In recent weeks, a movie has broken into the conversation, portraying the cocktail of ambition and stupidity that can drive us to extinction as a species. Don't look up! shouts a crowd blind to the meteorite that will crush us, under the baton of a few powerful unscrupulous. Just look up! the citizenry aware of the coming catastrophe cries out unsuccessfully. This choice does not seem applicable to life that overflows cinematographic fiction, where the alternative between "not looking" or "only looking" above is a false dilemma that prevents us from appreciating the complete reality, forcing us to choose only one half or bury the other. .
Hegemonic cultures push us to look up, where everything good is supposed to be located. Achieve glory, rise above the human condition, dominate and transcend nature, reach the top. Power (earthly and heavenly) is always represented above. But we are earthly beings and our ephemeral existence takes place fundamentally on the ground. And if this ground does not exist in our imagination, we cannot look at it; if we don't look at it, we can't recognize it; if we don't recognize it, we can't protect it.
The covid-19 pandemic has shown us that top-down duality. On the one hand, the scientific-digital sky shines like never before, saving lives thanks to vaccines achieved in record time and helping to maintain employment, studies, consumption, public services and social interaction thanks to technological deployment. On the other hand, from the domains of the earth, a strong shock confronts us with our radical physical, economic and emotional vulnerability. We are precarious and fragile beings, desperately in need of others. Regenerate to generate, reproduce to produce, anchor ourselves to a land from which to look at the sky. The pillar of the system is none other than care, because caring, being cared for, caring for ourselves and caring for the planet is what sustains life and our human condition.The pandemic thus forces us to question our linear concept of progress, which hides the determining sediment of life, based on cyclical, repetitive and invisible processes, the secret engines of vital magma.
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Women and technology: the gap that does not stop (but grows)
Despite this, as soon as the worst of the storm passed, that spark of lucidity was lost and we once again clung to the future, abandoning the present, disdaining the here and now, the below.
Except in specific moments of social or individual catastrophe, we seem incapable of combining both logics, which are two sides of the same coin.
This explains why the price of some technology companies has skyrocketed, while the working conditions of health, teaching and social services personnel have not improved after more than a decade of budget cuts.
The pandemic also revealed how these two spaces (heaven and earth, above and below, technology and care) are asymmetrically occupied by men and women. Women, at the forefront of assistance to patients with covid-19, essential services and multiplied household chores during confinement. The International Labor Organization (ILO) points out that this scar will operate as a scourge on the future opportunities of women, their income, job continuity, health and well-being. And it is that women take over all areas that involve dealing with people, in homes (housewives and domestic service), studies (humanistic, social and bio-health), jobs (physical and mental health, education, social services, hospitality,retail) and in technologies (with digital uses and technological careers more oriented to purpose, subjects and real-life experiences). These spaces —and the women who attend them— are located below, in the micro, the need, the invisible, in the undervalued kingdom of the land of care. Men, on the other hand, are deficient in these environments and undisputed kings in the world of objects, which
macro
, the opportunity, the visible, the power elites and a digital revolution in which women are a small minority. Wherever the technologically intense future of our societies is designed and decided, the shortage of women is overwhelming, particularly in frontier sectors (artificial intelligence, data science, cloud computing, cybersecurity).
We face the double challenge of incorporating more women into the digital world and more men into care, while redefining our priorities as a species. It is unfeasible that those who manage life do not manage power and those who manage power do not get involved in the daily management of life. If we do not learn as a society that above is nothing more than below, that the subject precedes the object, that the hybridization between technology and humanism is the way, we will be condemned to disappear. Bringing down the digital sky to the land of care and the care of the earth is the only thing that will guarantee a technological revolution at the service of humanity and not the other way around. The challenge of moving from the knowledge society to the wisdom society (looking above,looking down) is infinitely bigger and more real than inventing how to free ourselves from the meteorite.
María Ángeles Sallé
has a doctorate in Social Sciences from the University of Valencia and
Cecilia Castaño
, professor at the UCM.
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