Feminist scholars argue that ‘New media’ is masculine and hence reinforces structural hierarchies rather than reconfiguring them. Comment. (2019)
The claim is not the trivial one that more men are online. It is that new media is gendered in its constitution — in who designs, owns, codes and moderates it — so that mere participation by women does not translate into power. Read that way, the statement is largely sustainable, but it requires a qualification its strongest proponent herself insists on.
What the argument asserts
- Judy Wajcman (Feminism Confronts Technology, 1991; TechnoFeminism, 2004) argues that technology is neither neutral nor inherently masculine, but is socially shaped in male-dominated contexts of design, ownership and engineering, and therefore encodes existing hierarchies. Her decisive evidence is domestic: labour-saving appliances did not reduce hours of housework, because standards of cleanliness rose to absorb the saving. The technology reproduced the housewife it promised to free.
- Cynthia Cockburn adds that technical competence is itself a construction of masculinity, so women approach the machine already marked as its outsiders.
- Applied to new media, the mechanisms are design in male-dominated firms, algorithms trained on already-skewed data, and harassment operating as the policing of women’s presence in public.
Evidence that hierarchies are reinforced
- Access is gendered at the household, not the network. The Comprehensive Modular Survey: Telecom (2025) records internet use among rural 15–24-year-olds at 95.7% for males against 91.1% for females, with smartphone ownership similarly skewed. ASER 2024 found that among rural 14–16-year-olds, 36.2% of boys but only 26.9% of girls owned a smartphone. The “family phone” is, in practice, a male phone.
- Online violence functions as boundary maintenance. Amnesty International’s Troll Patrol India study of abuse directed at Indian women politicians found a large share of tweets problematic or abusive, with Muslim women and women from marginalised castes targeted disproportionately. The auctioning of Muslim women’s photographs on the “Sulli Deals” and “Bulli Bai” applications in 2021–22 showed the same logic of humiliation as exclusion.
- Algorithms carry the bias forward. Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression, 2018) demonstrates how search results reproduce racial and sexual stereotype at scale and at low cost.
- Kimberlé Crenshaw‘s intersectionality (1989) explains the Indian pattern: caste, religion and gender compound, so Dalit and Muslim women are exposed on several axes at once.
The case for reconfiguration
Donna Haraway‘s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) held that technology can dissolve the very boundaries on which patriarchy rests. Manuel Castells‘s mass self-communication describes how broadcast capacity passes to individuals — visible in India’s #MeToo disclosures of 2018 and in Khabar Lahariya, the news organisation run by Dalit women journalists, which used digital platforms to reach audiences that print and television withheld.
Conclusion
New media is masculine by constitution, not by essence. Wajcman’s technofeminism rejects both technological determinism and cyberfeminist utopianism: technology and gender relations shape each other, so the outcome is political rather than given. Where women enter ownership, design and regulation, reconfiguration is genuinely possible; where they enter only as users, the old hierarchy is reproduced with greater reach and lower cost — which is precisely why the statement holds for the present moment without holding for all time.