Women, fisheries technology and development: toward new research approaches

Abstract

In fisheries and aquaculture, technology is a critical factor in sectoral development. Tracing the sectors’ post World War II development stages, we note strong links with internal and external economic and sustainability drivers but weak connections to largely external gender equality and human rights drivers. Three characteristics of the fish sectors situate women during technology change: technology linked gender divisions of labor, focus on the primary production nodes where women are least common, and multiple causes of women’s invisibility. These exclusionary characteristics, and lessons from two cases—a fish container for women petty traders in Tamil Nadu, India, and fish smoking kilns in Ghana—point to opportunities, using feminist technology studies, to understand how gender and technology shape each other. Although typically presented in a positivist manner, fish sector technology operates in complex, dynamic sociotechnical systems. To date, sociotechnical systems research has received little attention from gender researchers. In the emerging field of fisheries sociotechnical systems research, no studies have included gender. Because sociotechnical systems research deals with power, politics and transitions, feminist fisheries researchers should take an interest to ensure gender is incorporated in post hoc and anticipatory sociotechnical systems studies.