the socialist may day · together we win: bottom-up gains for farmworkers ... over four years the...

the SOCIALIST

LIVING WAGENOT MINIMUM

WAGE!BOYCOTT

WENDY’S!

ENDMODERN

DAY

SLAVERY!

END THE

ATTACK ON

UNIONS --

OVERTHROW

THE RULE

OFCAPITALIST

LAW!

MAY DAY !

2016

theSOCIALIST

EDITOR & LAYOUTLynn Lomiba

COPY EDITORSKristen Henderson, Sally Joyner,

Jim Marra

EDITORIAL BOARDWalter Beck

Kristen HendersonSally Joyner

David KeilLauren Ann Read Koslow

Jim MarraAmanda RiggleSteve RossignolBrooke Shannon

The Socialist is published by the Socialist Party USA. Unless otherwise noted, the views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of

the SPUSA or the Editorial Board. The Socialist may be reprinted with permission for non-profit

purposes.

Rights revert to the writer upon publication, but credit should be given to The Socialist upon

re-publication. The Socialist retains the right to republish material that initially

appears in the magazine.ISSN 0884-6154

339 Lafayette St #303New York NY 10012

Copyright © 2016 The SocialistIssue 2 | May 2016

We have Locals and Local Organizers in:

CALIFORNIACOLORADOILLINOISINDIANAMASSACHUSETTSMICHIGANMINNESOTAMISSOURI

NEW JERSEYNEW YORKNORTH CAROLINAOKLAHOMAOREGONPENNSYLVANIATENNESSEETEXAS

Learn more at www.socialistparty-usa.org.

Socialists don't let other Socialists do socialism alone.

theSOCIALIST

EDITOR & LAYOUTLynn Lomiba

COPY EDITORSKristen Henderson, Sally Joyner,

Jim Marra

EDITORIAL BOARDWalter Beck

Kristen HendersonSally Joyner

David KeilLauren Ann Read Koslow

Jim MarraAmanda RiggleSteve RossignolBrooke Shannon

The Socialist is published by the Socialist Party USA. Unless otherwise noted, the views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of

the SPUSA or the Editorial Board. The Socialist may be reprinted with permission for non-profit

purposes.

Rights revert to the writer upon publication, but credit should be given to The Socialist upon

re-publication. The Socialist retains the right to republish material that initially

appears in the magazine.ISSN 0884-6154

339 Lafayette St #303New York NY 10012

Copyright © 2016 The SocialistIssue 2 | May 2016

"We have nothing to lose but our chains."

— Assata Shakur

WHAT'S

578

10

message from soltysik/walker 2016MIMI SOLTYSIK & ANGELA NICOLE WALKER

ON THE FRIEDRICHS CASE & OTHER SUPREME COURT FOLLIESSTEVE ROSSIGNOL

ON WOMEN, CODING AND CAPABILITIESMATEO PIMENTEL

INSIDE

TOGETHER WE WIN: BOTTOM-UP GAINS FOR FARMWORKERSGREG PASON

By Greg Pason

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has a long history of wins under its belt. CIW is a workers’ organization that was started out of necessity -- torepresent some of the most exploited workers in the U.S. The organization has become a model for how to organize workers with few legal rights and constantly changing workplaces. After a seriesof hard-fought victories, the target now is the Wendy’s Corporation.

I was first introduced to the CIW through a local labor coalition th Socialist Party USA supported, the Global Sweat Coalition. While our focus was primarily focused on targets like Nike, the issues were similar. We were building popular support of consumers to end sweatshop abuses while the CIW was organizing with consumers to end modern-day slavery and bring power tofarmworkers.

Background

The CIW was first formed in 1993 by a small group of farmworkers who met to discuss problems in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida. This small

group expanded quickly, emboldened by the number of farmworkers who joined and an increasing number of victories, including a successful hunger strike in 1998 that brought concessions from farm owners and increased wages.

The Coalition addressed issue beyond wage increases: Working conditions and exploitation were major issues in the fields. The Coalition brought attention to these issues and exposed the numerous multi-state farm slavery operation across the Southeastern U.S. These actions played a major role in the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000.

As the Coalition grew, it became obvious that focusing mostly on fly-by-the-night tomato picking operations was difficult. In 2001, the Coalition changed it strategy by focusing attention not only on the farms themselves but also on the major purchasers of tomatoes – specifically, the fast-food industry and supermarket chains.

TOGETHER WE WIN: BOTTOM-UP GAINS FOR FARMWORKERSLessons to learn from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Movement

WWW.THESOCIALIST.US 5

In 2001, the Taco Bell campaign began. Over four years the Coalition relied on the Taco Bell customer base (mostly students), as well as the faith and broader labor movement to build a strong alliance for Fair Food.

In 2005 that coalition brought the CIW’s first big victory. Taco Bell agreed to the following CIW demands:

• The first ever direct, ongoing payment by a fast-food industry leader to farmworkers in its supply chain to address sub-standard farm labor wages(nearly doubling the percentage of the final retail price that goes to the workers who pick the produce);

• The first ever enforceable Code of Conduct for agricultural suppliers in the fast-food industry (which includes the CIW, a worker-basedorganization, as part of the investigative body for monitoring worker complaints);

• Market incentives for agricultural suppliers willing to respect their workers’ human rights, even when those rights are not guaranteed by law;

• 100 percent transparency for Taco Bell’s tomato purchases in Florida (the agreement commits Taco Bell to buy only from Florida growers who agree to the pass-through and to document and monitor the pass-through, providing complete records of Taco Bell’s Florida tomato purchases and growers’ wage records to the CIW).

From Taco Bell to McDonalds

The CIW has continued to make major gains. With the support of allies, the CIW has pressured major corporations to agree to their demands and Code of Conduct, as well as a $.01 per pound “bonus” for farmworkers.

Eleven companies have signed on to the Fair Food campaign since the Taco Bell win, including multi-nationals like McDonalds and Wal-Mart. Not too bad for a grass-roots organization composed of some of the most disenfranchised workers!

The CIW strategy is exciting because it shows that a bottom-up labor organization can win

power for workers. It also shows that workers and consumers can work together on labor and human rights actions to create broader movements that bring structural changes. Current Campaign: Wendy's

Over the last few years, the Coalition has targeted Wendy’s using the slogan “YOUR BURGERS MAY BE SQUARE BUT YOUR FOOD AIN’T FAIR.” Labor and human rights activists have donned the Wendy’s pigtails and picketed, leafleted and organized. In March, the CIW formally called for a national boycott of the chain.

The Wendy’s boycott is the first formal boycott called since the Taco Bell campaign, and the Coalition started it with a bang. A Workers Justice Tour started in Florida and extended to Kentucky, Ohio and New York.

The Coalition declared the national boycott for three principal reasons:

1. Wendy’s is profiting from farmworker poverty by holding out while all its major competitors joined the Fair Food Program (FFP) years ago;

2. Wendy’s has chosen public relations over human rights by releasing an empty, toothless “Code of Conduct” in response to the FFP’s award-winning, enforcement-focused, worker-driven approach to social responsibility; and

3. Wendy’s abandoned the Florida tomato industry after the implementation of the FFP and shifted its purchases to Mexico, where human rights violations are endemic and go effectively unchecked.

April was declared a month of outrage, and the campaign will go into full swing this summer. The Socialist Party has endorsed the campaign and we encourage all of our members and supporters to become involved.

We all have an opportunity to join this important campaign and help continue to build momentum for the farmworkers movement.

Together we win!

6 THE SOCIALIST - ISSUE 2 | MAY 2016 - COPYRIGHT © THE SOCIALIST

A MAY DAY MESSAGE FROM THE SOLTYSIK/WALKER 2016 CAMPAIGN

This May Day, we’re asking you to join us for a moment to review some facts. Amidst the clamor of the Fight for $15 movement, we’d like to share some figures that reflect the sobering realities facing the working class. We’d also like to acknowledge that the Fight for $15 movement is providing a needed reform, and we are grateful for all those involved in that struggle. This acknowledgement is also a plea to those offering their blood, sweat, and tears to reform-based approaches to the working class struggle. We ask that they consider going all-in on a revolutionary effort to address the sickness of capitalism.

The facts motivating this proposal come from MIT’s “living wage calculator.” It “draws upon geographically specific expenditure data related to a family’s likely minimum food, child care, health insurance, housing, transportation, and other basic necessities (e.g. clothing, personal care items, etc.) costs.” In essence, it determines the minimum one needs to earn to meet life’s basic financial needs.

Setting aside expenditures for entertainment and other areas that contribute toward a life of dignity, if you live in Los Angeles County and are a single parent with one child, you would need to earn $25.72 an hour to make a living wage.

If you are a single parent with two children, that number skyrockets to $29.28. So, at $15 an hour, a single parent with one child is falling behind over $10 an hour for each hour worked. If you live in Milwaukee County and are a single parent with one child, the living wage is $22.75 an hour. If you are a single parent with two children, that figure jumps to $29.26. A single parent with two children in Milwaukee County is negative nearly $15 for each hour worked at $15 an hour.

In some respects, the push for raising the minimum wage is a successful diversion from a focus on addressing the root of the problem, and we suspect that capitalism’s biggest supporters are likely pleased that the broader focus has yet to fully shift toward system change. The Soltysik/Walker 2016 Campaign is saying, “No more!” It is asking you to join us in the effort to address the scourge of capitalism.

In the words of Assata Shakur, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

— Mimi Soltysik & Angela Nicole Walker


ON THE FRIEDRICHS CASE AND OTHER SUPREME COURT FOLLIES By Steve Rossignol

Public sector unions in California and probably elsewhere in the United States most certainly dodged a bullet on March 29th when the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling allowing public sector unions to deduct dues from employees’ paychecks.

While most certainly we will not take any joy in celebrating the demise of anyone, there is no doubt that the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was integral in this favorable ruling for the unions. Scalia had specifically said in January that he would be in favor of overturning the lower court ruling.

And it would almost appear that the Republican Party could technically have been hoisted by its own petard with their insistence on not approving a Supreme Court judicial nominee — it is quite possible that the corporate agenda could have succeeded had the appointment of a judicial nominee been selected and confirmed prior to the Friedrichs decision.

But public sector unions — and indeed probably all unions — are not out of the woods yet. Even while the tie ruling in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association left the verdict of the lower court unchanged, there are at least twenty more pending cases around the country which seek to challenge the authority of unions to deduct union dues.

Many of these pending cases are spearheaded by the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative nonprofit law firm, which petitioned for a new hearing after a ninth Justice is confirmed.

The fact that the conservative corporate anti-union business sector of the nation is feeling emboldened by these continued legal attacks should come as no surprise in view of the steadily pro-corporate rulings of the Supreme Court in recent years.

But even these recent court rulings appear

to have been following a long trend of pro-business SCOTUS decisions over the course of American history. The entire notion of “corporate personhood” is a shining example of this corporate trend.

The notion of a corporation as a “person” obviously has to take some sort of legal form — corporations must have a persona in which they can sue and be sued in the legal system. The notion probably dates to medieval times when the Church had to pursue its interests in a secular world. In the United States the notion began early, with a ruling in 1790 that established the mechanism for this legal stature. Therein followed Marshall v. Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1853, wherein the Supreme Court upheld the notion that corporations are citizens, but only for the purposes of court jurisdiction. Thereafter followed the Crown Jewel of the corporate personhood cases, County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this case, the railroad, and by consequence all corporations, sought to have the “Equal Protection” clauses of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution applied to itself. Robber baron corporations now had the same protections as freed slaves.

In one of those strange quirks of history, the court reporter for the Supreme Court, himself a former railroad man, wrote in the published notes of that case that the 14th Amendment applied to the company, even though this appeared nowhere in the Court’s actual ruling. But it had been inscribed unto the Laws of the Land: Eleven years later the Court ruled that the issue of corporate personhood via the Equal Protection Clause was “well settled,” and, per Chief Justice Morrison Waite, “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”


It’s been all downhill since then (or perhaps uphill for the corporations), but one could say that “Equal Protection” really went to crap for the rest of us with three decisions — one from the conservative Rehnquist Court, and two from the equally conservative Roberts Court:

1. Kelo v. City of New London in 2005, which granted the right of “eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further economic development.” The Court held that the general benefits a community enjoyed from economic growth qualified private redevelopment plans as a permissible “public use” under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Already this ruling has been used to justify construction of oil and natural gas pipelines in the country, notably the infamous Keystone pipeline from Canada, as well as a host of other “economic developments.” One case in Texas even allowed for a large hotel chain to acquire beach front property from a small landowner.It must be said that the majority vote in Kelo came from the “liberal” justices — Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens.

2. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, wherein the government could not restrict the “free speech” of corporations and associations via political campaign expenditures. Granted, this also applied to labor unions.

Henceforth, the concept of corporate personhood was extended to a strange definition of “free speech” for the corporations, a definition which was defined in regards to political expenditures. The more one spends, the freer ones corporate speech becomes.

3. McKutcheon v. Federal Election Commission in 2014. Citizens United provided a legal precedent for this third corporate-centric case. In McKutcheon, the Roberts Court removed all limits to campaign spending by corporations or associations (read this as “Political Action Committees”).

It must be said, however, that the McKutcheon case did not remove the campaign donation

restrictions for individual political contributions, which remain fixed at $2600 per individual per election. It has become pretty obvious that corporate “free speech” is just a wee bit freer than individual free speech.

It is becoming increasing obvious to the innocent bystander that not only is the entire concept of judicial precedent being used to further increase corporate wealth and power in American jurisprudence. It exerts a profound and undue influence in the name of “law,” but also that somehow the entire American judicial system has appeared to lose its way. Now the “rule of law” has become more specifically the “rule of capitalist law.”

In the criminal legal system, it has always been obvious that the rich have been more immune to punishment and the poor have always gotten the shorter end of the proverbial legal stick. It is now apparent that the entire American legal and political system has become a tool by which the wealthy and the corporations are literally able to purchase the legal rulings of their choice.

The Supreme Court, as the “supreme law of the land”, continues to demonstrate the supreme collective power of the 1%.


ON WOMEN, CODING AND CAPABILITIESBy Mateo Pimentel

Gender, Social Justice and Capabilities

Gender and social justice do not make strange bedfellows. Injustice based upon gender conflicts with the belief that people have dignity because they are human. By the same token, human dignity is fully compatible with the notion of “equal worth,” which necessitates a respect for the inherent value of all people. Equal worth precludes any abridgement of the value of human beings based upon gender, and it takes root in the democratic ideals of freedom and opportunity. Yet, to advocate for equal worth apropos gender is not passive; it means embracing the human ability to create a life that aligns with what matters most, or with what is most sacred. And in order to secure and protect equal worth, it is valuable to consider the “capabilities approach,” which prioritizes what people are able to do and to be.

The capabilities approach stems from Amartya Sen’s economics, which continues to influence the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Reports. This approach poses an elegant question that goes to the heart of what a woman’s opportunities and liberties truly

are. “What is a woman able to do and to be?” Moreover, the capabilities approach rests on two assumptions. First, it assumes the existence of a category of functions that are vital to human life. Second, as do Marx and Aristotle, it assumes that the performance of those functions is a distinctly human feature. These two basic tenets bespeak the idea that a human being – dignified and free – may shape her own life rather than live as a passive observer whose life the world shapes. Hence, a woman capable of shaping her own life bears value and is an end in herself instead of an exploited object whose worth is predicated on its utility to others.

Proponents of the capabilities approach note that traditional (or resource-based) economic approaches are not sufficiently comprehensive. For example, inquiring about the Gross National Product (GNP) per capita and problems with distribution of wealth and income does not paint an accurate picture of peoples’ lives. It excludes such factors as life expectancy, infant mortality, educational opportunities, health care, employment opportunities, land rights, and political liberties. Furthermore, the issue



it ropes the technological element and drags to the forefront of a discussion that must thereafter account for questions like, “Whose technologies?” and “Technology for whom?” Such questions are central to the larger feminist discussion. That is, any injustice wrought on the basis of gender is fundamentally at odds with the belief that all people have dignity simply because they are human.

Women in Computer Software Coding and Capabilities

While concerns about “what a woman is able to do and to be” certainly manifest in the world of software development work, it is less obvious whether the capabilities approach has any significance in the realm of coding. After all, it is a technological sphere where gender equality today is tenuous at best. If the capabilities approach is to be enlisted in service of social justice and gender equality for women in coding, it is necessary to test whether the approach satisfies the need for a new kind of action and political analysis. This analysis would address women, coding, science, technology, and the fresh sources of power they engender. Testing this hypothesis for falsifiability is an important, scientific step, which would demonstrate that the capabilities approach and women in coding are incompatible.

To prove the capabilities and women in coding incompatible, it would be necessary to demonstrate the irrelevance of the functions that the approach deems vital to all human life. Furthermore, it is necessary to show that the capabilities approach’s doctrine of vital functions does not command a sweeping, cross-cultural and global consensus among women, including women in coding. Hence, it is necessary to evince that some people’s views on what a “complete and good” human life constitutes may not represent either necessary nor sufficient determinants of those vital functions that would support the required political measures. Testing for falsifiability requires proving that the approach’s functions have no place in a pluralistic society; one that equally values women’s participation, work, and

the overall contribution to coding and science and technology. Ultimately, it is in virtue of such functions, which are separate components of distinct quality and central to basic human powers, dignity, and equal worth, which the capabilities approach and women in coding effectively coincide.

In addition, we should consider differences in applying the capabilities approach to women in coding in rich countries relative to those in countries where a lack of access to even basic education, say, is the reigning issue. But unlike women in poor countries, where coding and programming are perhaps chimeras, there is little doubt that women in rich countries can “do” coding and “be” coders. The fact that Ada Lovelace, an Englishwoman and countess of the mid-19th century, was the world’s first computer programmer suggests that economic privilege matters. Of course, the notion that a capabilities approach to women in rich countries is different from its application to women in poor countries is categorically different from claims about the absence of obstacles to woman becoming coders and doing coding. In fact, there are many obstacles, including the unabashedly misogynistic ether in the coding realm that can, and often does, make women seem alien from the outset.

Additionally, the basics of the capabilities approach to women in poor countries and throughout development work reveal that many women in rich countries face very different obstacles than their impoverished counterparts around the globe. Whether a language of preferences or rights, these are very important things to consider for women in, or who hope to join, the world of coding. The language of capabilities may supersede preferences and rights wholesale for women in poor countries (and, perhaps, to their benefit). But how will obviating such approaches oppress women in rich countries who “may have no preference” vis-à-vis the economic freedom that coding brings them, and who “may not consider themselves worthy” of at least a basic training in coding literacy?

Some may take issue with this question. In fact, they may argue that women who do not have the chance to become literate are far worse off than women who have more than their basic educational needs met, but are not being encouraged to take software engineering classes in college. Such responses do little more than qualify certain capabilities approaches as “real” and “valuable,” while at the same time relegating others. Are these responses intended to legitimate certain kinds of development by presuming their preeminent significance a priori? A further question involves whether this kind of contention suggests that the capabilities approach ignores the plight of some women in light of others; specifically because of the kind of value they create for members of rich nations. If so, it becomes necessary to acknowledge that the capabilities approach is not the product of feminism, least of all a socialist feminism.

Thanks to Women, Progress

Ada Lovelace was born two centuries ago in 1815 and she studied mathematics and logic out of a deep, personal interest in both subjects. She was both an Englishwoman and a countess, and she became the world’s first computer programmer while working with fellow mathematician, Charles Babbage. Lovelace’s intellectual contributions were unimaginably significant for many reasons, not the least of which is the advent of modern computer science. Ultimately, Lovelace’s achievements in programming (and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or “stem”) make her the predecessor to the very women that would kindle the powerful world of coding a century after her death.

In the late 1950s and early1960s, it was women who were responsible for founding two of the United Kingdom’s first “software houses,” or the sites where workers actually made the programs that might run on a computer. These women excelled at writing the programs themselves, and they were very financially successful despite the fact that many people assumed only science departments or technical firms would have any interest in their work. The fact that women started these businesses and turned a handsome profit comes as no surprise, though; it was during this

brief period in the history of women in coding that many laypeople normally considered coding to be “women’s work,” as it required dedication to both detail and typing.

One woman, Dina St. Johnston (formerly Vaughan), quit school at age seventeen and joined a “pioneering computer firm” by the name Elliot Brothers. There, St. Johnston learned programming and spotted an important market gap: She recognized that there were no programmers selling software straight to industry. “There was a shortage of processor-oriented people who were happy to go round a steel works in a hard hat,” she noted. So, St. Johnston donned the hard hat and went to work, and in 1959, this remarkable woman founded the business known as Vaughan Programming Services, the UK’s first software house. Her business created software for industry powerhouses like the BBC, Unilever, British Rail, and more. Most notably, St. Johnston created real-time passenger information systems (forerunner to the “clickety-click” timetable boards in train stations) and flight simulators for the Royal Air Force (RAF).

Another woman, Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley, who in 1939 made her way to Britain as a child Holocaust survivor, studied for a degree in mathematics in night school and later founded her own software house, Freelance Programmers, in 1962. Bent on working while raising a family, Shirley was intent that other women be able to do the same. So, she employed only women programmers until the mid 1970s, when the Equal Opportunities Act forced her to make applications available to men. Her business made sold software in the areas of banking, transport, and telecoms.

In many important ways, women’s contributions to computing history differs from those of the highly popularized Enigma machines of the 1940s, or the personal computing revolution of the 1980s. It was women in 1960s computing who assumed the task of “coding” for the mundane matters that affect life in vastly different parts of the world. Women lay claim to engineering solutions to everyday matters like train signaling, payroll automation, banking system, and air-traffic control — contributions to computing that people take for granted every day. Women’s early work in coding


and computing has thus allowed for new and digitally creative economic sectors to emerge, ones that have a tendency to be very profitable.

Today, gaming is one such industry. Regardless of its profitability, however, the gaming industry is rife with problems concerning to gender, participation, and opportunity. Some years ago, an American blogger tweeted the question “Why are there so few lady game creators?” Hundreds of women game developers responded. Many detailed their personal encounters with “entrenched industry sexism.” It is no secret that women are highly underrepresented, and face discrimination in programming-heavy industries like gaming and game development.

In 2006, female staff accounted for little more than ten percent of the UK games industry workforce. Figures from only three years later suggested that the number fell by three percent. The question is this: Why such underrepresentation in gaming and game development when women are comparatively well represented in others, such as marketing, PR and support services? Why not the design and production of new games? Moreover, the impacts that this unbalanced gender split creates worries industry leaders—especially now that virtually half of all gamers in the UK are women. And if trends continue to fall so dangerously low, the fear is that, economically the UK will suffer both creatively and digitally.

The problem is global, and it extends beyond gaming. Virtually forty percent of computer science graduates were women in 1983. That number today, in 2015, has decreased by half. What is more, the US Department of Labor reports that American universities will only be able to meet about thirty percent of the demand of the computer specialist job openings by 2020. One issue is that a portion of women simply do not pursue coding. But when young women interested in coding have been asked why they want to pursue it, they identify a number of things: jobs, love for the coding craft, empowerment. Women represent a portion of the population that can enter and suffuse the industry with the missing talent and intelligence it so desperately needs. So, why do more women not enter one of the 21st century’s major creative sectors? For one thing,

prejudice – sexism, racism, homophobia – is ubiquitous and not made unacceptable.

Arguing Against Change

For women and development in poor countries, it is worth mentioning that the capabilities approach mitigates several complications that arise among the different discussions on global gender equality. One is the argument from culture. This argument posits that traditional cultures subscribe to their own norms, which condition what women’s lives ought to be; too much encroachment on such standards is suspiciously “Western.” Another qualm is the argument from the good of diversity. This argument holds that the world is wonderfully diverse because not all people act according to a single ledger of norms; to homogenize the wealth of cultural standards at work in the world is tantamount to impoverishing the world’s cultural splendor itself. Finally, there is the argument from paternalism. This argument holds that the implementation of a set of cross-cultural norms disrespects people’s freedom and agency; moreover, the best judges of “what is good” are those who judge for themselves.

It is also important to note that applying the capabilities approach to the context (indeed, the lived experience) of women in the coding kingdom may incite resistance due to these very same arguments. Borrowing from the argument from culture, critics may manifest that software engineering or coding culture is already capable of providing avenues for women to flourish and construct worthwhile careers. But to introduce the capabilities approach – they may argue – is to arrogantly presuppose that coding culture is incapable of providing women with economic and political opportunities that equal those of their male counterparts. Those opposed may likewise borrow from the argument from the good of diversity and claim that introducing the capabilities approach to existing practices and norms in coding culture detracts from its worth and beauty and risks homogenization. Or they may cite the argument from paternalism and wager that pushing for change thusly relegates women to childlike positions of having to accept “what is good for them” rather than facilitating their freedom and agency to judge “what is good” for themselves. Nevertheless, it is only fair to ask


The capabilities approach to women in coding today is ultimately significant for a number of reasons that go beyond argumentation. For one, women in coding present a historic event that is coplanar to a multiplicity of similar histories that involve gender and technology. The capabilities approach has much to offer women in coding who work in rich countries and is potentially a party to a new chapter in women in coding history. Moreover, women merit the application of the capabilities approach to their history, lest a new form of proletarianization occur, persist, or worse. Prioritizing what women are able to do and be in the realm of coding effectively fashions a new paradigm, one that presumes gender-based injustices to be fundamentally at odds with the belief that all people have dignity and a right to shape their lives regardless of gender. Such a push to secure and protect equal worth and dignity in coding requires nothing less.

Broaching just one example shows that the application of the capabilities approach lends much needed assistance to gender equality and social justice in coding. The relevant function in question here is the category entitled “Senses, imagination and thought.” This entails that women should be able to employ their senses, their imagination and their rational faculties. Moreover for women to perform these in a “truly human way” implies their cultivation by education, literacy, scientific, and mathematical training. It implies that women are able to imagine and think “in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice…” It implies that they are free and able to use their minds “in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression” and the possibility of avoiding pain and having worthwhile experiences.

Yet, if women are not being encouraged or equipped with the education necessary to enter coding from the outset, then there is certainly a set of social and economic preferences at work that stifle equal participation and propagate gender-based discrimination. This is remarkably problematic; historically speaking, it has been the women in rich countries who, with access to education in the stem fields, have not only created programming and modern computing, but who have also fomented one of the most powerful instances of industry that surrounds them. In

advanced industrial societies, some speculate that coding reigns supreme, and that the social relations of science and technology have largely restructured the “historical positions” of women. Some have categorized such “women’s places” in advanced capitalist societies as the home, market, work place, state, school, hospital and church. One more task is thus to identify “women’s places” in coding and other software engineering spheres in order to reveal how power structures and social life are plagued by a lack of equal worth and economic disenfranchisement by capitalist forces.


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