Technology and Gender Apartheid.

While we applaud our recent technological milestone, it is hard to deny the divisive role it has equally played, especially in the area of gender consciousness, reinforcement of stereotypes, and sustaining stigmatisation across societies. While technological development has brought undeniable benefits, it also comes with hidden costs that are too often overlooked. As many feminist scholars have argued, technology is never neutral; it is embedded within social relations, power structures, and cultural expectations. Thus, the ways technologies are designed, marketed, and used often reflect and reproduce existing gender hierarchies.

Consider domestic technologies such as the electric stove, oven, washing machine, or vacuum cleaner. While marketed as tools of liberation —promising to minimise the time women spend on domestic tasks — these devices in fact reinforced the association of women with domestic labour. Far from dismantling traditional gender roles, they reproduce and redefine them in technological form. Similarly, reproductive technologies like birth control pills, pregnancy tests, and tampons are highly gendered, constructed as tools to manage women's biological and reproductive functions. These inventions are not just practical innovations; they also represent cultural realities and inscriptions of women's identities as primarily reproductive beings or potential mothers, and in the worst cases, sex objects.

At the same time, technology is often coded as masculine. The stereotypes have routinely assigned masculine roles to men and feminine roles to women; by so doing, men are frequently portrayed as experts, technologically skilled, innovative, and rational, while women are framed as emotional, less competent, or simply uninterested in technical matters. This symbolic dichotomy between "technology as power" and "domestic slaves" has profound consequences. The encoded psychology of gender discourages girls from pursuing education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, which they consider to be typically men's academic fields. This academic discouragement contributes to the underrepresentation of women in the technology industry. The persistent gender gap in science subjects is not simply a matter of personal preference but reflects systemic inequalities, including a lack of mentorship, biased educational practices, and institutional exclusion.

The gendered dimensions of technology extend well beyond education and employment. Digital platforms — while often celebrated as spaces of free expression — have also become sites where misogyny thrives. Online harassment, including sexist, racist, and hateful comments, disproportionately targets women and girls. Research has shown that this "toxic digital environment" leads many women to self-censor or withdraw from online participation, thereby silencing voices and narrowing public discourse. Far from democratising participation, the digital sphere has, in many cases, reproduced and even amplified offline inequalities.

Economic inequalities persist as well; this is evident in the pay gap between men and women in the technology sector, where men often earn more than women for the same roles. They are less likely to be promoted to leadership positions and more likely to encounter subtle forms of exclusion from decision-making processes. The so-called "glass ceiling" in tech reveals how power and privilege are consolidated along gendered lines, ensuring that technological progress often benefits men disproportionately.

AI and Gender Diachotomy.

Artificial intelligence (AI), one of the most influential technologies of the 21st century, magnifies these dynamics. Machine learning systems operate by identifying patterns in data. However, as scholars have demonstrated, when data reflects historical biases, AI does not erase them — it amplifies them. For example, search engine algorithms have produced sexist and racist associations, while AI-driven hiring tools have been shown to disadvantage women by replicating discriminatory hiring practices. Women, especially those of colour, face enormous bias and discrimination in the area of facial recognition technologies. The technology often misidentifies the above group at far higher rates than white men, exposing how supposedly "neutral" systems reproduce systemic bias.

These biases are not accidental flaws; they reveal how inequality is woven into the very fabric of technological systems. Although the world applauds the enormous breakthrough in AI technology, it also comes as a serious promoter of gender inequality. Biased AI can harden discriminatory practices, creating a feedback loop in which inequalities are legitimised through claims of technological "objectivity." This raises urgent ethical and political questions: Who designs these systems? Whose data do they learn from? And whose interests do they ultimately serve? Without diverse representation in the design, training, and governance of AI, technological systems risk entrenching a form of digital gender apartheid—systemic exclusion that is as pervasive as it is invisible.

Towards a More Equitable Technological Future

Technological development has brought abundant benefits to the world; yet we can not disregard its negative impact, especially in the area of gender discrimination. To enjoy the benefits of technology, we need to dismantle those technological dimensions that lead to gender tension. To do that, we must revisit the issue of power and access, and who has power and access to the production of technology that reproduces the ideology. Hence, it is not technology itself that is inherently oppressive, but the power behind the production of those technological innovations (and the discourse), as many feminist technologists have pointed out. That calls for systemic interventions to address worrisome gender apartheid in technology, through encouraging inclusive participation in STEM education, enforcing pay equity in the tech industry, designing harassment-free digital spaces, and embedding principles of fairness and accountability into AI development.

Equally, through balanced sex-role presentation and encouragement of criticism, including challenging sexist portrayals of genders in technology, we can foster critical thinking and raise awareness among both technological inventors and consumers. Only by confronting these cultural and structural barriers can technology move from being a tool that reproduces gender inequality to one that fosters gender justice.

The history of technology reveals how innovation has often been complicit in reinforcing traditional gender roles and hierarchies. But the future offers the possibility of reversing these patterns. Without sound policymaking and serious engagement, we can hardly remake the present technological status quo. The question is hardly whether we can, but whether we are willing to confront the technological realities. Our choice and willingness determine how far we can go towards eliminating gender apartheid in our societies. Yes, we have the power to reshape our technological development and its gender discourse toward a more just and inclusive horizon; after all, we are producers of meaning.