From Women to Gender and Diversity: Working Group 9.8: Gender, Diversity, and ICT

In this chapter, we look carefully into the genealogy and formation of WG 9.8: Gender, Diversity, and ICT. In our inquiry, we have looked into proceedings available online and via university libraries, read yearly reports from the working group, and reached out to prior participants who have played a part in forming and consolidating the working group by way of organizing the Work and Computerization (WWC) conference. The WG 9.8 has, since its early formation in the beginning of the 1980s, been concerned about women’s experiences and conditions in relation to an automated and digitalized working life. This focus has prevailed in the lifespan of the working group and has been accompanied by other foci, such as gender and power relations. Thus, in unfolding the history of the working group, we come across technological phenomena and theoretical concepts that are still in use and/or are revived. We will, for example, meet the timely concept ‘invisible work’ and we will meet former conversations about the technology ‘Artificial Intelligence’. With such reading of the history of WG 9.8 we will encounter a history where technology is deeply intertwined with the social, the cultural, and the political.