Course 2: Understanding Digitalization from Gender Perspectives

Bianca Prietl · University of Basel

Lecturer

Bianca Prietl is Professor of Gender Studies with a focus on Digitalization at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Basel, a position she has held since 2023, where she also co-chairs the Centre for Gender Studies. Her research explores how technology and gender are co-produced through institutions, practices, and design decisions, drawing on feminist science and technology studies. She has habilitated in sociology at TU Darmstadt with a thesis on datafication and power/knowledge in the digital age. Prietl is actively involved in the University of Basel’s Responsible Digital Society research network and publishes widely on critical-feminist approaches to digitalization.

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Lecture Overview

Overview

Prietl approaches digitalization from gender studies and social theory. She argues that gender and technology should not be treated as separate or natural categories, but as social constructs that are co-produced through institutions, practices, norms, and technical design.

Main Points

The lecture rejects essentialist views of both gender and technology and instead uses a constructivist perspective centered on co-construction.
Prietl highlights three major fields of discussion: digitalization of work, digital technologies as gendered artifacts, and digital media as arenas for gender politics.
She shows how design decisions often reflect the social position of those building technologies, especially when homogeneous groups imagine themselves as the default users.
Technical systems can reproduce exclusions through everyday design choices, for example in interfaces, accessibility assumptions, or digital assistants shaped by gender stereotypes.
The lecture ends with the political point that digital transformation is not fixed in advance and can be shaped differently.

Examples Mentioned

Big tech labor structures
Google Maps and accessibility problems
Siri and Alexa as gendered assistants
Data Feminism as a critical frame

Source transcript: transcripts/Course 2_Prietl_UnderstandingDigitization.txt

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