Claiming Back the Role of Women in Technology

Argentine educator and technology advocate Melina Masnatta’s TEDxRiodelaPlata talk is titled in Spanish “Recuperar el rol de las mujeres en la tecnología”; TED renders it in English as “Claiming Back the Role of Women in Technology.” She frames entry into technology as a kind of career points game that starts in childhood: who receives a computer and who receives a toy kitchen; who is encouraged to take things apart, experiment and solve problems, and who is steered toward care and service. The opening is not an argument that a single gift determines a child’s future. It makes a sequence of ordinary signals visible: career paths begin taking shape before children know whether they are “suited” to them.

Masnatta follows this path from home into schools, universities and workplaces. She discusses barriers women face in technology education, while insisting that the problem is not only whether more girls are recruited. It is also whether they have the conditions to keep learning, develop professional confidence, contribute to design and remain in the field. If classrooms, curricula, peer cultures and professional networks all presume that technical work belongs to men, telling individual girls to be more confident leaves the surrounding rules intact. The talk connects entry, participation and retention, and treats technology education as an institutional environment for which many actors share responsibility.

The talk’s most useful feminist move is to recast underrepresentation as a set of relationships that can be changed, rather than a deficit in individual ability or interest. Who is imagined as a future engineer? Who is allowed to make mistakes? Whose contribution is remembered? Who gets to define the problems technology should solve? It also cautions against treating “women” as a single group. Gender intersects with class, race, geography, disability and educational access, shaping who can afford equipment, courses, transport and unpaid learning time. Increasing representation matters, but it does not automatically redistribute power; we must also ask who controls product direction, organizational decisions and the benefits of technical work.

Personal memories, professional pathways and education initiatives make these mechanisms accessible to a public audience. The talk’s scope is also specific: it focuses on education and technology in Argentina and cannot stand in for research on the differences across Latin America. Published in 2019, any survey or percentage it cites should not be treated as a measure of current conditions. While watching, notice how the talk moves from daily experience to institutional responsibility, then ask what must change beyond the classroom: will schools, employers and technology organizations also revise hiring, promotion, pay and product decisions? Read it alongside Feminist Principles of the Internet and Not My AI’s feminist critique of public-sector algorithmic decisions, extending the question from who enters technology to who decides how it is used.

Watch and read further: TED talk and Spanish transcript; Feminist Principles of the Internet; Not My AI.