Mutual Shaping of Technology and Gender

Mutual shaping is the theoretical framework at the core of Wajcman's lifework, developed across Feminism Confronts Technology (1991) and extended through three decades of research. The argument is that technologies are neither autonomous forces acting on passive societies nor neutral tools whose effects are determined by users. They are artifacts designed within specific social relations — relations of gender, class, race, and institutional power — that shape what the tool does, how it works, who it serves, and who it excludes. The tool in turn reshapes those relations, in ways that sometimes entrench existing inequalities and sometimes open space for their renegotiation. The mutual shaping is continuous: at every stage of design, deployment, and use, the social and the technical are being co-produced.