Here is the first in a series of extracts from award-winning journalist Tracey Spicer’s book, Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future
My latest mission is to switch from Uber to female-run transport in the form of Shebah. The drivers are women, many of whom pick up a few extra dollars during school hours. On paper, this business ticks all the boxes. But there are simply not enough people using the service. It’s tough to get a car when you need it, especially at the last minute. Still, it’s incumbent upon us to support these efforts, to break the stranglehold of the homogenised tech titans. If not us, then who? And if not now, when?
Put your money where your mouth is: collective action is the only way forward. It’s well and truly time to bankroll tech companies run by women and people from marginalised populations. Australian tech company Canva – a global goliath – is led by co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins. Entrepreneur Shivani Gopal is the brains behind the app ELLADEX, which mentors, educates and guides women to grow their wealth. A proponent of ‘tech for good’, Gopal plans to start her own cryptocurrency.
Cheryl Bailey leads Indigenous Technology, an IT company 100 per cent owned and operated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Take a look at the Superstars of STEM website to find women like Natalie Chapman from gemaker, a trailblazer in the sciences who’s been fighting the good fight for decades.
Despite announcing a review into diversity in STEM, the federal government has committed no new funding for women in tech programs, according to co-founder of the Girl Geek Academy, Sarah Moran. Let’s support organisations like the Academy, which offer workshops, courses and scholarships to ‘girl geeks’.
Obviously, targeting individuals isn’t enough to create lasting change. Sometimes I yearn for a return to the consciousness-raising days of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. During that era, discrimination was endemic: a wallpaper of misogyny. Women often attributed their circumstances to personal failings rather than wider structural issues.
Gathering in groups in homes, parks and halls, they realised they were not alone.
A similar truth-telling occurred during the Me Too movement, started by Tarana Burke in 2006 before being popularised as a hashtag in 2017. Joining together is an effective way to lobby for lasting change. Grassroots protest and legislative reform are responsible for the great achievements of the civil rights movement, action on climate change and every wave of feminism since the nineteenth century.
Dealing with big hairy issues like intersectional discrimination in artificial intelligence can seem overwhelming. This is frontier feminism.
You can buy Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future, here
Readers can also buy a signed copy via this link: https://traceyspicer.com.au/signedbook
