The Internet Architecture of Gender/Decoding the Layers

ARIN6902 : Masters in Digital Culture : Andra Keay : April 2010The internet, like any new technology, has a disruptive effect onsociety and governance. AsMilton Muellerof theInternet Governance Projectsays, “For a while, when its effects are new and unanticipated,it empowers in a relative sense some actors at the expense of others.This relative empowerment alters the composition of interest groups,further promoting political change.” (1)The rise of the internet economy has occurred at a time when thegender gap has actually been increasing in many indicators of highlydeveloped countries, which is somewhat of a surprise to those whobelieved that the second wave of feminism in the 60s and 70s hadborn legitimate fruit.It seems, on reflection, that legislation of equal opportunity and therhetoric of empowerment has failed to have any effect in some crucialareas, most noticeably computer science, ICTs and engineering, wherethe numbers of women in higher education and employment haveactually declined since the 1970s. (2)

an example of gender division by workplace fromThe Guardian, UK .

Technology is not gender neutral although much of the rhetoric, likethe end to end principle, simplicity and net neutrality, obscures this.Technology is socially shaped. As Hrynyshyn says, ‘values areembedded in a technology through a social process of the interactionof different groups of relevant actors who are involved in the process

of design…. Often what is not recognized is that the decision about thedevelopment of technology are made by agents with different locationsin structures of social power, and the different locations createdifferences in the extent to which different agents are able toparticipate successfully in the process of social shaping.’ (3)I am taking a social shaping of technology approach to this situation(as described byMackenzie and Wajcman,Williams and Edge), where at every stage in the development of a new technology a decision ismade, a fork in the branching logic paths is taken that incrementallychanges the direction of development, and of necessity excludes somedirections. AsLessigputs it in Code 2.0, The ‘nature” of the Internet isnot God’s will. Its nature is simply the product of its design. Thatdesign could be different.’ (4)I am using the Layers Principle as adapted bySolum and ChungfromLessig’s work, and endorsed by theWSIS in 2005

, for my analyticframework. The six layers that constitute the Internet are:

• The Content Layer—the symbols and images that are communicated.• The Application Layer—the programs that use the Internet, e.g. the Web.• The Transport Layer—TCP, which breaks the data into packets.• The Internet Protocol Layer—IP, handles the flow of data over the network.• The Link Layer—the interface between users’ computers and the physicallayer.• The Physical Layer—the copper wire, optical cable, satellite links, etc. (5)

These layers were defined for internet governance but also serve as away of examining how different structures have evolved in seeminglycomparative isolation from other layers and how these isolatedinstances are part of the interrelated whole. How the internet hascreated a society in which women, in many important areas, arefurther from equality and self determination than they were in 1960.How we can decode the layers of gender discrimination to see how thearchitecture of the internet limits our global society.(to be continued....)

1. Milton Mueller,"The New Cyber-Conservatism: Goldsmith/Wu and thePremature Triumphalism of the Territorial Nation-State: A review of Goldsmith and Wu's 'Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a BorderlessWorld'"(June, 2006). Internet Governance Project. Paper IGP06-003.Available athttp://internetgovernance.org/pdf/MM-goldsmithWu.pdf 2. Maria Klawe, Telle Whitney, Caroline Simard,"Women in Computing - take