to your seatmate.

What we come to take on as normal and true is shaped by the society in which we live, learn, and evolve.

A piece of the confirmation equation that a thought or an action is normal comes from a knowledge source. Most obviously, it’s (mostly still) agreed that formal education received at universities and similar post-secondary places of learning is a true and normal source to find knowledge. Less obvious sources of knowledge are found in the spaces where the fog rolls in, places like ‘feeling’ something is true or right because we’ve grown so used to looking at one version. This is also where a lot of conflation happens where generational wealth or financial gains are lumped together with knowledge across different areas. This is the space where we’re experiencing an unfortunate outbreak of epistemic trespassing [2] - that is, when an expert in one field speaks with authority in another while lacking sufficient training or study for such authority.

So, if technology plays a role in shaping our society, what role then does it play in shaping our acceptance of knowledge? Why does it matter?

Power matters

Nearly two decades ago, Shoshana Zuboff explained the importance of identifying “the source of power that undergirds the authority to share or withhold knowledge,” [3]. Her book on surveillance capitalism as an omnipresent digital architecture remains a good fit for our current struggles against threats to autonomy, privacy, and institutions. The technologies have changed but the underlying architecture has not. How we decide, societally, who ‘knows’ relies on the authority of the decider. To apply this practically, pretend you are going to pay someone to do something – put in a new set of windows, be your therapist, draw up your will – how do you decide they ‘know’? You need some sort of paper from some sort of authority to give you the assurance that the required knowledge exists in that person.

Why, then, do we trust the pieces of paper and the institution of authority? Hopefully, we trust them because they demonstrate some version of standardisation we agree is an appropriate reflection of knowledge. But then things start getting foggy again, because as Zuboff and so many other thinkers remind us, power and knowledge are locked into a complicated relationship. In fact, if we skip the arguments over translations, it might be useful to apply Foucault’s le dispositif [4] to form a visual of the interconnectedness between the various components that make up the apparatus (translated below as ‘dispositive’) of knowledge/power. Here, it functions as

a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble, consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural planning, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic proportions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the dispositive. The dispositive itself is the network that can be established between these elements. [4, 5]

Imagine the network between things like discourses, institutions, laws, scientific statements and morals – and consider my example in the introduction. How does technology currently function to shape the relationship between those things? Is it a distant, objective, detached entity ferrying messages to and fro? What role does technology itself play in the deciding stage of knowledge? For a very overt example, consider an algorithm as you answer this question.

I told you it was a complicated relationship.

Gender matters

My opening assertion was that society shapes technology as technology shapes society. Within society, there are expectations and norms (i.e., what we ‘ought’ to do) which inform what comes to feel normal and, much of the time, natural to us. This takes on many forms, including in the work we commit our time and energy to each year. As technologies evolve in our workplaces, the site of our labour – along with the extraction of its value – occupies an interesting multi-dimensional position. The people who are developing the technologies are disproportionately male, limiting the diversity of design in a way that will not match the diversity of end user.

It’s difficult to report exact numbers since many of the big tech companies stopped publishing their gender and racial representation numbers a few years ago [6]. Google did report in 2024 that only 33.8% of its US employees were women. This number hasn’t changed much since 2022 and is only slightly higher than the 2014 report of 29.0% [7]. The numbers don’t fare much better elsewhere around the world. In a recent study examining why women leave the IT profession, researchers looked at 2,578 female IT professionals from 36 countries and found a significant gender gap. They reported that 45% of women leave within five years compared to only 17% of men. The reasons identified included work overload, work-home conflict, and job insecurity create different levels of work exhaustion and job dissatisfaction [8].

Along the production chain, women are missing from the design and decision-making as technologies continue to be increasingly used in our work lives. Going back to Foucault’s dispositif, can we say that women are well represented in the other elements he listed? Perhaps if institutions of policy, laws, and philosophy were reflective of the societies they serve, things will be okay. Alas, no. It’s more often the case that spaces we like to consider neutral are deeply gendered. In everyday organisational life we encounter inequalities and power imbalances profoundly shaped by gender [9]. Sometimes this looks like a C-suite filled with men, and sometimes this looks like decisions learning to city design being unsafe for women. The underlying, however, remains the same – society continues to be disproportionately shaped by men. Increasingly, the ramifications of as much are showing up as reliance (passive or required) on AI tools increases.

Society matters

As this lack of voice, representation, and general input from half the population is missing from something we’re more reliant upon as the financial quarters tick by, something is being determined in the void, as well. With a mechanized tool that functions based on equations and statistical modelling, we like to soothe ourselves with stories of objectivity. Bias is, after all, a deeply human failure that surely goes away once you rid yourself of the human element, right? Given part of the acronym AI represents intelligence, you’d be forgiven for accepting its product as a form of knowledge, possibly even expertise. It is hopeful and understandable to want something as straightforward as an immediate answer-giving machine to trust in when faced with so many problems. All the more so in work settings where employees are often asked to do-more-with-less each year. It’s important to remind ourselves that the work we do permeates beyond the cubicle dividers and conference room walls into other layers of life, one way or another.

Society shapes technology as technology shapes society. Gender norms play a role in shaping society, too. As technologies increase their power in society through infrastructure embedded in everyday lives at work, at play, and in the repetitive tasks of staying alive – how is this power then reinforcing knowledge? When knowledge is assumed, trusted, and accepted because a source of power has given it the authority required, how quickly do we get to a society that reflects technology? And what does that look like? Maybe it looks like what we have now - a dearth of critical thinking; a conflation of expertise and personal opinion; a male-as-neutral template for measurement; complete dependence on invisible and exploitative labour hidden behind a word cloud suggesting otherwise. Whatever we desire of our society depends on the knowledge we recognise, the authority we entrust, and the power we permit to exist in our technology.

Works Cited

[1] Kelan, E. (2025). Patterns of inclusion: How Gender Matters for Automation, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work.

[2] Ballantyne, N. (2019). Epistemic Trespassing, Mind, Volume 128, Issue 510, Pages 367–395, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzx042

[3] Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs, p. 180.

[4] Foucault, M. (*1977b): “Le jeu de Michel Foucault”, in: Foucault, Michel (1994): Dits et écrits. Paris Gallimard.

[5] Foucault, M. (1977) "The Confession of the Flesh", Interview in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon, 194–228. New York, Pantheon Books, 1980.

[6] Dave, P. (2025, November 7). Google, Microsoft, and Meta have stopped publishing workforce diversity data. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/google-microsoft-and-meta-have-stopped-publishing-workforce-diversity-data/

[7] https://about.google/company-info/reports/? - click on the year and search for ‘Diversity Report’

[8] Palvia, P., Cooper, V., & Kakhki, M. D. (2026). The flight of women from the information technology profession: Nuances and global perspectives. Information & Management, 63(3), Article 104299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2025.104299

[9] Bates, T. (2026). Organizations, jobs and gender: Joan Acker’s Theory in Practice. Taylor & Francis.