#breakthebias: Working Towards Alternative Ways of Being in a Digital World Through Conversations With Critical Friends, Texts, and Technologies

The motto of International Women’s Day 2022 is #breakthebias, with a major theme being Women and Technology. Its mission is “advance gender parity in technology and celebrate the women forging innovation” by tackling bias, stereotypes, discrimination and creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive (tech) world where difference is valued. With this Research Topic, we engage with this year's themes critically to explore ways in which we can be different in our digital or post-digital world and how we can explore multiple alternatives. For a long time, scholars pointed out the exclusionary nature of technology for women and non-binary populations who are still confronted with bias, stereotypes, and androcentric views. Technology is still typically associated with heteronormative masculinity, which is a matter of concern for women and non-binary folks, leading to political, social, and economic gender inequities in complex ways. Importantly, while technologies have the potential to address these inequities, they could also reinforce them.

This Research Topic seeks to bring together contributions from feminist researchers, designers, and/or technologists to explore their relation to ‘digital worlds critically.’ In an attempt to look towards alternative worlds in academic publishing as well, we ask that all pieces should focus on dialogical approaches to understanding and/or writing – we see articles as being in dialogue among individual authors themselves, co-authors, texts, or technologies.

With this call we want to go beyond simple debates aimed at reaching mutual agreement and instead offer an opportunity for authors to enrich and nuance one another’s views with care, humility, and without the need to resolve debates or come to a singular common understanding fully. In Freire’s sense, we believe that without that attention to the dialogical approach, dialogue turns into “paternalistic manipulation.” This dialogical approach to understanding could shape the format of the paper (e.g., having multiple authors expressing their views in a written conversation), but could also shape the style or focus of the paper, such as a critical conversation and engagement with an existing text or a technology (e.g., through documentation of diffractive reading practices). This could also relate to the re-telling of individual experiences with bias, technologies, and our digital worlds through autoethnographic accounts, vignettes, conversations with our future selves, or other storytelling techniques. We explicitly invite community organizations to submit as well.

Authors can choose from a variety of article types, and for this Research Topic, "Perspectives" are especially welcome. For more information on the available article types, see here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics#article-types

We welcome manuscripts that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• How digital technologies and their design processes can be leveraged to genuinely promote gender equity in social, political, and economic life.
• Warnings about the potentially harmful consequences of digital technologies.
• Break the bias within women-focused (which often reads as white, western, middle-class women) technology research.
• Confronting practices and power structures of modernity through post-digital futures, using afrofuturist, decolonial, and/or ecofeminist perspectives.
• Enacting alternative presence in tech-related research and industry.

Keywords: Gender Equity, Gendered Technologies, Feminist Technologies, Bias, Stereotypes

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.