Working the gray areas : gender and labor in the digital age
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Digital technologies are transforming the conditions and meaning of work in the twenty-first century. Yet research on the digital economy has often neglected the role of gender, while feminist scholarship has yet to account for how digital technologies are restructuring the relationship between gender and labor across economic sectors. This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach including close visual and textual analysis and ethnographic interviews to examine case studies of technological "disruption" of gendered labor in three different sites of production: the home, the service industry, and corporate management. Attending to the exclusion of historically feminized work from formal employment, this project contributes to both digital media studies and feminist studies by showing how digital technologies are enabling new modes of formalization and visibility of gendered labor across economic spheres. At the same time, my research demonstrates how the specific socio-technical dynamics in each site create tensions between workers, employers, and platforms, leading to new avenues for bias and exploitation as social norms fill in the gaps between legal and technical regulation in a shifting world of work. I argue that dichotomies of formal/informal and visible/invisible labor are insufficient to understand gendered labor in the digital age. Rather, we must contend with how gender reattaches to different tasks, bodies, and skills in the gray areas created by new socio-technical configurations. This interdisciplinary cross-sector study highlights the complexity of labor formalization and illuminates challenges for policy makers, technology designers, and labor organizers seeking to address gender equity in the digital economy. My project not only demonstrates the importance of gender as a critical lens through which to understand the changing dynamics of technology and labor in the twenty-first century, but also shows how digital technologies impact how gender itself "works" in the digital age.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Butler-Wall, Annika Lisa |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Thesis advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Thesis advisor | Denson, Shane |
| Thesis advisor | Turner, Fred |
| Degree committee member | Denson, Shane |
| Degree committee member | Turner, Fred |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Annika Butler-Wall. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/sm423tq3066 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Annika Lisa Butler-Wall
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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