SIGCHI Equity Talks # 5: Understanding Gender
Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (VP for Publications)
Previous Equity Talk Summary: Infrastructuring Equity
All Equity Talks (running March through June, 2021)
The conversation began with an introduction from me Theresa Tanenbaum (she/her*, VP for Publications) and Neha Kumar (she/her, VP at Large). We acknowledged that the topic of gender and sexuality within our community was sufficiently complex and significant that we wouldn’t be able to do much more than open up a conversation within the time we had available. I highlighted the presence of some of our exceptionally accomplished participants “who have been in the trenches working on issues of gender equity from a service standpoint within the community and also working on scholarship connected to gender representation as it pertains to HCI.” I outlined the vision for the conversation that we’d collected these participants to have. I wanted us to focus on pain points within the HCI community and the issues that we had encountered as scholars, community members, and volunteers. I asked participants to reflect on the challenges they’d experienced while seeking to conduct non-gender related scholarship (in a context that isn’t always hospitable to people who are not men), and also while seeking to look at the role that gender plays within our communities, scholarship, and our service work. Our moderator, Cale Passmore (he/him/they/them) then started us off.
…we have about four things that we’d like to center this discussion on….to name the problem, Tess has brought us in to discuss, “What would you say are the biggest challenges facing women, trans, non-binary, gender expansive, and queer people in the SIGCHI community today?” Another question would be, “What do you suggest as a strategy for creating a safer, more inclusive, global SIGCHI community for women, trans people, and other marginalized folks, due to their gender identity? How can SIGCHI better support queer and trans members, who have intersectional and multiply marginalized identities? And where does the responsibility lie for change, and who holds power to create a more gender and queer-inclusive SIGCHI community? What actions can and should be taken to improve the situation?”
*NOTE: In this article I’ve included pronouns only for people who disclosed them, either verbally, or in their Zoom name. It’s important to recognize that pronouns cannot always be inferred from someone’s name or appearance and that not everyone feels comfortable or safe broadcasting their pronouns in every context.
Background: creating inclusive policies at the ACM
Cale then invited me to discuss the work that I’ve been doing on inclusive name change policies within the ACM Digital Library, as a way of getting the conversation started. I spent some time recounting my experiences coming out as a transgender woman in 2019, at which point I sought to correct my name on my previously published work. At that point, no publishers had any kind of trans-inclusive name change policy or practices in place, and I was met by a series of rejections and closed doors. The ACM was about a year into an attempt to determine how to equitably correct the names of several trans and nonbinary people who had requested changes previously, but the conversation was not moving forward.
I came in right as a number of other folks were leaving and found myself one of only a handful of trans people in a conversation…finding myself suddenly tokenized and advocating for trans issues within the ACM leadership around publication rights. And so I did the thing that we’re trained to do as scholars: I educated myself as quickly and as thoroughly as I could. I talked to as many people as I could. I became aware of as many different facets of the issues as I could because I knew that I was going to be representing a very diverse international population of people, who are seeking to change their names for various reasons. And I went to work.
Working with CHI community members Katta Spiel (they/them) and Z Toups, we drafted what would eventually become the first ever trans inclusive name change policy to be adopted by a major publisher. This policy set a significant precedent for the publishing world, but it also fell short in a few key areas, and so I’ve continued to work on implementing it and improving it, even as I’ve worked to advocate for these kinds of policies with other publishers. As a result of this work, I’ve come to learn at least a little bit about how power operates within the ACM, how decisions get made, and the kinds of activism and advocacy that are able to produce meaningful change within the institutional context in which SIGCHI operates. My experiences with this work speak to the third question Cale asked, about who has power to create a more gender and queer inclusive SIGCHI Community. How do we, as a community of people who are seeking equitable and just treatments and policies, find ways to claim power within our institutions? How do we hold our institutions accountable, so that they are in service to our needs, and not themselves a source of harm?
When I raised this issue, Susan Dray (she/her) asked if the policy we had created was focused solely on trans people, or if it applied to anyone who changed their name. I responded that it applied to anyone who changed their name for two reasons.
First, it’s simply the right thing to do! I believe that everyone is entitled to be the authority on their own identity, and to be called by the names and pronouns that they wish to be called by. I see this as a basic human right: one that our society is increasingly coming to respect. There are many good reasons why someone might change their name, including marriage, divorce, religious conversion, gender transition, or to avoid a name that carries stigma (such as caste status). We created a policy that addressed the urgent need of one of the more vulnerable and discriminated-against groups in our community, knowing that there was a much larger constituency of people who would benefit from that policy once implemented.
The second reason why the policy needed to be comprehensive and inclusive is that the ACM shouldn’t be in the position of deciding something like who is and isn’t “transgender enough” to be included under this policy. From a practical standpoint the ACM doesn’t have the resources or expertise to independently verify someone’s gender identity, transition status, or any other arbitrary “proof” of transness that we might establish. Those of us drafting the policy felt that to demand documentation of gender transition would be a violation of the dignity and privacy of people in our community, and that it would ultimately exclude the most vulnerable members of the community — those who live in states and countries where they are not permitted to correct their identification documents. From both a practical and an ethical standpoint, this policy needed to be as inclusive as possible.
Talking about gender and collecting data
Cale opened the floor for discussion again, and Edward Freedman raised the issue of how to ask the membership of his local ACM chapter for demographic information, including how to collect data on the gender of chapter members. He asked if it might not be better to ask for “gender identity” instead of “gender”. Morgan Scheuerman (he/him) responded in the chat that “gender” was a better term, and Oliver Haimson (he/him) elaborated on this point, arguing that while there was a brief period of time where it was considered “politically correct” to say “gender identity” or “identifies as” that the current consensus is to simply accept people at face value when they state their gender. Edward responded, explaining that the question was intended to make the forms more reflective of the personal preferences of the membership, and less reflective of “some local state’s legal identification”.
Within the chat window, a parallel discussion unfolded. Katta shared an excellent resource created by members of our community with guidelines for how to ask about gender in research. Morgan followed this with a link to some more of his work questioning whether we need to ask for gender at all on web forms. Susan Dray also questioned whether we had any need to collect this information, and Oliver agreed that in HCI we typically “don’t really need to worry too much about people’s ‘legal’ gender identification or biological characteristics.” Andrew Kun (he/him, VP for Conferences) pointed out that collecting demographic data like gender and race can be important in understanding who the stakeholders were in a community, in order to better support them. This point was echoed by Catherine D’Ignazio (she/her/ella) who argued that if we don’t collect this data “we are potentially removing a tool to hold people accountable for the disparities that exist.” Stacy Branham (she/her, AC for Accessibility) agreed that this was an important function for data collection, but reminded us that so long as people felt unsafe disclosing their marginalized status, any data we collect will be inaccurate. She proposed that these questions should be optional. Michael Muller (he/him) considered this from the perspective of Europe’s GDPR policy, asserting that collecting such data without justification was not necessary. He argued that in some contexts it was important to know who the stakeholders in a community were, but that in many contexts, collecting and maintaining these kinds of records without need burdens the people doing the collecting, and the people whose data is being held in trust. Kate Shores (she/her) pointed out that we should never require people to report their legal gender designation, because the processes for legally changing one’s gender are wildly variable and biased along socioeconomic/class lines.
Power imbalances and DEI work as uncompensated labor
At this point, something was happening in the discussion that merits attention and reflection as it illustrates a recurring and problematic pattern in discussions around equity issues within our community. Well-meaning individuals keen to be allies ask in earnest to be educated about, for example, the difference between intersex and nonbinary people. Each time this educational need arises, however, it then requires multiple people to point out suitable resources and offer lengthy explanations. Inexperience is not in itself a problem: many cisgender people (people whose gender matches their assigned sex at birth) are unfamiliar with the experiences of transgender, non-binary, and intersex people. But when in our limited time together, addressing inexperience begins to take precedence over centering the voices of the marginalized individuals who have gathered to discuss the challenges they face within our community, the price we pay is steep.
Michael Ann DeVito (she/her) pointed to this in the chat, arguing that “data collection is entirely the wrong thing for us to be focusing on here. We’re in the weeds when there are much bigger issues. We need to be talking about getting people onto committees, giving marginalized people power, and making real change, not just how to make it easier for people to collect data on us.” Her comment was echoed by many people in the chat. Nic Bidwell (she/her) tried to call our attention to the ways in which these demographic categories do a poor job of addressing diversity, and tried to focus us on how this question of data collection relates to systems of power. Morgan agreed that we should shift the discussion to one of power and safety, and I suggested that it would be nice to hear from some of the other panelists. At this point we had spent a full 34 minutes of a conversation intended to focus on the equity concerns experienced by gender and sexual minorities on educating the audience instead. Cale called on Michael Ann who spoke forcefully on how the situation was reflective of the challenges that we face in this community:
If we’re looking at what the problems are for SIGCHI, it’s this! It’s what’s happening literally right now!
There are a bunch of people that are queer, that are trans, that are in the chat being very clear that this is not the issue! And we’ve decided to keep centering the discussion around it because it is what the white men in the audience would like us to talk about right now!
The first step in fixing what’s wrong with queer issues, trans issues, gender issues in SIGCHI (as with any space) is centering the people who are being affected. This cannot be a useful forum if it is just going to be “question hour” for white men that would like to understand how to collect data about trans people better. Hire a consultant for that! That’s not what this is for! We need to recenter on actual change, or there’s no point to this discussion.
Within the chat there was much support for Michael Ann’s perspective. I tried to expand on her points:
This is getting towards something that I’ve been struggling a lot with in the last few years, which is “how to balance our responsibilities as the people, who are knowledgeable about the issues of marginalized folks around gender, against the unrelenting demands for that kind of epistemic labor that come our way in this community?” Because…I did not want the name change policy to be written by cis people, and so (as one of the only trans people in the room) I found myself taking on that work. Not because I was initially an expert in it but because the policies that affected me, and my community, needed to be written by people with an insider view rather than an outsider view.
And at the same time, it shouldn’t always be the responsibility of the vulnerable group to do the educating of the comfortable majority. How do we balance that? What is the strategy available to us to manage our own time, to manage our emotional resources, to manage our capacity, to continue to do the other work that we’re all committed to doing (that we went into this career to do) and also, make certain that we aren’t ceding the floor to the comfortable majority to make decisions on our behalf?
This tension between feeling uniquely qualified to do the work to address issues of equity and inclusion and feeling frequently exploited by demands to do equity work is something that many marginalized people routinely experience. Morgan Scheuerman made an important point, saying:
In the cases where we have people that are part of the marginalized community who are affected leading things (like diversity events) I think there needs to be a delineation between things that are meant to be educational and things that are meant to be worked on. Things that are educational should also be led by the people in those communities who are affected, but I also think that they should be prepared to do that and paid to do that.
He went on to reflect on his experience during this equity talk:
I can say coming in, I didn’t expect to be sitting here trying to provide an educational moment when I was asked to be here. It’s very jarring. And it can actually be very — I don’t even know if microaggression is the right word? — but it is very upsetting. I think a lot of people here are very upset by this. And so when the space is meant to be educational for the majority, I think it needs to be really clear. And [marginalized] people need to be compensated in some meaningful way for that labor, because it’s a lot of emotional labor too, to field those kinds of questions.
The kind of educational and emotional labor described by Morgan has a name: “Epistemic Exploitation”. It’s a phenomenon that Katta Spiel introduced me to a few years ago (initially described by Nora Berenstain in 2016), and it “occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression…epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor.” This is a common experience that resonated with many of the participants in the discussion. Oliver Haimson expanded on the ways that this kind of work has opportunity costs for marginalized people:
I just also wanted to acknowledge the extra time that it takes if we’re thinking about the example of Tess working so hard on the Name Change Policy. That’s time that Tess wasn’t able to spend doing research, writing papers, working on her tenure case — all of these things that all of us have to do. And I know [for] myself, I end up spending way more time on DEI work and work related to gender (often at my university or in a lot of different contexts) and I just want there to be some acknowledgment that some people are spending a lot more time on this than others. Even though we’re also saying “yeah, the people, who are most impacted should be able to be involved and have leadership” , at the same time, the other side of that is that there needs to be some acknowledgment that it is at the cost of other work.
Celine Latulipe (she/her) considered how this kind of labor might be recognized and compensated by our institutions:
It would be really great to figure out how to consider the time taken by individuals from marginalized communities to educate/advocate/write policies/etc., and how to embed recognition of that work in tenure and promotion policies. I would love to see examples of T&P policies that already do this…I do NOT think that recognition should take the form of ‘extending the tenure clock’ as that just extends the time these individuals work at lower rates of compensation.
Representation, visibility, and empathy vs. lived experiences
Michael Ann DeVito argued that we needed to make it a matter of written policy that the communities most impacted by an issue should be in leadership positions when developing solutions.
The fact is the opinions of cis people on trans name changes are irrelevant. They are completely irrelevant because it doesn’t affect them. The fact is Tess should have been in charge of that committee with no question whatsoever, because she actually knows what she’s talking about. It is not useful to put people that have no lived experience in charge because no matter how empathetic you are (and I do thank you all for your empathy) empathy is not lived experience. And it never will be.
She argued that in order for this to be possible, we need to build better pipelines to support marginalized people over the course of their careers. “The fact is we don’t have enough trans people, enough queer people, to fill the spots because we don’t hire enough trans people, because we don’t hire enough queer people.” She highlighted the unfortunate reality that in HCI it’s much harder to get a job if you are out as queer or trans.
We need to make these structural changes…SIGCHI doesn’t have control over individual university hiring, they don’t. They do have control over who gets all sorts of benefits (in terms of having conferences certain places, in terms of who gets positions on committees) and we can use SIGCHI’s power to deliver a message to individual institutions that “If you want to still be a powerful institution — in our arena, that we control — you need to get your house in order first!”
There was consensus within the group that hiring more marginalized people was of critical importance. To Michael Ann’s point of wanting queer and trans people in positions of leadership on committees Emory Edwards (they/them) highlighted a very real concern:
The problem I worry about with requiring that people leading on gender issues be trans is that it requires people be out. Maybe that is the right call, I’m not sure, but I worry about requiring people out themselves in order to weigh in on issues.
This was something I experienced before I came out, where I had a stake in gender issues within our community, but didn’t feel safe expressing them, because I was still hiding my own transness and queerness in my professional life. Someone shouldn’t have to out themselves in order to have a voice on these issues. Morgan suggested that he would love to have more cis allies involved in improving trans lives in our community, but that that work required trust for it to be just and representative.
Intersectional concerns, and the role of SIGCHI
As the conversation shifted to focus more on what SIGCHI could do to support queer and trans community members, I asked us to consider some of the intersectional issues facing members of our community.
I’m a transgender woman, and so I have some vulnerabilities. But I’m white, I’m in a tenure track position, I live and work in North America (which comes with all sorts of geographic privilege), and I live in a fairly liberal part of North America: California. And so I am not the ideal person to speak to a lot of the concerns facing trans people of color, facing trans people outside of the global North, people who are in more precarious positions such as contract labor, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars. Our community is broad enough that we have people that are marginalized across a wide range of conditions.
Guilherme Colucci (he/him/his) responded to this by highlighting some of the challenges that he faces as a queer person working in Brazil.
I would like to talk a little bit about the reality in Brazil for queer people, and gender issues, and sexuality issues in general. Brazil is considered the most violent country for queer people in general. I think before we can talk about how the SIGCHI community can embrace gender nonconforming people, or even the LGBT people, I think the question is: how can academia in general, reach these people in other ways? Because most of these people will not have the opportunity to engage in a university, let alone in a computing course, let alone the HCI area. So what other strategies could the community create to reach these people and to allow that a Black transgender woman’s thoughts in the south of Brazil can be heard, for example, in California? And I don’t feel I know the answer for this question, to be honest….I would like to know if any other fellow panelists might have some ideas for how to decolonialize the SIGCHI community and allow people from other regions of the world to have their ideas expressed and acknowledged as well?
Alexandra To (she/her) reflected on the ways that inhabiting intersectionally marginalized identities in our community can be overwhelming, and asked what power SIGCHI had, if any, in addressing the systemic violence that women, especially queer and trans women of color, face:
I wanted to briefly address that issue of intersecting identities, and marginality…I have been in and around SIGCHI for a long time, and I have to tell you: I have no idea what this organization does, or is able to do, or what the purview is, and I think that makes it really hard to understand where our advocacy needs to lie. Thinking about intersectionality — queer women of color, trans women of color — the violence that we’ve seen this year, in our community of computer science and HCI researchers, happening to women of color is horrendous.
We keep putting out statement after statement: every single month I’m signing a statement about “why is this being done to women of color?” But I have no idea where to point that attention, and that labor, and that time to. I think when you occupy these intersecting identities, it’s like constantly being pulled in a million directions of, like “where is my voice best used?” and “where is my advocacy best spent?” And it’s just something that is overwhelming that I just wanted to bring into the space a little bit, because again, having been in and around SIGCHI forever, I have no idea what the power of this institution even is!
Neha Kumar responded to this question, echoing Alexandra’s concern that it had also taken her time to understand the institutional difference between the ACM and SIGCHI, especially in terms of rules, regulations, and policies. She argued that SIGCHI is in a position to do more than it currently does, but that this work needed to be done“thoughtfully, rigorously, carefully, and respectfully to a lot of the communities that make up SIGCHI.” She highlighted the role that SIGCHI conferences play in supporting people in our community as they advance through their careers. Referring back to the previous talk on Infrastructuring Equity, she considered how our conferences can be used to support marginalized people, without adding additional labor to their lives. She also highlighted existing sources of support and funding for workshops, and other educational initiatives, arguing that we needed to do better outreach and communication about these resources, so that more people in need can take advantage of them. She acknowledged that our relationship to the ACM means that SIGCHI has limitations on what we can do — that we’re bound by the ACM’s policies, as the parent organization — but that there is room within those policies for us to advocate for the needs and interests of our members.
Shaowen Bardzell (she/her, VP at Large) was optimistic about the ways things have been changing within the SIGCHI Executive Committee since she and Neha joined in 2019. She specifically called our attention to the different forums for community engagement that SIGCHI has been using, including a series of SIGCHI Ask-Me-Anything sessions, and now these current Equity Talks. These forums helped her and many others to recognize existing blind spots in how the SIGCHI EC understood issues of equity, and forced them to confront some longstanding issues within the community in some very honest ways. She urged participants in the session to find opportunities to get involved in volunteering work within the community, and reflected on how Volunteer Profiles might be amended to better recognize this kind of labor in order to help make it more visible, especially for tenure and promotion committees moving forward. “I think that if we can create major benefit for one marginal group, it will make a difference in a lot of different marginal groups and all of us in the future.”
To this last point Neha added that we needed to recognize that supporting one marginalized group doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t be able to support other marginalized people. “I think we have to figure out creative ways to support everybody. And I think that we can support everybody.”
In the chat, Susan Dray agreed:
“It’s not a pie” as they say….
On this note we ended the recorded portion of the fifth equity talk: “Understanding Gender”.
Reflections on Equity Talk #5: Understanding Gender…or Understanding Vulnerability?
In the time since the talk has been completed I’ve had some time to reflect on how the conversation played out. I found it striking to see how much of the talk ultimately revolved around questions of emotional and educational labor by vulnerable and marginalized members of our community, and the uneven recognition and compensation of that labor. This issue was foregrounded by trans and queer people: members of our community like me who often find ourselves in a position of having to defend our right to simply exist safely and comfortably within SIGCHI’s public spaces. We often must engage in this labor before we are even permitted to assert our right to be accorded equal representation, consideration, and treatment within the institutional structures and norms of our professional environments. Even in a talk expressly intended to center the concerns of gender and sexual minorities, we devoted more than half of our time to educational labor in response to the demands of a white, cisgender, man.
While gender was nominally the topic of this talk, by centering the concerns of people who are intersectionally oppressed as a result of their gender, as well as their gender identity, and their sexuality led us to discuss issues of vulnerability, advocacy, and marginalization beyond what would have emerged in a conversation about gender centered on the needs of cisgender or straight people within the community. This meant that our talk dealt less with specific issues of gendered discrimination, (mis)representation, and oppression within our community (all of which remain pressing equity issues), and more on the opportunity costs of doing this kind of equity work within the community. This disproportionately hits people who often are “tokenized” or otherwise asked to individually represent the needs of an entire group of people due to their status as a“minority within a minority”. Following the talk, I became aware that some of the attendees of this talk — in particular the cisgender and straight participants — did not anticipate the conversation to take this path, however I would argue that the issues we raised are of critical importance to our community. By centering the voices of people who in many ways exist on the margins of our community (due primarily to their gender and sexuality) we were able to consider systemic and structural forms of inequity that impact a broader subset of vulnerable groups within our community.
Resources:
Revisiting Gendered Web Forms: An Evaluation of Gender Inputs with (Non-)Binary People.
Citation: Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Aaron Jiang, Katta Spiel, and Jed R. Brubaker. 2021. Revisiting Gendered Web Forms: An Evaluation of Gender Inputs with (Non-)Binary People. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 400, 1–18. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445742
HCI Guidelines for Gender Equity and Inclusivity.
Authors: Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Katta Spiel, Oliver L. Haimson, Foad Hamidi, Stacy M. Branham.
Contributors: Os Keyes, Kate Ringland, Brianna Dym, Leo Stewart, Danielle Lottridge, Jes Feuston, Ashley Marie Walker, Michael Ann DeVito, Emily Q. Wang, Danaë Metaxa, Blake Hallinan, Julia Fernandez.
Reviewers / Editors: Alex Ahmed, Os Keyes, Danielle Lottridge.
Epistemic Exploitation
Citation: Nora Berenstain. 2016. Epistemic Exploitation. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3: 569–590. https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0003.022
