Looking forward, looking back: Gender, Technology and Development in a changing world

With this issue, we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Gender Technology and Development. The journal was established in 1997 by the Asian Institute of Technology, also the same year that AIT formally started its graduate program in Gender and Development Studies. As associate editors and hosts of GTD we are also excited to share and celebrate another important development. Starting with this issue, GTD will now be published under Taylor and Francis after two decades of being part of SAGE publications.

When GTD’s first issue came out in March 1997, it had a manifest optimistic outlook - being still in the stimulating momentum of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and just before the Asian Economic Crisis would cast doubt on the perceptions of Asian economies as tigers and dragons. Since then, the world has gone through two large economic crises, a surge in local and international concerns and discussions about climate change and natural disasters, opening up of multiple sites of global insecurity and conflict in conjunction with rise and fall of political movements and ethnic conflicts, as well as numerous humanitarian crisis on all continents. At the same time, emerging technologies have drastically changed the way we live and work, the Internet, a diversity of mobile devices and social media have redefined how we communicate, while reproductive technologies have become both more diverse and available to a larger number of people. In this same time period the world has collectively set two rounds of development priorities (the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals), both of which highlight the ongoing struggle for gender equality and equity against a backdrop of global changes. In short, ‘gender’, ‘technology’, and ‘development’ have gone through drastic changes ever since GTD was established.

Such changes are reflected in the 311 articles that GTD carried in the past 20 years. Earlier articles tended to focus more on agriculture technologies, as well as theoretical discussions on gender and science/technology, by authors such as Sandra Harding (2000) and Nina Lykke (1997). The early papers were authored by a mixture of established scholars, and junior scholars including PhD students, a trend that we continue to uphold. However, the journal diversity has continued to expand both in terms of the topics and author profiles over the years. Early on, we received interesting and relevant contributions covering traditionally male dominated fields such as transport (Fernando, 1998), energy (Nathan & Kelkar, 1997; Swaminathan, 1999) and mining (Ahmad & Lahiri-Dutt, 2006, Bose, 2004). We continue to have strong papers submitted with content related to agriculture, fisheries and livestock (for recent examples, see Bose, Al-Kindy, Al-Balushi, & Rajab, 2013; Gurung, Bhandari, & Paris, 2016; Huyer, 2016; Johnson et al., 2015; Mittal, 2016; Murray, Gebremedhin, Brychkova, & Spillane, 2016). Reflecting the rapid expansion and development of ICTs in the last two decades, GTD has continuously carried articles related to gender and ICTs including a special issue on the digital divide in 2004 (GTD 8.1). Articles on reproductive technologies have been a more recent addition (see for instance Castro-Va´zquez, 2015; Majumdar, 2014; Munjal-Shankar, 2014; Whittaker, 2014). Aside from articles with a main emphasis on science and technology, GTD has also, since its beginning, carried articles on globalization and women’s employment, natural resources management, migration and human trafficking (see special issue GTD 12.1 2008, on human trafficking), violence and conflict, as well as women’s movement. Women in STEM education and career development has also been a topic of discussion (for some recent examples, see Lažnjak, Šporer, & Švarc, 2011; Li & Peguero, 2015; Samulewicz, Vidican, & Aswad, 2012)

In much the same way that the theorization of ‘gender’ has undergone shifts within feminist and development theory, the journal too continues to evolve and contribute to the ongoing discussions on how we interpret and understand the term ‘gender’. In addition to the early and ongoing focus on women’s voices and empirical evidence of women’s lived experiences in the context of development debates and technological evolution, the journal’s work continues to expand on the understanding of gender as a network of relationships implicated in power and social hierarchies. To this end we envision an expanding agenda for our field (and GTD) looking beyond gender binaries to encompass and give voice to sexual and gender minorities. In the coming years, we see GTD contributing to both the theoretical base and empirical evidence of global, local, and cultural complexities of ‘gender’ articulations in the contemporary world.

Further, as can be deduced from the breath of articles that GTD carried over the years, our definition of ‘technology’ is not limited to conventional industrial or biological understanding of science and technology, but also includes what Amartya Sen (1990) called the ‘social arrangements that permit the equipment to be used and the so-called productive processes to be carried on.’ (Sen, 1987, p. 11). In addition, our interest in gender necessarily opens a critical examination of the broader uses of the term technology in an intangible sense of aiding in the organization of human activities. This understanding would still fall under the view of technology as the practical application of knowledge, though in a wider acceptation. As the complexities of ‘technology’ and our understanding of it continues to grow in this century we expect that in the coming years more and more articles will traverse the breadth of the gendered nature of technologies.

Reflecting on GTD’s focus on ‘development’ in the tripartite of gender-technology-and development, many of the articles are based on case studies in Asia and Africa. More than half of the articles were about Asia (especially on South Asia) and around 30 were on Africa. However, a growing trend in the journal is found in the increasing number of article submissions from and on Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, Latin America and the Middle East. As we move away from easy First World/Third World, developed/developing categorizations and toward challenging realities of growing disparities among and within societies, the work from development scholars has kept pace opening up new arenas of enquiry and addressing issues of social justice and equity in varied contexts. Thus while the focus on ‘development’ has led to GTD carrying more articles on developing countries, at the same time, we see more and more work interpreting questions of ‘development’ more broadly and bringing attention to gender relations and struggles for gender equality across the world.

In sum looking at the history of contributions to GTD, we witness shifting debates and moving definitions of gender, technology and development, and new insights in ways these concepts are linked and interdependent (whether positive or not). The editorial of the first issue stated, ‘Gender, Technology and Development is an international referred journal which provides a forum for exploring and examining the linkages between changing gender relations and technological development’, but GTD has been and will be doing more than examining linkages between gender and technology. The journal and its contributors will continue in their commitment to unpack and challenge how such linkages further deconstruct the boundaries and our understanding of gender and technology and how these contribute to and/or undermine a more equal development.

Finally, on occasion of this anniversary we would also like to take the opportunity to thank all the individuals who have supported GTD over the past 20 years, especially the coeditors who have provided leadership and put in an enormous amount of work to uphold the quality of papers. The current three coeditors (Joy Clancy, Rebecca Elmhirst, Yukari Sawada) who have been with GTD since 2013, are the fourth team of editors in the 20 years of the journal. The founding editor, Govind Kelkar, served as editor-in-chief from 1997 to 2002. Since 2003, GTD has had three coeditors, one serving as the main editor for each issue. Between 2003 and 2007, the coeditors were Cecilia Ng, Mari Osawa and Thanh-Dam Truong, and between 2008 and 2012, Merete Lie, Ragnhild Lund, Mari Osawa and Thanh -Dam Truong. All the articles have benefited from the effort of numerous reviewers, who have upheld the quality of the journal. Support from NORAD over the years is gratefully acknowledged, as it made the publication of GTD possible. We also thank the Rockefeller foundation which also provided support to GTD for many years. We thank SAGE publications for partnering with us for 20 years and Taylor and Francis for their support and for sharing our vision of GTD in this new phase. Finally, we want to thank and acknowledge the support of our home institution, the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand, which, as owner of GTD, has been important to the success of the journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.