Here’s how Eyebeam is fighting sexism in the arts tech world

As we reported yesterday, Industry City–based art and technology nonprofit Eyebeam boasts an all-female class of residents this year.
The residents will begin their yearlong terms working on projects such as exploring how artistic colonialism continues in the digital era and examining gaps in data collection. As it turns out, gender parity has been a big focus of the organization over the past few years, and Eyebeam has been a bright spot in a field that’s still rife with sexism.
The issue recently came to the fore during Ars Electronica, a major art and technology festival in Linz, Austria, which ended on Monday. After reviewing the festival’s list of past winners, Chicago- and New York City–based artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg found that nine out of ten of them were male. This lopsided gender ratio spawned the hashtag #KissMyArs on Twitter and sparked a discussion about the challenges for women working at the intersection of art and technology.

90% of Ars Electronica prize winners are male & the award statue is a headless woman https://t.co/RfdqJ62peP #KissMyArs

— J.R. Carpenter (@jr_carpenter) September 13, 2016

Dewey-Hagborg, along with fellow artists Addie Wagenknecht, Camilla Mørk Røstvik and Kathy High, wrote about the discussion for The Guardian. Eyebeam, where Dewey-Hagborg and Wagenknecht were past residents, got a shoutout for its work to balance the gender ratio.
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Eyebeam doesn’t seek a specific diversity quota, and it was a pleasant surprise that all its residents this year ended up being women, with three of them being women of color, communications manager David Borgonjon told Technical.ly. But it shows just how much progress the organization has made since it began actively addressing the issue in 2013. (Borgonjon had some slight quibbles with The Guardian story: namely, that Eyebeam has found that some of the listed strategies, such as placing more emphasis on interviews than written applications, aren’t so effective.)
The organization has since refined its approach to include the following strategies, program manager Laura Welzenbach wrote in an email to Technical.ly:

• Composing a diverse and fair jury, not only in terms of gender
• Conducting outreach to communities that normally might not think of applying
• Supporting initiatives, such as the Lady Tech Guild and Art + Feminism, that are focused on equity
• Making yourself open to criticism and actively evaluating your own organizations regularly
• Not expecting women — or anyone else, for that matter — to make work related to their identity

Borgonjon also gave us some further background on how Eyebeam was prompted to begin addressing the issue of gender equity in the first place.
He wrote:

The story of how we came to recognize our deep bias really picks up with a resident in 2013 — Laurel Ptak had come on to research 1990s cyberfeminism but got much more interested in the gender politics of the present. She pointed out that her year was the first one that we had more women than men. Women have always had residencies with us, but often they felt like (and were) a minority — she had an idea to bring the whole community of women artists and technologists together into a single space.

She called the program “The Very First Year” — backhanded praise. There wasn’t an agenda. But over this series of conversations, over a year, people really got to dissect all of the gender bias in technology, and in art, and in “art and technology,” which was less progressive than it appeared. 

So we started to examine why we were replicating societal sexism in the institution. Were we reviewing the applications in a biased way? Were our applicant numbers skewed because we weren’t doing outreach? Did our application questions have implicit bias? Once people were here, were they treated differently based on gender? It’s been a slow, iterative process, but we’ve developed some tactics to address this bias. 

We’re pretty keen on presenting a vision of what technology could be — something for everyone, not just tech-bro culture. That means something for people who have been excluded or devalued in technology: communities of color, women, people facing ableism. As far as we’re concerned, real invention happens under pressure, in response to real needs — not the fantasies of tech bros. 

Half of the writers of that [Guardian] piece — Addie, who makes these crazy paintings where she uses drones as a brush, and Heather, who creates portraits using DNA that she scavenges off the street — are particularly intimate alums of Eyebeam. So they saw how Eyebeam went from being a “boy’s treehouse” to, this year, awarding all our residencies to women without noticing or mentioning it. The shift is real — we can see it in how our social media followers demographics have shifted, without us aiming for it.