Bringing Women's Voices into the Dialogue on Technology Policy and Globalization in Asia

This article documents an innovative research project 'Monitoring the Impact of Technological Changes in Women's Employment in the Asian Region'. Initiated in 1994 by the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies (UNU/INTECH), the project sought to democratise the dialogue around technological changes and globalization by bringing together NGOs active among women workers, academic researchers and policy makers. It was guided by the assumption that those affected by the impact of new technologies should play a major part in making and implementing policy. Women workers, for example, should be able to lay claim to the knowledge which circulates through international organizations, while national and international policy makers stand to gain by listening directly to groups such as these who frequently are excluded from the benefits of globalized technological changes. Twenty-eight trade union and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worked alongside experienced researchers, covering eight countries and holding a series of both country-based and international workshops. The first research project to attempt direct inter-communication on such an extensive scale, 'Monitoring the Impact of Technological Changes in Women's Employment in the Asian Region' shifted the debate on gender and technology onto the terrain of the actual problems and possibilities currently faced by women workers rather than adopting positions for or against technology. The collaborative research process highlights several priority areas of policy dialogue which have been neglected and indicate ways of organizing which could secure better conditions of work. The evidence uncoveredandthe concerns expressedraise fundamental questions about whose interests and values are shaping the emerging techno-economic paradigm.