Feminist talk

[COLUMN] Open software movements, open content, free culture: Where are the women?

Posted Tue 18 Apr 2017 - 06:31 | 10,483 views
The gender balance is far from equal even in progressive movements such as the free and open source software community, Mozilla user groups, and others. Despite all the rivers of ink that were written about the gender imbalance in these areas, the changes are slow to arrive.

Feminist talk

[COLUMN] I want to be a Pokémon master

Posted Thu 13 Apr 2017 - 05:18 | 4,157 views
Pokémon exploded as a game that could be played on mobile phones in 2016. Of the many debates around it, Angélica Contreras explores the gendered aspect of videogames and how Pokémon struck a chord with many women in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and parts of Latin America. This article was originally written in Spanish, and is part of a column series that explores young women and their lives…

Feminist talk

[COLUMN] Access and beyond (1): Navigating the gendered cyberspace

Posted Wed 12 Apr 2017 - 05:18 | 5,919 views

In this column series, Chenai Chair explores the barriers to accessing the internet in four countries in Africa - Rwanda, Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya. The study in particular looks at the impact of affordability of internet and subsidised data services, and what impact this has on people in different locations (countries, urban-rural), of different genders, and so on. In the first column,…

Feminist talk

The nerdiest and most open of them all: Internet Freedom Festival 2017

Posted Fri 7 Apr 2017 - 03:51 | 4,247 views
The Internet Freedom Festival is refreshingly different from most forums around internet rights and technology - it is almost equal in gender ratio, welcoming of gender non conforming and trans persons, and takes privacy of its participants at the venue seriously. Smita Vanniyar tells us more about their experience at the festival this year in Valencia, Spain.

Publication

Internet use barriers and user strategies: perspectives from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Rwanda

Posted Tue 28 Mar 2017 - 08:27 | 7,094 views
The introduction of OTT services that replace regular messaging applications in built into a phone, definitely has an impact on internet use. OTT services have become the main entry point to the Internet for most users in the prepaid mobile environment that characterises most African markets. This comparative country study, based on focus groups conducted in November 2016 in Kenya, Nigeria,…

Feminist talk

A Woman Coder's Journey (Women-in-tech)

Posted Thu 23 Feb 2017 - 01:25 | 7,361 views
Judith Owigar speaks about her journey entering into tech spaces, and also about their work with Akirachix in Kenya helping other women along the same journey marked by trials, exclusions and success. While speaking about the barriers of education in science and technology (STEM), she says that what inspires her work in many forums around women in tech in Africa, is that eventually a woman should…

Gender, Labour, Technology

Posted Thu 23 Feb 2017 - 00:27 | 9,818 views

This edition on gender, labour, technology examines how gendered labour is embedded in the making of digital devices in the hardware industries spread across Asia, how inequities of gender and other dynamics of caste, race, ethnicity continue to play a role in allegedly emancipated corporate spaces across the globe, and the disturbing strands of gendered labour of volunteering and managing…

Editorial

[EDITORIAL] The problem of value for “women’s work”

Posted Wed 22 Feb 2017 - 23:11 | 10,420 views

In depth

Feminist autonomous infrastructure in the internet battlefield: From Zombies to Ninjas

Posted Wed 22 Feb 2017 - 08:49 | 23,061 views
The Distributed Denial of Women strike borrows the metaphor of the DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack as a radical and subversive tool by activists, but currently DDOS attacks powered by zombie-bots are part of the anarcho-capitalist economies of the internet. Ganesh in their article unpacks the many levels at which gendered labour is extracted, and while positing feminist autonomous…

Feminist talk

Being Dalit, Doing Corporate (Women-in-tech)

Posted Wed 22 Feb 2017 - 05:09 | 11,074 views
Multinational companies often put in place a policy for diversity and inclusiveness at the workplace, but does this guarantee the everyday, actual practice of accepting people from marginalized communities, and especially women from such communities. In this article, Christina Thomas Dhanaraj, examines what it means to be Dalit in corporate India - the continued invisibilising of caste, sexism…