The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.
Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015.
Before reading this passage, I have never actually thought about the distinction between the makers and the non-makers as connected to the history of gender. My immediate thought was that the makers may be considered superior to the non-makers due to their more direct and noticeable contributions in advancing technologies that shape society and human life more so than being superior because it’s a male-dominated field. However, after giving some thought, I started seeing connections between the issues that this passage is bringing up and the gender issues that I’ve experienced and see living in Japan.
In Japan, where gender inequality is a prominent issue, there have been movements to encourage women into the STEM field and have seen some positive outcomes these past few years. However, despite the rise of female participants in the STEM field, there is still a notable characteristic in the roles that women have been able to take. Roles that may be considered more caregiving than creating such as nurses, doctors, and researchers in the life sciences, have seen changes in its gender gap, but in fields that are more creating in nature, such as engineering and coding, there have been smaller changes in the gender gap. The present gender issues in Japan reflects the author’s description of how maker culture is rooted in the history of gender. As the digital merges with the humanities, the former associated with male roles and the later with females in Japan, I am interested to learn how the historical and current role of gender influences who gets to become active participants in the digital humanities and whether divides in identities or social status are present in the field.
