When engineering teams aren’t diverse, only certain people’s problems get solved.

On April 27–29, MIT Media Lab will host its second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon. The aim of the hackathon, the first iteration of which took place in 2014, is to bring technological equity to the table, to develop improved lactation devices, to fight the stigma of breastfeeding, and to brainstorm services that better support women who want to breastfeed their babies in a society that often shuns the practice. Centered on collaboration over competition, the hackathon brings together top CEOs of women’s health companies, teams of doulas, mothers of color, and LGBTQ parents and families to help generate better solutions for the breast pump.

Even for people who are not mothers, the hackathon highlights the need for collaborative innovation that reflects a wider community, making room for equity by design. But, breast pump? For many, that’s still a hard pill to gulp down, at least at first.

I’ll admit that I don’t think much about breastfeeding and I think of breast pumps even less. I’m a 48-year-old, unmarried, unpartnered woman. It’s more likely that I’d be struck by a bolt of lightning inside my own apartment than become anyone’s biological mother. And basically, a hackathon is like spring break for nerdy white dudes, so why should I care about what they’re doing? I have no tender mound of nipped flesh in this game. I’ve no breast in this pump.

The thought of breastfeeding conjures mythological images for me, like the 13th-century sculpture La Luna Capitolina, the Capitoline Wolf, nursing the frozen forms of Romulus and Remus. The lean she-wolf grimaces as the greedy twins, mouths and hands open, wait for her milk to rain down. My mind skips ahead 400 years to 1977, when Buffy Saint Marie breastfed her then baby, Dakota “Cody” Starblanket Wolfchild, on Sesame Street, while Big Bird observed.

In a recent television ad, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Kelda Roys not only challenges Scott Walker’s reign, but takes on the stigma associated with breastfeeding by nourishing her baby while delivering her campaign message. This seems like a revelation, so infrequently do we see breastfeeding in our culture.

Until last week, I didn’t know my own mother breastfed me. She never told me, and I never asked. I never even thought about it. This revelation just slipped out during a conversation between commercial breaks while watching Scandal. I thought about my bond with my mom, how strong it is, and how important it must have been to her back then, as a politically active, working mother and wife in 1970, to create space to breastfeed me in a time when women were also boldly expanding the territories of feminism and the meaning of womanhood.

The Troubling Erasure Of Trans Parents Who Breastfeed

Today, we treat breastfeeding as a solely natural occurrence. I mean, you don’t ask grass how it grows, right? We expect all mothers to be capable of breastfeeding, and to disappear from public life to breastfeed behind closed doors, or in dirty toilet stalls. Insurance companies give free, but subpar, breast pumps to poor and working poor mothers. But when those break, they suggest mothers have failed to adequately use said breast pump, which seems to have as many moving parts as a pocket watch, and then pressure them into feeding their baby factory-made formula when that’s not their preference, often as a result of their “failure” to express their milk using the pump. (It’s important to note too, of course, that women should have the freedom to decide the best way to feed their children, be it breast or formula or some combination of the two.)

We gaslight mothers by saying things like, “breast is best,” while ignoring the need for an equitable infrastructure, like paid family leave, so they actually have time to bond with their children. We tell women we value them most when they become mothers because, “[we] believe that children are our future,” and then we rob them of the time to actually parent their kids. How is this all supposed work?

Catherine D’Ignazio, an Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization Storytelling in the Journalism Department at Emerson College, and co-founder of the Make The Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon, was a graduate student with a newborn pondering the answer to this question while dealing with the complications of feeding her third child and getting to class. Using a breast pump became an essential part of her life and routine when she faced a medical crisis. This need for a breast pump also revealed many of the problems women face in the pursuit of using the machine.

We gaslight mothers by saying things like, ‘breast is best,’ while ignoring the need for an equitable infrastructure.

“A couple months in, I couldn’t breastfeed for 48 hours,” D’Ignazio tells me in a phone interview. “It was a little insane I couldn’t find any help. I was a privileged person, I could pay out of pocket, and I literally couldn’t find anyone to help me. It was fine, he didn’t die, but the experience was traumatic.” D’Ignazio explains that while she possessed the affluence to obtain high-quality health care, key elements of postpartum support, like an efficient breast pump, and the infrastructure of time and space to use it was lacking.

Her third time pumping, D’Ignazio says she had a revelation:

“Shit, I’m sitting on this bathroom floor pumping, at MIT, in this super fancy building in the most elite engineering school in the world. Why am I sitting on the fucking floor?”

Her frustrations led D’Ignazio to reach out to her colleague, Alexis Hope, a designer and research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Civic Media, to tackle the problem head on. “That was the starting point of the whole thing,” D’Ignazio says. “We were in a position of power — we could do something about this!”

In 2014, the MIT Media Lab hosted its first hackathon to improve the breastfeeding and breast pumping experience. That’s not to say making the hackathon happen was an easy sell. “[The Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon] was perceived as weird by students, faculty, and administrators at first,” D’Ignazio says. “Like, why are you doing this?” But soon, more people got on board. “One particular group was so moved by the talks and energy of the event that they dropped out of volunteering and formed their own team. They developed this warm pump cover to make the pumping experience more warm and fuzzy.” She recalled some team members said, “I see why this matters.”

Your Attitudes About Parenting Might Be Classist

While 2014’s Hackathon was a fun event that brought together 150 engineers, designers, health-care providers, parents, and so many babies that the event set a Guinness Book of World for the most babies at a hackathon, it was a predominantly white experience that seemed to be designed for a privileged few. Ultimately, the hackathon rendered solutions for the breast pump that mostly only wealthy people could afford, like a $1,000 breast pump — not exactly what D’Ignazio had in mind.

“[Innovators] made a lot of assumptions about people’s job situations — that they had a private office to pump in, access to outlets,” D’Ignazio says. Innovators assumed that they’d provided solutions to serve the needs of all women. But innovation requires equity; otherwise you end up with technology like soap-dispensing sensors that only trigger soap when a white person uses them. Real change comes when the most marginalized in society are able to harness the power of equity to move forward.

That’s why even I, a childless human, am on board. It’s time to create a world that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. The breast pump is as good a place as any to push for inclusion in design, and that can’t happen without equity on all fronts.

Real change comes when the most marginalized in society are able to harness the power of equity to move forward.

Kimberly Sear Allers, author of The Big Let Down: How Medicine, Big Business and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding, and the Media and Communications Strategist for the team, has been instrumental in the shift of perspective on the hackathon. According to D’Ignazio:

“[Allers’] book was a galvanizing force to think about how we address these things in a more systemic way while maintaining the playfulness and let’s-do-it spirit of the first hackathon, at the same time recalibrating who’s innovating and who’s at the table.”

D’Ignazio says Allers’ research provides a pathway to understanding the power of shifting the narrative of breastfeeding from corporations and insurance companies — with their shitty products and policies that profit from our collective silence — to sharing personal stories that support the expansion of breastfeeding knowledge between mothers, their children, and their families. And by giving nursing mothers a place to share their stories, engineers can hopefully better understand what they really need.

Allers explained that “it’s not okay to have a group of white male engineers designing something that needs to also help low-income white women, and when there are many black and brown engineers who should be at the table as well.” Black and brown voices will also be amplified in the hackathon’s participants and teams.

Bad Advice On Foster Daughters And New Mom Nudity

The Make the Breast Pump Not Suck now hosts four organization communities through its Community Innovation Program Breastfeeding Innovation Fellows. The Boston Team, under the leadership of Nashira Baril, is working on the creation of a free-standing birth clinic to be based in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Harambee Care of Detroit, led by Executive Director Anjanette Davenport Hatter, is developing tools for self-advocacy and to increase the availability of lactation support based on the individual needs of mothers and infant care. Rachael Lorenzo, Founder of Indigenous Women Rising, is working with Pueblo and Apache seamstresses to develop breastfeeding-friendly regalia that will allow mothers to breastfeed while maintaining their sacred practices. And the Tupelo team, spearheaded by Toni Hill of Northeast Mississippi Birthing Project, focuses on breastfeeding equity and culturally appropriate care.

Along with the diverse voices of the teams participating, hackathon organizers will present the findings of their story collection project from the previous hackathon. Many expressed their displeasure with the time it takes to clean the pump, the god-awful sound it makes when in use, the need for more discrete ways to pump when in public, and the pain of having one’s nipple suddenly sucked into a plastic, conical-shaped cup. The story collection also yielded compelling arguments for not only better breast pumps, but improved postpartum services for mothers and families.

“The reason we are doing this again is the immense story collection and analysis process that happened after the last one,” Becky Michelson, Project Manager at the Engagement Lab at Emerson College and the Program Manager of Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon, says. “During the last Hackathon there was an email open to the public that said ‘share your experiences and we’ll share them with engineers, technologists, and researchers.’ People thought a few dozen would come in. More than 1,100 stories came. Some of the findings were…there was a lot of internalized shame, guilt, anxiety , and depression, because people felt they are failing.”

The Tech Bias: Why Silicon Valley Needs Social Theory

According to Michelson, the stories revealed that a better breast pump is a societal issue. Our culture, while pressuring new mothers to breastfeed, is not set up to help women and new parents succeed at breastfeeding and pumping when they need support. “We need to take on a more system-level approach to change and to galvanize creativity, innovation, and advocacy for breastfeeding and pumping support,” says Michelson, “so it’s not just about the pump this time around; it’s about the ecosystem, technology, and program services for the postpartum experience.”

Adds D’Ignazio:

“The stories were about way more than a breast pump. They were stories about going back to work, the stigma of breastfeeding, the places where people were pumping. There were stories of women feeling like failures. That’s what galvanized us to think about how to address this in a more systematic way. We needed to turn that negative energy on the system that was failing us.”

The us means ALL of us — even no-baby-having people like me, because in order to create real change we have to center the most marginalized to see that change.

Included in the latest iteration of the hackathon is the work of Kate Krontiris, Principal Investigator on the Hackathon’s Leadership team.“The design [of the breast pump] itself is an issue of equity,” Krontiris says. “We don’t value parents’ time. If your baby requires triple feeding [to up a mother’s milk supply], if your baby had to eat every three hours — two out of three hours are spent feeding and cleaning the pump, and that’s one hour of sleep every three hours. Designing a pump to be a much better and more efficient process actually has real implications.”

While the need is obvious to hack the breast pump, Kimberly Sears Allers cautions us all to question our reliance on machines, even breast pumps. Allers suggests that we balance innovation, policy, and equity if we really intend on fruitful results of this hackathon.

“I feel very strongly that breast pumps are a necessary evil,” Allers says. “Women actually deserve time to mother. We can’t let the pump enthusiasm distract us from the fact that it is a crime that women are going back to work two weeks after giving birth and that we have to rely on a machine to finish the job that we’re not allowed to do ourselves. We have to not become a Pump Nation and turn the pump into the all mighty thing to save us, when what we really deserve is time to mother, time to breastfeed and be with our kid.”

Even so, Allers says that breast pumps should at least work efficiently if we must use them, and that tied to efficiency, this is the true value of using the machine — the value of a parent’s time.

The breast pump is a tool, and one whose use affects all of us, breastfeeders or not. Let’s make better ones that work for everyone.

If tech companies are serious about building a better society, they must attend more closely to social theory.

Wikimedia Commons

By Jess Bier

I n the summer of 2017, a now infamous memo came to light. Written by James Damore, then an engineer at Google, it claimed that the under-representation of women in tech was partly caused by inherent biological differences between men and women. The memo didn’t offer any new evidence — on the contrary, it drew on longstanding sexist stereotypes that have been disproven time and again, and it included only the vaguest mention of decades of research in relevant domains such as gender studies. Given the expansive resources at Google, his omissions didn’t stem from a lack of access to knowledge. Instead, they pointed to an unwillingness to accept that social theory is actually valid knowledge in the first place.

That Google memo is an extreme example of an imbalance in how different ways of knowing are valued. Silicon Valley tech companies draw on innovative technical theory but have yet to really incorporate advances in social theory. The inattention to such knowledge becomes all too apparent when algorithms fail in their real-life applications — from automated soap-dispensers that fail to turn on when a user has dark brown skin, to the new iPhone X’s inability to distinguish among different Asian women.

Social theorists in fields such as sociology, geography, and science and technology studies have shown how race, gender and class biases inform technical design. So there’s irony in the fact that employees hold sexist and racist attitudes, yet ‘we are supposed to believe that these same employees are developing “neutral” or “objective” decision-making tools’, as the communications scholar Safiya Umoja Noble at the University of Southern California argues in her book Algorithms of Oppression (2018).

In many cases, what’s eroding the value of social knowledge is unintentional bias — on display when prominent advocates for equality in science and tech undervalue research in the social sciences. The physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, for example, has downplayed the link between sexism and under-representation in science. Apparently, he’s happy to ignore extensive research pointing out that the natural sciences’ male-dominated institutional cultures are a major cause of the attrition of female scientists at all stages of their careers.

Silicon Valley tech companies draw on innovative technical theory but have yet to really incorporate advances in social theory.

By contrast, social theorists have shown a keen interest in illuminating how unjust social relations inform the development of science and technology. In the 1980s, the anthropologist Lucy Suchman, now at Lancaster University in the UK, showed that even the employees at Xerox in California struggled to use the copy machines the company produced — leading them to laugh, mumble to themselves, and repeatedly ask questions such as: ‘Where’s the start button?’ The machines’ designers had made an effort to write clear instructions, but people interpreted those guidelines in different ways, depending on factors that included their gender and class. The result was a machine that made sense to the engineers themselves, but didn’t work so well for everyone else.

Social theory also plays a critical role in understanding rare, catastrophic events, which can’t be assessed solely in terms of technical failure. Human error and forms of social organisation — such as the hierarchies used to manage sensitive technologies — often play a critical role in whether or not a crisis is averted, as the sociologist Charles Perrow argues in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (1984). For example, prior to the Challenger disaster in 1986 — in which a space shuttle exploded shortly after a take-off, killing all the crew-members on board — it turned out that some NASA staff had been aware of potential problems, caused by the material used to seal the rotating joints. However, certain organisational norms prevented these worries being transmitted to those who had the power to delay the launch. Because of a failure to appreciate the power dynamics behind NASA’s structure, scientific knowledge could not prevent the crash, even when some of the scientists clearly saw the potential for disaster.

These examples show that social theory is not about detaching oneself from the world, so as to observe it at a distance. Instead, its many practitioners often try to develop knowledge from the standpoint of engaged participants, questioning the limits of their own perspective. The goal is to improve knowledge of the social world, an effort that goes hand in hand with active efforts to change society for the better, while also thinking critically, and continuously, about what ‘better’ means, and for whom.

Detractors of social theory dislike it not because it’s not effective, but because it is. It has catalysed profound shifts in race and gender relations in recent decades. In activist and community groups, people who were historically excluded from universities, such as people of colour and women, have been the pioneers of perspectives on the world that have an impact on everyday life for billions of people.

In spite of these ongoing contributions, technical knowledge continues to be privileged over social knowledge. The disconnect is apparent in numerous ways, such as the salaries of researchers. While academic scientists tend to earn lower salaries than those in industry, scholars in the social sciences and the humanities earn less across the board than both groups — and have fewer grant and employment options overall, too. Science and tech are viewed as revenue-generating down the line, but the cost-saving benefits of improved social understanding, and the benefits that go beyond costs, tend to go underappreciated.

New Book Reveals Toxic Tech ‘Bro’ Culture In Silicon Valley

Ironically, the same discriminatory systems targeted by social theory end up blocking underrepresented groups from getting a toehold in academia, the very seedbed of these ideas. Sexual harassment and racism are much more than individual incidents; they’re institutionalised mechanisms for maintaining systemic barriers. As the feminist theorist Sara Ahmed points out in her book Living a Feminist Life (2017), sexual harassment is ‘a network that stops information from getting out. It is a set of alliances that come alive to stop something.’ Such behaviour raises the stakes of fighting against the system, she says, by offering a choice to those who are on the receiving end: ‘get used to it, or get out’ of the institution. ‘No wonder if these are the choices,’ she notes, ‘many get out of it.’

The skewed institutions that result should be everyone’s concern. If tech companies are serious about building a better society, and aren’t just paying lip service to justice for their own gain, they must attend more closely to social theory. If social insights were easy, and if practice followed readily from understanding, then racism, poverty and other debilitating systems of power and inequality would be a thing of the past. New insights about society are as challenging to produce as the most rarified scientific theorems — and addressing pressing contemporary problems requires as many kinds of knowers and ways of knowing as possible.

This story first appeared at Aeon, and is republished here with permission.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/are-we-witnessing-the-death-of-san-franciscos-revolutionary-spirit-54328986f403/ Sat, 23 Apr 2016 17:45:58 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8631 Read more]]>

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By Emma Bushnell

Once on a flight home to San Francisco for a visit from college in Boston, I sat next to an anarchist couple in their sixties. They were dressed all in black with matching fedoras over long, grey hair, and came armed with giant sketchpads. They were warm, happy people, who spent the trip sketching and encouraging each other. When not drawing, they turned their attention to me, and we chatted, pleasantly exchanging conflicting political and artistic ideals. They told me they admired my studies; I said I admired their sketches. I don’t believe any of us were lying.

Ten years later, in the English class I now teach at Brooklyn College, we were discussing Colson Whitehead’s “City Limits.” The conversation was animated — New York natives and transplants alike connected to Whitehead’s meditation on the changeable nature of the five boroughs. As we considered the many ways in which the city was re-inventing itself now, one student, a native of Bed-Stuy, said her parents were selling their house. She added, with a bemused shrug, that “I guess now people want brownstones in Bed-Stuy.”

I remember having this reaction on the phone with a friend a few years after my interaction with my anarchist seatmates. Then, she had told me they were building condos in a squalid area of downtown that had been re-branded as “SOMA.”

“SOMA?!” we had both laughed in disbelief. Calling that stretch of empty warehouses, urban crime, and homelessness near the train depot by a trendy acronym seemed like nothing more than a crude marketing ploy. And yet, only a few short years later, those condos, like the Bed-Stuy brownstones, were selling for millions of dollars; the tech takeover of San Francisco had begun in earnest.

Unlike New York, San Francisco has a somewhat parochial history. Each new group entering the city can be singled out, and conclusions can be drawn about that population’s contribution to the texture of the city as a whole. To name but a few, there were ‘49ers in the gold rush, the beats, the hippies, the gays, and now the techies. And then, of course, there have been influxes of various ethnic and immigrant groups that have played a significant role in shaping the city.

Something many of these movements had in common was a flocking to a city where thought could be freer, conventions more challenged. One need only skim through the great chroniclers of San Francisco — John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, William Vollmann, Gary Kamiya, Armistead Maupin, Amy Tan, Rebecca Solnit — to glean that the allure of San Francisco is not any one promise or movement in particular, but a revolutionary spirit that the city has always abided, one ideal after another.

It would take a much longer essay than this to really delve into the various transplant movements in San Francisco and how each was received and embedded in the city’s existing culture. But if we consider only a few of the most instantly recognizable ones, it’s easy to see how each vociferous counter-culture was able to change the city’s dialogue and image while remaining somewhat insular. Where were the hippies? The Haight. The gays? The Castro. The beats? North Beach.

I present this cordoning off as a mere fact — not to say that those challenging the status quo should keep themselves to themselves, but that one of the ways San Francisco has been repeatedly successful in accommodating strong-convicted and sometimes conflicting viewpoints is that each has been able to stake out its own little space without being forced to conform or compete with its neighbors.

In many ways, it makes a lot of sense that the tech movement has its roots in the Bay Area. Where else but San Francisco would a corporation take pride in thinking “different,” or bright young dropouts be accepted as pioneering geniuses instead of family screw-ups? On its face, startup culture seems a natural fit for the city’s other transplant movements — it claims to buck convention, be curious, and create a community of like-minded people.

But, as we know, the tech community has not “merely” gentrified “SOMA” and contributed its new voice to the larger conversation in San Francisco. With its attendant wealth and heady feelings of power, the tech boom is not-so-slowly colonizing the entire city, driving out whole communities and stamping out the possibility of pushback to its ideals from other populations. The harm of the tech takeover is not that this movement has turned out to be more square, nerdy, or moneyed than the city’s other revolutionary movements, but that under the guise of “improving” the city, it is literally bulldozing physical space for living, debate, and the exchange of ideas, thus ridding the city of its generations-long ability to support its local residents and receive non-conformers. The Tenderloin, a hub for cutting-edge social programming since single room occupancy hotels were established for family-less sex workers after the 1906 earthquake, is now the subject of myopic open letters accusing it of being a blight on the sort of San Francisco the tech industry desires.

The tech takeover is also fundamentally changing a city that, not so long ago, was considered an “island of diversity.” Startlingly, it’s projected that by 2040, San Francisco County will have a non-Hispanic white majority — jumping from 42% in 2013 to 52% in 25 years. The percentage of Asians is expected to fall from 34% to 28%, and the Latino population from 15% to 12%. The city’s already-declining African-American population, currently at just 6%, is expected to remain about the same. How will these shifting demographics further erode what once made the city great?

On a plane a few weeks ago from New York to San Francisco, I chatted with my seatmate, a nice woman from Long Island on her way to visit her son, who works in tech. By the time we had reached cruising altitude I knew about his education, his career goals, and the current housing hunt he and his fiancée were on for a place to accommodate their planned family of four.

This was a genuinely kind woman who spoke well of her son. A man who is, by her account, successful and in a happy relationship, and she is rightly proud of him. But our conversation introduced no viewpoint I had never encountered before, and was merely a way to idly pass time talking about nothing but the particulars of one’s own success. It brought in stark relief my experience 10 years ago, when the topics of conversation had been public funding for the arts, the difference between a democracy and a republic, and anecdotes about Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The contrast makes me wonder how often in the future I will encounter fellow travelers like that couple, and be confronted with people who think differently than I do and talk about subjects I do not normally consider. Or if whether, someday soon, they’ll disappear from planes to San Francisco altogether, when there is no longer a single neighborhood at the flight’s destination willing to keep them around.

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Lead image: flickr/Ricardo Villar

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