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By illuminating the rich context in which a state of peace emerges between nations, this article has demonstrated that the care ethic can provide a broader, more complete foundation for the observed democratic peace, one within which “considerations of rights and justice constitute a subset— though admittedly an important one.”47 More specifically, peace, like war, begins “in the mind,” according to Kenneth Waltz. This attribution of the root cause of peace to attitudes and intentions of individuals is evident in Arnold Wolfers’s early and controversial defense of the importance of moral ity in international politics. The main point of his essay on “Statesmanship and Moral Choice” is that national leaders are morally obliged to “establish bonds of friendship.”48 The explicit connection here between moral obligations in international relations, easily derived from, say, a human right to peace, and care as it is prac ticed in friendship holds a twofold significance for the purposes of this article. First, this connection intimates the ethically prior position of care. Indeed, especially as women and members of other traditionally under-represented groups enter the political process, the practice of care associated most closely with them influences local and national policy. While this relationship has been widely confirmed for the world’s democratic, industrialized nations, it has more recently been evidenced in non-democratic and less-developed nations. Womenpiece-workers in Bangladesh, for example, successfully formed a labor union as a platform for legalizing the economic independence women there need to care and provide for their families.49 The international political process increasingly respects such domestic laws and policies, in part due to personal and diplomatic relationships among individuals committed to humanitarian The “Democratic Peace” norms. That is, in order for the leader of a sovereign nation to fulfill his or her recognized role, he or she must be sensitive to and appreciate fully the array of details and contexts associated with friendship in international relations.50 Second, the connection between the traditional, rights-based ethic and the alternative ethic of care raises the issue of how to delimit the exercise of friendship in international relations so that the practice of care therein may be widely regarded as necessary and judicious. This issue reflects a concern that care has and might conceivably continue to engender a dependency characterized by paternalism and the privileging of those in power.51 Discus sions relevant to the dangers actually and potentially inherent in the practice of care are wide-ranging and perhaps tangential to the focus of this article. Still, the recognition here of the importance of relationships to human exis tence and, by extension, international peace would support ongoing feminist and critical re-evaluations of participation, deliberation, and communication in democratic politics. Central to this research agenda is the idea that democ racy may well have less to do with securing individual rights than with honor ing the individual as a particular person “with social connections and commitments, but also autonomy.”52 Consider, for instance, the extension of the right to vote to women in most Western industrialized nations during the first half of the twentieth cen tury. It took decades even in the most progressive nations for universal adult suffrage to generate policies intended to secure women’s access to productive employment and to protect their reproductive role in family and society.53 Now voting, as a means of participating in government, is considered a human right and thus a partial justification for international recognition and acceptance into the international community of nation-states.54 Of course, this history may be regarded as an indication that it may be a very long time yet before the practice and politics of care domestically affects the foreign policies of nation-states sufficiently to yield a lasting peace among them. Alternatively, it might be understood as a sign that peace really is, as contemporary visionaries suggest, only as far away as we permit it to be.55

That democracies, though just as belligerent as non-democracies, are unlikely to fight one another is practically law in the study of international relations. Yet prevailing liberal explanations for this democratic peace, which focus primarily on democratic political institutions and culture, remain incomplete. Most importantly, these explanations emphasize a rights-based ethic, which has significantly limited our comprehension of the link between domestic politics and international relations to empirical generalizations. International relationships, however, are intrinsically interdependent and therefore thoroughly knowable only in the context in which they occur and are experienced. In this article I interpret the “democratic peace” as a single thread, albeit a highly visible and important one, in the dense fabric of international relations. More specifically, I enlarge the context in which domestic politics is connected to international relations to include the politics of care—itself a practice that is usually understood to be private, i.e., particular, often emotional, and contextually moral. The result is a more refined understanding of the conditions for peace among all nations—democratic or not.

We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law. . .governs the conduct of nations. —U.S. President George Bush, January 17, 1991

Suppose you have to go up to the school. You've got to be a full-time mother, then you've got to be a breadwinner, then you've got to be a nursemaid and you've just got to always be there. It's like you're being stretched so many different ways. . . .

I know from my experience. I've had to deal with it. I would get depressed and I would withdraw. Somehow, you can even feel like you're not even a part of society because you're standing there looking at the American Dream and you feel like it's passing you over. Just the basics. To pay rent, to buy the food and to make sure your kids have decent clothing so they can go to school and look like they belong to somebody. You don't always have that when you're working. 1

However, equally problematic is the way in which notions of the economic and the economy find expression. These emergent forms of 294 Feminist Theory 4(3) discourse on crime and the economy still largely present themselves as wedded to notions of the economic as business. The economic emerges as business-oriented activity for profit and gain versus loss, benefits versus costs. Economic activity emerges as business-oriented activity, trading, buying and selling according to the demand and supply mechanisms of the market. The market, in turn, is itself an environment, place or space defined according to similar criteria. Despite detailed efforts to delineate ‘the market’ as something additional to a simple mechanism occupying a space where goods and services are traded, Taylor and Ruggiero nevertheless largely accept a traditional definition of the economic as narrowly defined by orthodox mainstream economists. In effect, they remain largely uncritical of this particular economic focus within their broader conception of the market and import it as given. One feminist perspective may be to attempt to incorporate the missing feminist issues – the add-women-and-stir variety. A second may be to stick with the emerging analyses of crime as embedded in markets and perhaps make it compatible with feminist economic concepts. A further feminist perspective may be more radical. It may argue that the emergent forms of discourse on crime and markets are too wedded to notions of the marketas-the-economic-as-business and that altogether different economic concepts – feminist economic concepts – ought to be adopted as wholesale replacement versions of the notion of the economic. The economic and rational choice In this context it is worth examining the economic as specifically linked to the notion of rational choice. The ways in which rational choice has been articulated and developed within criminology indicates the manner in which the notion of the ‘economic’ has been popularly incorporated into criminology. The rational choice perspective generally focuses upon both the opportunities to commit crimes and offenders’ choice to commit them. The ‘choice’ that offenders make is deemed ‘rational’ in that the offender engages in a form of ‘cost benefit analysis’. This type of analysis is therefore essentially an economic one. It entails calculating and weighing up the risks of detection, capture and punishment, on the one hand, against the material rewards, benefits and satisfactions to be reaped from seizing the opportunity to commit the crime, on the other. In this way the offenders are always assumed to be acting rationally, seeking to benefit themselves by their criminal behaviour. It is widely acknowledged that the spur to the recent incarnations of classical ideas in criminology derives from the work of Cornish and Clarke in 1986. Their version of the rational choice perspective suggests that offenders act ‘in terms of a limited or bounded rationality’ (Hopkins-Burke, 2001: 44). The rational choice model has been applied to a range of different offences in the search for situational crime prevention measures. In the 1980s research addressed offenders’ motivations and the costs and benefits of robbery (Walsh, 1986). Shoplifting (Carroll and Weaver in Cornish and Clarke, 1986), burglary (Bennett and Wright, 1984) and opium addiction Davies: Is economic crime a man’s game? 295 (Bennett, 1986) were among the particular offences examined. This early phase of application clearly saw the rational choice model as more applicable to crime for gain or property crimes than to ‘expressive crime’. The contemporary variant of the rational choice model has become somewhat less economically determined and routine activities theory claims to apply to both personal and property crimes. Thus in the 1990s, routine activity theory, pioneered by Felson (1994), expresses concerns about how ‘the press of circumstances shapes individual acts (rational choice)’ (Pease, 2000). Both of these perspectives – rational choice and routine activity – have inspired strategies for crime control; in particular situational crime prevention research and policies. In this respect the legacy and influence of ‘economic rationality’ in general endures. The brand of criminology that has been most widely embraced in Home Office and policy-making circles in the last decade or so has been that associated with the perspectives (rational choice and routine activity) and crime control strategies (situational crime prevention) derived from a fundamentally classical view of human nature wherein offenders are free, rational and make choices. There are several problems with this wholesale adoption of the rational choice model and the rational actor model within criminology. The model incorporated within criminology is little changed from that originating within the mainstream of the discipline of economics. The rational choice perspective represents the enduring way in which economics has permeated criminology. There are widespread criticisms of the core analytical assumptions of rational choice perspectives; namely its primary focus on the individual and individual responsibility, as well as its assumptions about choice. Wider forces and issues that may influence decisions, such as morality, conformity, social organization and inequality, including race, ethnicity, gender and class tend to be largely ignored. In effect, as Taylor puts it, individuals are viewed as ‘identical “calculators” ’ (Taylor, 1999a). Despite ongoing critiques of rational choice perspectives in their crude and more refined representations, they endure and exert considerable impact upon criminological debates as well as influencing public policy. I would argue that this method of incorporating the economic within criminology and this demonstration of interdisciplinarianism is unsuitable for feminist criminology, economics and feminist theorizing generally. Adopting the rational choice model of economic activity is selecting a particular and inappropriate type of economic analysis. Such a selective and unitary model, which excludes whole areas of legitimate economic activity that are important for women in particular (e.g. homeworking, domestic labour, childcare, unpaid work and so on), leads to an only partial understanding of economic life. Similarly, if legitimate economic activities are excluded, so too are the illegitimate and unofficial or extra-legal activities that both men and women engage in. By introducing a feminist economist’s critique of the rational choice model that dominates their discipline, I hope, finally, to demonstrate and convince readers that the whole notion of the economic within criminology deserves (feminist) critique. 296 Feminist Theory 4(3) A decade ago Ferber and Nelson opened up the debate about feminist economics in their edited collection Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics. Ferber and Nelson’s argument was that economics should be known as ‘the study of the basis of human material welfare’ (1993: 145) and that economics should be concerned with all the necessities and conveniences that sustain and improve life. This should be the proper subject matter of the field of economics – the phenomenon of the production and redistribution of goods and services (1993: 165). Hence they argue for a refocusing on the ‘provisioning’ of human life (1993: 135). The editors claim that economic provisioning makes economics a more fully human or gender-friendly science than if it were to remain exclusively concerned with goods and services traded in the market. It is suggested that this concept of ‘economic provisioning’ addresses the social reality that women’s economic position differs from the economic reality faced by men. Hence economic provisioning is held out as a way forward, away from an inadequate definition of economic activity. The concept of economic provisioning is offered as a simple alternative within economics. The more developed argument of the volume lies in its critique of the dominant and traditional focal point within economics. Ferber and Nelson challenge the traditional and dominant presentation and application of neo-classical economics. In essence, they take issue with the way in which rational choice theory and the market have variously come to define what economics is all about. They suggest that economic analysis tends to be dominated by assumptions of free individual choice, where individual human action is governed by rational action in the search for optimum rewards and maximum gains. Choice theory has become equal to economic theory. At the macro level this translates, as already noted, into a simplistic preoccupation with the market where goods and services are traded. This feminist critique of economics is a persuasive one and could be superimposed upon the emerging literature on crime and markets, as discussed earlier in the article. However, within that literature a feminist influence and contribution remains largely invisible. Most feminist positions have some measure of disagreement with the assumption that we all make choices in a process of rational optimization (Ferber and Nelson, 1993: 61). Women do not easily or comfortably fit into such disembodied views of how society operates. Women are more likely to identify themselves through family relations than as separate, detached and emotionally disconnected from others. As Ferber and Nelson (1993) conclude, if notions of rational choice are to survive and be useful to feminist economists, different conceptions of rationality are likely to be required (Ferber and Nelson, 1993: 164). Conclusion This article has been inspired by my attempts to explore female offending for economic gain and the ensuing problems of defining the economic crimes of women. It has raised many more problematic issues for Davies: Is economic crime a man’s game? 297 criminology and other disciplines than it has satisfied. My original starting point has led to a much more fundamental concern about the uses by criminologists and others of the notion of economic crime and the dilemma of what is ‘economic’. Thus the article has illustrated the problematics of economic classifications and definitions in criminology and mounted an argument that suggests the whole notion of the economic, within and outside criminology, demands feminist critique. There is much to be said for trying to benefit from the lessons already learned in another discipline, and to bring a feminist economist’s influence to bear on how the economic is incorporated into criminology may be one such lesson. If economic categorizations and concepts are to survive as descriptive and analytical devices within criminology and more generally, then feminist economists and feminist theory demands different conceptions of rationality. Some feminist theorizing has questioned what actually constitutes rational knowledge (Walklate, 2003: 37). Allowing a feminist economist’s influence to combine with versions of rationality that are concerned with a more contextual form of reasoning, as suggested by feminist writers Gilligan (1998), Harding (1991) and, within criminology, Walklate (1995, 2001), may provide a path to a gendering of the economy. Conjoining feminist versions of the ‘economic’ with feminist versions of rationality in criminology may offer a new way of conceptualizing women’s crime in economic terms and women’s crimes for economic gain. Hence refocusing the subject matter of the field of economics on the ‘provisioning’ of human life within an overall assessment of women’s position as regards agency and structure is suggested. Thus, following Walklate, it may be useful to consider if there is any way in which the 19th century dualisms of male/female, rational/irrational and reason/emotion may be transgressed (Walklate, 2003: 38). Hence this article demands a critical review of the tendency to dichotomize women’s agency in respect of offending. More specifically, feminist theorizing ought to take up the challenge of explaining the extent to which women are motivated to do crime more for need than greed.

Economic criminality This avenue for the investigation of economic crimes takes us into much broader realms of how the economic intrudes upon criminality. Explaining crime by reference to economic motivations and economic criminality is a strong theme in criminological theorizing. Indeed, it is a foundational assumption within critical criminology that human beings have choices, but not in conditions of their own choosing and those crimes they may commit are inextricably bound up with ‘the economic’. This was noted in the early work of Merton (1938, 1968) who suggests that the crimes of fraud, employee theft, gambling, prostitution, burglary and robbery tend to be carried out by ‘innovators’. This is the category of offender who, unable to acquire wealth by institutionalized or legitimate means, devises alternative ways by which wealth can be acquired (Vold et al., 1998). Thus ‘innovators’ use such crimes as economic crimes. The strong left realist tradition within criminology similarly argues that the effects of economic marginalization can combine with political disaffection and engender anti-social behaviour. Such theorizing suggests that crime thrives where the expectations of material rewards cannot be met equally well in all sections of society and hence is greatly influenced by the Mertonian tradition and strain theory. Thus, ‘economic criminality’ becomes conflated and inextricable from ‘economic crimes’. Quotation three illustrates this effectively: [C]rimes committed as a consequence of economic circumstances and resources. . . . sex, fraud and shoplifting. . . . The motive is economic survival and the means are related to opportunity and resources. Women can sell their bodies. . . . their fraud is often related to working while on benefits or use of stolen credit cards. . . . In short people who are not necessarily committed to dishonesty or a criminal career commit ‘economic crimes’ to supply the things that they need Davies: Is economic crime a man’s game? 287 but cannot afford . . . crimes . . . become economic because of the economic circumstances and (lack of) criminal resourcefulness of the perpetrators. (Personal communication) Phrases used as synonymous with ‘economic crime’ noted in the early part of this article also imply, or are used alongside, a particular explanation for the activity or crime.

The reasons why material possessions are stolen is explained by need, necessity or greed. We can recognize these explanations of criminality as core to theoretical criminology, especially critical, left realist, cultural and postmodern criminological enterprises. A critical review of how economic crime and economic criminality have been variously defined and explored confirms that gender has for the most part been ignored. How women may contribute as perpetrators or victims of economic crime remains underexplored. Quotation three above neatly summarizes how women and girls are represented within the context of economic criminality and this too is problematic. These points are examined in greater detail in subsequent sections of this article. The above brings us only slightly closer to a clear and useful definition of what constitutes ‘economic crimes’ and what particular crimes for economic gain may be included in this generic category. Taking account of the prevailing definitions in the literature is clearly imperative for future research pertaining to economic crimes and crime for economic gain but such research will also need to take into account the limitations and contradictions incumbent in the dominant definitions and classifications. This article goes some way towards developing a feminist critique of them. At best, the above discussion leads to a definition of economic crimes that includes most varieties of property crimes, in particular thefts such as shoplifting and pilfering, frauds and forgery, burglary, robbery, some forms of car and drug-related offences as well as prostitution and other crimes that come under the general heading of white-collar crimes. These examples can clearly be labelled acquisitive crimes or ‘instrumental’ crimes, as opposed to crimes that may be committed due to reasons of boredom, and to some extent, for the excitement. Criminology has a strong tradition of being sensitive to ‘the economic’, as identified in the argument above on economic criminality. Nevertheless, the foregoing demands a theoretical feminist critique. Economic crimes and women If finding a common and consistent definition or classification of ‘economic crimes’ is difficult, finding a definition or classification of ‘economic crimes’ as they apply to female offenders is doubly problematic. Attempts to elaborate upon what may properly constitute economic crimes, as reviewed above, are inherently problematic in themselves and unsurprisingly, but still disappointingly, they are flawed from a feminist perspective. Two fundamental problems are evident. First, women as victims remain largely invisible in dominant definitions/classifications of white-collar (Croall, 2001), corporate (Snider, 288 Feminist Theory 4(3) 1996) and other (Gelsthorpe and Morris, 1988) varieties of economic crimes, thereby obscuring the gendered nature of victimization. Women as victims of certain corporate and business crimes remain doubly susceptible to invisibility. Crimes and criminality remain the primary concern of mainstream criminology and victims tend to be identified only as a result of crimes being proven and perpetrators being caught (Davies et al., 1996; Mawby and Walklate, 1994). Victim accreditation and status depends upon this process being completed and until then sufferers remain alleged victims. Economic corporate and business crimes tend to be in the main invisible, under-policed, under-controlled and the offenders under-prosecuted and under-punished, at least in the public domain. If such harmful and criminal economic activities and practices are invisible so too are the women victims of such activities, behaviour and crimes. Women are emerging as the victims of pharmaceutical companies, the fashion and beauty industry. In effect women are victims of what Hall (1997) describes as the globalizing neo-capitalist marketplace, based on circulation, consumption and social administration: they are victims of a consumer society. Women and their children have been victimized by suffering personal abuses, including the deforming of their bodies. It is rare that this is documented but one collection of articles edited by Elizabeth Szockyi and James Fox, entitled Corporate Victimization of Women (1996) focuses on such issues. In that volume, Loreen Snider discusses the gender-blindness of the corporate crime literature more generally. Despite the gender-neutral character of the term ‘economic crime’, women are often disproportionately the victims of the less visible, yet very physically, emotionally and financially harmful, forms of economic crime. Moreover the impact of such forms of victimization and the recovery period is likely to be greater for these female victims. The acceptance of gender-free and gender-neutral terms has blinded us, thereby rendering the gender patterning of victimization invisible.

The analysis of crime within licit and illicit economies has been most explicitly developed and exemplified in relation to drugs markets (see for example Dorn and South, 1990; Dorn et al., 1992; Ruggiero and South, 1995; Ruggiero and Vass, 1992; South, 1997). This research has identified seven diverse groups involved in drug trafficking. These groups range from those that are loosely organized and less professional, such as ‘trading charities’, to the more organized ‘business sideliners’ who are primarily involved in legitimate businesses. Similar to the latter group are ‘criminal diversifiers’ or professional criminals, whereas corrupt officials who obtain cash for private or other gain feature in the category, ‘state sponsored enterprise’ (Croall, 1998). South acknowledges, however, that women’s position in the drug economy is rarely explored (South, 2002: 920). The literature on crime and markets and the detailed research on crime and the drugs market provide collectively significant insights into the operation of the informal and criminal economies, in particular the relationships and blurred boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate businesses (see also Findlay, 1998; Hobbs, 1988, 1994, 1995). Ruggiero has Davies: Is economic crime a man’s game? 293 often noted the extent to which the ‘criminal’ labour market parallels the legitimate one (Ruggiero, 1996). He specifically points to the mirroring of the licit economy in the drug economy (Ruggiero, 2000: 22) as well as the blurred distinctions between employment and unemployment and between licit and illicit work in the marketplace or ‘urban bazaar’ (Ruggiero, 2000: 30). While the examination of the embeddedness of crime and markets is particularly sophisticated in respect of how the illegal drug economy operates, for feminist theoreticians there remain inherent problems. Women remain largely invisible and gender is only partially explored through masculinity. There are few examples or analyses of women doing crime and femininity is under-explored. Gendering the economic and the economy The developments noted above expand our understanding of crime as a commercial relationship in the market place. However, the work remains disappointing from a feminist theoretical perspective. It remains open to the earliest type of feminist critique when women were largely neglected, hidden and largely invisible. Where they do feature, this is as exceptions to the rule. Hobbs (1995) gives just one example of a female drug dealer: Moira’s entrance into crime was based upon the rational acknowledgement that an entrepreneurial opportunity was staring her in the face. The chance of making money from crime was apparent to her by the evident incompetence of her boyfriend. She sells dope. (Hobbs, 1995: 23) Hobbs’s commentary simply extends from the boys and men to Moira with some additional interesting points about her use of gender and sexuality in her criminal business. The theoretical contributions made by Hobbs to the gendering of the economy, however, can for the most part be accredited to his work around boys ‘doing the business’ and masculinity rather than femininity. In a similar vein, Ruggiero (2000: 44) discusses occupational barriers in illegal economies based on race and ethnicity in some detail, but not gender. Women are briefly alluded to as the victims of human trafficking (Ruggiero, 2000: 95) and they are also briefly acknowledged at the margins of the informal and criminal economies. In this respect women feature as ‘ “grafters”, an inexperienced army of users, a criminal reserve army’ (Ruggiero, 2000: 21). In Taylor’s work (1999a), despite a lengthy section within the context of a chapter reviewing the social transitions of the late 20th century entitled ‘Crises of Masculinity and the Gender Order’, women’s participation in crime as offenders is little referred to. Given Taylor’s initial recognition of the gender order, together with the growing evidence that women are engaged in and are increasingly jailed for drug-related offences (Carlen, 2002), it is disappointing that women feature in such a limited way in the remainder of the analysis of crime and markets.

ABSTRACT The expansion of fracking, an intensive form of hydrocarbon extraction, has been met with increasing public hostility, spanning a diverse range of interests and political allegiances. However, to date, few authors have engaged with the role of gender and women activists. In this paper, I consider how gender and gendered ideas have been used as a resource to underpin fracking protests in the USA and UK. I find that a problematic gendered binary has emerged that undermined the veracity of anti-fracking protestors’ opposition and aligns with modes of planning governance that valorize universal and objective forms of knowledge. Drawing upon a feminist epistemological stance, I turn to a planning dispute over noise levels in Lancashire, England, to explore the limits to current forms of knowledge production. I argue that specific actors, behaviours, and forms of knowledge become framed as gendered and unreliable in the sphere of technical decision making, diminishing our understanding of the complexities of human experience and subjectivity within spatial planning. Women think differently to men on a whole range of issues – I am sure both men and women would agree with that statement … As a mother, I would do nothing to put my family, or any other family, in harm’s way. As a scientist, I study the facts and know that many of the fears are irrational … Scientific language does not resonate with them [women]. They do not engage with it. What they do connect with is the impact they think science or technology will have on them and their family. Averil MacDonald1 My opening epigraph sets out the viewpoint of the scientist Averil MacDonald who was appointed chair of the industry lobbying body UK Onshore Oil and Gas in 2015. Her words exemplify a wider perception of public opposition to fracking. The assertion that public viewpoints from women on the matter are something that can be disregarded as irrational goes to the heart of questions of knowledge and objectivity, and how science is framed and utilised to support vastly different perspectives within planning disputes. To date, the intense public debate on fracking, which refers to a key part of the extraction of shale gas from deep subsurface rock, has revolved around disputed knowledge claims regarding the environmental, health, and social impacts on local communities (see Cotton, 2015; Sovacool et al., 2020). Supporters of the industry have deployed arguments that opposition is rooted in the non-rational world of emotions, with women so concerned with their caring roles that they are unable to engage with science in their everyday lives. Gendered discourses have in turn been used by anti-fracking campaigners to support their claims to know and care for local environments more deeply. In this paper, I explore how essentialist ideas about gender have proliferated throughout the public debate on fracking. In the first section of the paper I outline how gendered opposition that draws on ideas about the relationship between nature and women have animated aspects of public protest. Secondly, I turn to a feminist epistemological critique that challenges a prevailing “rational versus irrational” knowledge binary underpinned by gendered stereotypes. In the final section I examine these gendered framings through the politics of noise. I look at the limitations of current governance approaches that seek universal measures through which to evaluate decisions. Specifically, I consider how the multi-layered nature of opposition to fracking reveals the continuing limitations of current conceptualisations of knowledge within environmental and planning decision-making. My argument draws upon interviews with people involved in the shale gas dispute, including advocates and protesters, in Pennsylvania, USA, and Lancashire England.2 I focus in this paper on the interviews with women, although gender was not the primary focus of my research at the time of conducting fieldwork. The final part of the paper, focused on a specific dispute over noise, draws on the publicly available reports, from the planning inquiry, and noise reports, as well as watching the public inquiry via weblink and recorded sessions (9 February–11 March 2016). Drawing on a feminist lens, I raise questions about how a binary distinction emerges between objective scientific decision-making and more subjective “emotional” forms of knowledge and dissent both shape and limit policy-making processes. Focusing upon a key area of dispute, noise, I examine how feminist epistemological approaches towards the subjective are crucial to understanding and analysing the complexities of shale gas development. Noise emerges as an important factor to consider questions of knowledge as the community could gain influence through engaging with technical assessment of sound. However, the sounds produced by fracking operations cannot be reduced to standardised levels of noise that are presumed to have similar and universal impacts on others. Women have emerged as key actors in the anti-fracking movement but their activism has been subject to a backlash and underpins a key tenet of the dismissal of public concerns as irrational and outside the rational space of allegedly scientifically informed policy-making. Whilst the anti-fracking movement spans gender and political affiliations, a feminist epistemology provides crucial insights into the relegation of community forms of understanding that have long been critiqued in planning research (see Aitken, 2009; Rydin, 2007, 2020). A feminist critique challenges modes of policy-making that separate decisions from people and imagine a rational world where decision-making has equal impacts on different groups and all are equally able to participate in public debates. Public policy scholars have emphasised the growing need to engage with the role of emotions in policy-making (Verhoeven and Duyvendak, 2016). However, expressions of emotion can act to re-essentialise gendered tropes (see for example Durnová and Hejzlarová, 2018). Jessica Pykett and colleagues point to the growing “emotionalised rhetoric” deployed in political debates but they further caution that “emotional resources and repertoires are of course in themselves linked to wider inequalities: who is able to muster and display appropriate emotions within encounters with the state  … ” (Pykett et al., 2016: 9). By a feminist and gendered approach, my research focus is on women involved in the movement, and how a binary emerges relegating community objection to a long-standing gendered sets of ideas of irrationality and subjectivity. Yet fracking disputes are further constrained by the highly formal realm of spatial planning where permission must be sought for each specific shale gas well to developed and require objections to conform to a series of issues deemed relevant by central government. Planning as a spatial mode of governance has been subject to critique due to its limited ability to engage with the public in highly formal settings (Aitken, 2009). Furthermore, the challenges of multi-scalar forms of decision-making that may bypass the public at higher levels and where they may struggle to be heard at locally specific stages. (see Abbot, 2020; Owens, 2004; Rydin, 2020). “Spatial governance” refers to those systems of decision making that have spatial or environmental dimensions including, but not limited to, the formal state apparatus and the legislative framework for land use planning. Whilst planning ostensibly lies within the hands of the state, the operation of shale gas requires engagement with regulatory state actors, as well as industry actors monitoring, advising, and producing research data. Yet these non-traditional forms of governance raise questions of legitimacy and accountability (see Lau, 2014) There is considerable dispute between work focused on fracking disputes that argues that knowledge and information has little bearing on community beliefs about the industry (Evensen, 2017; Stedman et al., 2016). A second strand queries the notion of objective risk as well as the limited trust that public institutions hold, particularly when they are seen to be advocates for the technology (see Bradshaw and Waite, 2017; Goldstein, 2014; Williams et al., 2017; Zilliox and Smith, 2018). Environmental concerns regarding air quality, water contamination, traffic impacts, noise levels, human and animal health, and wider social impacts of shale gas development have advanced particularly in the US context (see Davis and Fisk, 2017; Dunlop et al., 2021; Evensen and Stedman, 2017; Kinchy et al., 2014; Szolucha, 2021). There continues to be public distrust of the industry, as well as a series of studies examining the negative impacts for local residents living near shale gas sites or affected by the wider industry (Burbidge and Adams, 2020; Fry et al., 2015; Litovitz et al., 2013; Meng, 2015). The anti-fracking protests themselves have drawn increasing attention from scholars with studies have focused on motivations for opposition and the experiences of residents, adding to existing work on environmental activism (see Beebeejaun, 2019; Cotton and Charnley-Parry, 2018; Muncie, 2020). The limitations of current public policy arenas to weave together scientific complexities into robust regulatory frameworks, arguably challenges the limits to current forms of governance and decision-making. Pathways to resolving these disputes have proved to be a thorny issue with no clear answers. The idea of frames through which discursive claims regarding the industry’s impacts and pathways to decision-making has been an important focus of attention in how to engage with the disputed and highly-charged terrain. The scholars Tamara Metze and Jennifer Dodge (2016) have explored the way in which ostensibly deliberative debates around fracking are shaped or framed by different actors seeking to frame the benefits or risks to fracking. Despite the intense differences between perspectives that contribute to highly adversarial processes, Dodge (2015) suggests that ways of thinking have been advanced over time with debates pushing forward all actors’ knowledge and perspectives. Yet the capacity of the state to reframe the nature of the debate acts to resituate the types of knowledge that might illuminate decisions. Tamara Metze traces the shifting boundaries that unfolded in the face of public controversy and strong opposition to fracking in the Netherlands. She notes that it moved from economic issues to one of environment risk before being transferred to the planning arena. The change of forum for debate presented a way of reasserting the topic as a technical debate rather than a political one that some formulation of national interest could guide (Metze, 2017). Planning inquiries exemplify such an arena where evidence produced by communities is often considered to lack the scientific and objective credibility (see Aitken, 2009, 2010; Lee et al., 2018; Rydin et al., 2018). The environmental impact assessment processes (EIA) informs potential development of shale gas in the UK as is the case with many other countries. These assessments have become increasingly complex, spanning a range of distinctive scientific and technical fields arguably far beyond the knowledge and expertise of planners. For the planning system to operate it must be presumed that Environmental Impact Assessments provide “correct” forms of data. The legal scholar Jane Holder is critical of the undue influence that developers garner through the EIA process, given their ability to set the terms of reference for data collection. “The reliance in environmental assessments procedures upon scientific and expert opinion appears to offer objectivity in terms of prediction of likely effects and impacts” (Holder, 2004: 241). Ideas of objective certainty become important political currency, with even objectors questioning their own credibility within the highly formal and semi-legal processes of the planning inquiry. The energy researcher Mhairi Aitken elucidates how knowledge and science is represented within the public inquiry:Prior inquiries may be construed to have socialised members of the public to accept that expert knowledge exists apart from—even as superior to—lay knowledge and that this alone is an appropriate basis for determining technical decisions (Aitken, 2010: 63).Despite an acknowledgement that women are more likely to be opposed to fracking, the role of gender, particularly as a socially and politically constructed categorisation, has been largely overlooked in much research (for an example see Weible et al., 2016). Discussion of gender, when it does occur, reveals essentialist representations of gender exemplified in the epigraph. Furthermore, Rachel Howell’s evaluation of public opposition notes how “Hypotheses to account for the gender differences that are often found in environmental risk perceptions include biological and social explanations (women are more vulnerable and are nurturers by nature or socialisation) … ” (2018: 726). Exploring how gender intersects with the framing of opposition and shapes knowledge disputes remains an important yet underexplored arena.

Women in some South-Asian countries, like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan face significant hardships and problems, ranging from human trafficking to gender discrimination. Compared to their counterparts in developed countries, developing-world women encounter a biased atmosphere. Many South Asian countries have a patriarchal and male-dominated society, and their culture has a strong preference for male offspring (Kristof, 1993; Bhalotra et al., 2020; Oomman and Ganatra, 2002). These countries, particularly India, have experienced instances where technology has been utilized to create gender bias (Guilmoto, 2015). For example, there has been a great misuse of some of the techniques, of which sonography, or ultrasound, is one. The public misappropriated sonography, which was intended to determine the unborn’s health select the fetus’s gender, and perform an abortion if the fetus is female (Alkaabi et al., 2007; Akbulut-Yuksel and Rosenblum, 2012; Bowman-Smart et al., 2020). Many Indian states, particularly the northern states of India, have seen a significant drop in the sex ratio due to this erroneous use of technology. India’s unbalanced child sex ratio has rapidly deteriorated. In 1981, there were 962 females in the 0–6-year age group for every 1000 boys. In 1991, there were 945 girls, then 927 girls in 2001, and 918 girls at the time of the 2011 Census (Bose, 2011; Hu and Schlosser, 2012). In 1994, the Indian government passed the Pre-conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act to halt this trend. The law made it unlawful for medical practitioners to divulge the sex of a fetus due to worries that ultrasound technology was being used to detect the sex of the unborn child and terminate the female fetus (Nidadavolu and Bracken, 2006; Ahankari et al., 2015). However, as the Indian Census data over the years demonstrates, the law did not operate as well as intended. According to public health campaigners, this is due to the Indian government’s failure to enforce the law effectively; sex determination and female feticide continue due to medical practitioners’ lack of oversight. Radiologists and gynecologists, on the other hand, argue that it’s because the law was misguided from the outset, holding the medical profession responsible for a societal problem (Tripathi, 2016).

In the realm of artificial intelligence, gender imbalance is a critical issue. Because of how AI systems are developed, gender bias in AI can be problematic. Algorithm developers may be unaware of their prejudices, and implicit biases and unknowingly pass their socially rooted gender prejudices onto robots. This is evident because the present trends in machine learning reinforce historical stereotypes of women, such as humility, mildness, and the need for protection. For instance, security robots are primarily male, but service and sex robots are primarily female. Another example is AI-driven risk analysis in the justice system. The algorithms may overlook the fact that women are less likely to re-offend than men, placing women at a disadvantage. Female gendering increases bots’ perceived humanity and the acceptability of AI. Consumers believe that female AI is more humane and more reliable and therefore more ready to meet users’ particular demands. Because the feminization of robots boosts their marketability, AI is attempting to humanize them by embedding feminist characteristics and striving for acceptability in a male-dominated robotic society. There’s a risk that machine learning technologies will wind up having biases encoded if women don’t make a significant contribution. Diverse teams made up of both men and women are not just better at recognizing skewed data, but they’re also more likely to spot issues that could have dire societal consequences. While women’s characteristics are highly valued in AI robots, protein-basedFootnote1 women’s jobs are in jeopardy. Presently, women hold only 22% of worldwide AI positions while men hold 78% (World Economic Forum Report, 2018). According to another study by wired.com, only 12% of machine learning researchers are women, which is a concerning ratio for a subject that is meant to transform society (Simonite, 2018). Because women make up such a small percentage of the technological workforce, technology may become the tangible incarnation of male power in the coming years. The situation in the developing world is worse, and hence a cautious approach is required to ensure that a male-dominated society in some of the developing world’s countries does not abuse AI’s power and use it to exacerbate the predicament of women who are already in a precarious situation.

Women's past contributions to technology have been largely ignored until recently (see especially Trescott, 1979; Stanley, 1979). In seeking to redress the balance and reveal women and inventions hidden from history, feminist scholarship can do what is being done in other fields, such as in history generally, in the social and natural sciences, in the arts and literature. 7 But as in the fields undergoing transformation through feminist scholarship, a feminist perspective on technological history shall do more than fill in another piece of women's missing past. For a feminist perspective asks why. Why have women's contributions to technology been obscured? Recent scholarship (especially Tanner and Zihlman, 1976; Zihtman, 1978) indicates that early tools for gathering, preparing food, caring for children were devised by women, and that living patterns and social organization in which such toolinvention and use took place were female-centered. Why, then, has there been a consistent bias in the literature to value tools for hunting and combat over those for field and hearth, and to assign to men the dominant role in establishing modes of living and social organization? We must also consider changes over time. Has there been any pattern to women's inventions? What is significant about reinterpreting the effects of technology on women's labor, both industrial and domestic (see Trescott, 1979; Rothschild, 1981; Hacker, 1979)? How has women's role in technological development correlated with changes in living patterns, modes of production, and a society's dominant cultural values (see al-Hibri, 1981)? Questions inevitably emerge about what is significant technology, s In what ways does the gender dimension affect how technology has been defined and what kinds of technology have been produced and used? Has there been a female technology, and, if so, has it been feminist as well? Much the same approach can be taken in examining present-day societies developmentally and culturally different from our own. Women's traditional association with crafts can be a particularly fruitful area (Heresies, 1978). Are such crafts industrial arts, or tourist baubles? Why? The effects of modernization need also to be further explored (Boserup, 1970; Siens, 1977; Youssef, 1974). Turning to the current feminist movement, we find ideas and models for an alternative technological future in both research and experience. This is so because of contemporary feminism's commitment to sharing and egalitarian values, and to the personal as political. Thus feminists seek to break down the false separation between theory and practice, to move back and forth between the worlds of ideas and experience, and never to lose sight of the human dimension. Modern technological society, regardless of econo-political ideology, is almost exclusively controlled by men and male values that ignore or reject such feminist concerns. Therefore, we must look for a feminist perspective on technology in these very strengths of the feminist movement. We can seek ideas and models for an alternative technological future in such areas of feminist concern as home and family, medicine and health care, feminist organizations, education, the world of work, the ecology movement. What are the dimensions of such an inquiry? Focus on home and family has been important, not only because it is women's traditional sphere, but also because it--particularly the modern nuclear family--has been seen as the root of women's oppression. Feminist analysis and experimentation have increasingly looked to alternative ways of organizing sexual relationships, reproduction, and childrearing. In the areas of sex and reproduction, we have, for example, Firestone's (1970) proposals to de-biologize women by freeing them completely, through technology, from childbearing-- including creating humans artificially and making it possible for men to bear children. The freer sexuality and alternative households she proposes then become technically possible. Social scientists such as Bernard (1973, 1974), Keller (1971), Binstock (1972), Francoeur (1972), and Giele (1978) have predicted less radical changes in family structure and 8 Personal communication with Autumn Stanley, December 1979. A Feminist Perspective on Technology and the Future 69 motherhood. These include the acceptance of a variety of marriage patterns and of single status--including single motherhood--and the future decline of the mother role as other roles become available to women (see also Tripp, 1974). Experiments in new family arrangements had roots as well in the 1960s counterculture. Sociologist Patrick Conover views the alternate culture as resting on feminine values. He writes, '... I am prone to simplify the cultural issue by arguing that the creators of alternate culture have rejected the values of their fathers and "discovered" the values of their mothers recast in different words so as not to affront their male egos' (Conover, 1973; p. 114). That he assumes the creators of the alternate culture are male, while recognizing the importance of female values and the psycho-social difficulties for males to adopt those values, again illustrates the tenacity of the male-supremacist model. The persistence of such thinking also helps to explain why such experiments, although professedly feminist in their goals, often remained sexist in practice. All-female communities, both lesbian and not, have given us a still further range of alternative living patterns. The idea of such communities, in both fact and imagination, is increasingly studied and reported on (see, for example, Quest, 1978; Country Women; Auerbach, 1978; Gilman, 1979). A feminist perspective on sexual relationships, childbearing, and childrearing can have explicit as well as implicit effects for technology. Whether it be technologies of birth control and reproduction, or social invention arising from theories and experiments in family living patterns, organizing human knowledge in these areas for the future needs to be done in light of the ideals of the half of the human race intimately involved in these technologies, but traditionally as receiver or victim---not as shaper. Men, and the male-supremacist model, continue to control the research priorities in such areas as population control, reproduction, and family law (Gordon, 1977; Rose and Hanmer, 1976; Rothschild, 1981). Ethical concerns over genetic engineering need to reflect an even stronger feminist perspective. All areas of science, especially medicine, have been gaining new feminist attention. A critical eye is cast on the masculine nature of science and the scientific world, and projections of what a feminist science would be like are beginning to emerge (lmpact of Science on Society, 1975; Hubbard, et al., 1979; Harding, 1979; Keller, 1980; Signs, 1978; Reed, 1978; Haraway, 1978). Demonstrating how women become objects, and even victims, of medical research, microbiologist Rita Arditti outlines what a feminist perspective in science and medicine would mean. 'It [a feminist perspective] would involve the conversion from an exploitative value-free technology to a commitment to a humane technology: to preventive medicine~ fair distribution of material goods and educational opportunities .... Scientific research that would finally take the interests of women into consideration will only be developed and carried out in a life-oriented society in which sexism does not exist anymore and in which feminist priorities are the priorities of the whole culture' (Arditti, 1974; p. 31).

Mention technology and what word images spring to mind? Science, invention, machines. Skill, ingenuity: homo faber. But femina fabera? 1 Hardly. Trapped for most of her history by biology into the private sphere of home, family, and locality, and barred from the necessary training and education especially scientific and mathematic (Osen, 1974~; Mozans, 1975)--woman has been kept outside the mainstream of recorded technological development. Historically, she has been seen as contributing little or nothing to technology. At most, woman has been viewed as being acted upon by technological change--as in accounts of how the industrial revolution brought women out of the home and into the paid workforce (Baker, 1964)--or else as user of technology devised by others, e.g. the 'happy housewife' and her so-called labor-saving devices. Only recently has feminist scholarship begun to shatter the prevailing myths about the effects of technology on women's lives. New studies of the seventies have begun to show the ways women have contributed to methods of farming and industry, to social invention, to forms of political and social organization [footnotes omitted] What is the significance of a 'feminist perspective' for technology? What is such a perspective, and what can it mean for the future? A feminist perspective means, above all, a certain set of values. Sexist society, in systematically subordinating more than one-half of its population, is both exploitative and anti-humanistic. Feminism, in seeking to have women realize themselves as independent, autonomous human beings, must necessarily reject social systems and their ideologies that exploit and dominate. Feminism means creating a society in which a set of values can be brought to prevail that can end such systems of dominance. At the broadest level, then, a feminist perspective is humanistic, life-oriented, nonexploitative. Taking a feminist perspective toward technology serves two important functions. It enables us to gain greater insight into the values and assumptions which underlie our technology's creation and use. 4 Second, a feminist perspective can direct us toward a humanistic technology for the future. The assumption that our technology is ~value-free' and that values enter only with its use has been refuted on other than strictly feminist grounds (Marcuse, 1964; Ellul, 1964; Ferkiss, 1969; McDermott, 1969; Leiss, 1974; Muller, 1970; Noble, 1977). A feminist perspective strengthens the case. If we describe technology as knowledge organized and systematized for productive purposes, fulfilling the goals and ideals of a particular culture (Gendron, 1977; Pacey, 1976; Firestone, 1970), we begin to see how the creation of technology, not just its use, grows out of and cannot be separated from a mindset which in turn reflects a set of values. As Kuhn (1970) has clearly demonstrated, the development of scientific knowledge--which forms the building blocks for most of our modem technology--is in itself subject to prevailing societal norms and values. Therefore, how and for what productive purposes that knowledge shall be shaped is not a random choice, but subject to what the scientific, technological, and political community will support. Since the institutional forces of corporate wealth, of the military, university, and political establishments combine today to set the priorities for technological development, as well as use, we are guaranteed that ideals reflecting the values of these powerful institutional forces shall be perpetuated in our technology. 5 These ideals coalesce into the technological ideal, that of 'rational efficiency'--Ellul's (1964) 'technique'. And as Ferldss (1974) compellingly shows, when that ideal is carried forth under the impetus of a liberal political economy, technology in the name of progress exploits all it touches: human beings, nature, the universe. It is anti-humanistic, anti-ecological. It wastes, it conquers, it destroys. Our Western concept of technology--as all-powerful and all-conquering--is distinctively and distinctly male. With the exception of the physio-genital, gender attributes, like technology, are cultural products. ~ As such, they reflect what is valued in a society. Being aggressive, independent, strong, objective, rational, analytical, unemotional, is considered not only male, but superior. Such qualities make fortunes and build empires. Being passive, dependent, weak, subjective, intuitive, empathic, emotional, may be revered in song and story, but at best such 'female' qualities merely support; they do not conquer or win. So-called male attributes are the valued attributes. And on such valuing rides power. Male values rule in our society. To state, then, that our technology is male is to show how powerful a hold the values of conquest and dominance have on our technological perspective, rooted as they are in a belief 4 A Feminist Perspective on Technology and the Future 67 in the rightness and supremacy of the male worldview (Reuther, 1975; al-Hibri, 1980; Gray, 1979; Ruth, 1978). Those who are in positions of power (who are mostly men), and who thus control the course of technological development, have had bred into them since birth--and continuously reinforced by societal institutions--that the male and the male way of doing things are superior. We are locked into an anti-ecological, anti-humanistic, exploitative technology not solely because of political, economic, scientific, and philosophical beliefs, but because such beliefs and the systems they underpin are powerfully supported by the dominant system of male values. What would happen if these values were shifted? What would happen if our technology became nurturant, life-supporting, sensitive, empathic, intuitive? Science writer Robin Clarke (as quoted in Milton, 1974) describes our 'hard technology society' as alienated, destructive, fragmented, centralized, elitist. By contrast, his 'soft' technology community would be integrated with life, culture, and nature, and would be decentralized, egalitarian, and democratic (Milton, 1974; p. 268). Ferkiss (1969) looks toward a technology and a society which is holistic, natural, and immanent. Bookchin (1971) writes of a 'liberatory technology'; there are the terms alternative, passive, and appropriate technology (Schumacher, 1973; Dickson, 1975); we have Illich's (1973) 'convivial' tools. The hard technology society correlates with values and attributes called male, while the soft technology and holistic community is compatible with so-called female attributes and feminist values. A feminist perspective on technology means seeking to discover and further define feminist values and finding ways to implement them in our technology. It means attempting to project an alternative set of technological values, and to discover ideas and models for a future humanistic, 'soft technology' society. Women's role in technological development has been neglected partially because homo faber has been seen literally by our historians as male. 7 Man does, woman is: the latter does not invent, innovate. But her role has also been neglected because underlying these accounts is the Western cultural perspective that homofaber's purpose in inventing tools is to make bigger, better, more efficient tools each time. Homo faber's ideal is progress. We can read about those technologies which appear to contribute to the 'advance' or 'progress' of productive processes, but learn little of those organizational processes or forms that may have pursued other social, economic, political, or cultural ideals, or of those societies in which Western-styled progress is not the ideal. A feminist perspective that seeks to find women's role in technological development would not be culture- or ideology-bound in this way. In other words, the feminist perspective is freer to explore alternative ideals, to establish new categories and frameworks for technology and its development. How do we find such categories and frameworks? The sources of ideas and models for a feminist 'soft technology' future are threefold. First, we need to uncover women's role in technological development in the past, and also in present societies culturally and developmentally different from our own. Second, we must look to the theory and experience of the current feminist movement. And third, we must look at feminist projections for the future.

The gender gap in patenting rates is much more pronounced than the gender gap in many other endeavors: American women patent at only 8% of the male rate, according to the National Survey of College Graduates 2003, while by comparison they earn 81% of male full-time weekly earnings (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). Other sources confirm the wide patenting gap. Only 10.3% of the 90,705 U.S. origin patents granted in 1998 are estimated by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (1999) to have had at least one female inventor.1 Adjusting for co-authorship, Frietsch et al. (2009) estimate that women accounted for 8.2% of patents filed by Americans at the European Patent Office in 2005, a decrease from the 8.8% peak of 2001. The highest shares were for Spain and France (12.3% and 10.2% respectively), while the lowest shares were for Austria and Germany (3.2% and 4.7% respectively).2 The magnitude of the gender gap in patenting raises the concern that, rather than reflecting comparative advantage or differing tastes by gender, the gap reflects gender inequity and an inefficient use of female innovative capacity. Innovation, or equivalently, technological progress, is a driver of economic growth and key to future prosperity: more than half of U.S. economic growth since the Second World War is attributable to technological progress (Boskin and Lau, 2000). Clearly, growth will be highest if the innovative capacity of the whole workforce is exploited, and doing so is particularly important at a time of concern about growth and technological progress. By referring to the 2007–2009 recession as a “Sputnik moment”, President Obama in 2010 called into doubt whether the United States was innovating at its full potential,3 while an influential report by the National Academy of Sciences (2007) states “…the committee is deeply concerned that the scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding…” Among many other recommendations, the report urges increasing the share of women in science and engineering. Innovation is difficult to measure at the individual level, and scholars use patents as a proxy. While not all innovations are patented, patenting is likely to be correlated with unpatented innovation, including innovation embodied in tacit knowledge and disseminated by inter-firm worker mobility. In this paper, we explore women's underperformance in patenting using a representative sample of U.S. college graduates, the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates. While there have been earlier quantitative studies of the question, they have been confined to samples of PhDs, generally academic scientists and engineers.4 Such samples provide only limited information about patenting generally, since our data show that over a five-year window, PhDs are granted only 29% of patents and academics only 7% of patents. Furthermore, the gender patenting gap appears to be much smaller in these samples than in the more general population we study in our paper. Although the studies generally do not report the unadjusted gender gap, we estimate based on information in the papers that women in these samples are between 40% and two–thirds as likely to patent as men, compared with 8% for the college graduates we study. Most of the gender patenting gap apparently arises because women do not get to the stage of being in the samples of earlier studies.

Regarding the ‘inventor’, patent law is concerned with those who contribute to the ‘inventive concept’ behind an invention. There is no inventorship attributed to those who ‘merely’ contribute manual or bodily labour (Burk, 2007, 186-194). Similarly, patent law is not interested in the communal nature of the inventive process (Pollack, 2006: 615-616) – it requires a discrete list of those who contributed to the discrete inventive concept. This reflect patent law’s development based on the justification that intellectual labour of the mind was of greater value than mere labour of the body (Foster, 2011: 319-320). More specifically, the mind/body dichotomy mirrors the market favouring masculine work in the intellectual (derived from the great male ‘geniuses’), over feminine labour (derived from nature and the ‘nurturers’). Thus, patent law idealises the constructed lone genius inventor (Fausto-Sterling, 1981: 45–46), who exists within a capitalist mode of production and ‘divid[es] subject from object and knower 4 from the known’ (Halbert, 2006: 439). In contrast, feminine knowledge is often physical and typically related to child-rearing, caretaking and the domestic (Burk, 2007: 191–194). It is stereotypically invented in a cumulative fashion in communal environments, where invention is inseparable from what has come before and from its knowers. This does not sit well with modern patent law requiring nameable inventors of an isolated inventive concept. As to patentability, an invention must be novel, non-obvious (or embody an inventive step), have utility or be useful (or have industrial application in Europe), and constitute patent-eligible subject matter. The requirements for patentability reflect multiple constructed binaries, which favour the masculine over the feminine. The gendered nature of these requirements has been analysed in depth elsewhere (forthcoming) and is summarised in the following. The standard of novelty requires that inventions are new when compared to prior art. This is ostensibly a quantitative assessment. However, the conceptualisation of novelty is valueladen. Historically, women’s inventions were classified as constituting better ways to do housework, ‘make-do’ or improvisations, or ‘an extension of the traditional homemaker’s role’ (McDaniel, Cummins and Sender Beauchamp, 1988: 8–9; Stanley, 1992: 197). They were not considered new, but part of a woman’s role in the private sphere – the home (e.g. GordonBouvier, 2019). Only men were considered to occupy the public sphere – a place of trade and commerce (Elshtain, 1993; Rosaldo, 1974: 17; Pollack, 2006: 613 and 615). That is, women are socialised to give, while men are free to take from the private sphere and commercialise and gain in the public sphere. Inventions must be non-obvious to the ‘person having ordinary skill in the art’ (PHOSITA). PHOSITA must consider the invention to be inventive. This is in relation to the ‘common general knowledge’. Constructed masculine (Burk, 2011: 903–4), PHOSITA judges inventions based on the common general knowledge of men. As feminine knowledge is in the private sphere, it is not part of the common general knowledge. Thus, inventions are only assessed relative to masculine modes of science and invention (Burk, 2015). Feminine knowledge is invisible to the patent system. This keeps knowledge coded feminine open to appropriation – considered new and possibly embodying an inventive step when filtered through masculine modes of science and invention (Foster, 2011: 312). If women traditionally occupy the private sphere, it should be immediately clear that the utility or industrial application requirement discriminates against them. Anglo-American jurisdictions use the utility standard, which has been interpreted as meaning capable of being worked in business or industry (Pierce, 2006: 7, 72). 2 Being in the private sphere, women were less likely to create something to be worked in business. European jurisdictions require that inventions have an industrial application. ‘Industrial’ has been defined according to masculine ideals of work (Mellor, 1997; Rose, 1986). Masculine labour generates abstract knowledge in laboratories, research institutes and factories, outside of social relationships, allowing it to be commoditised. In contrast, feminine labour is constructed as ‘care’ labour, being labour of the hand, brain and heart, and placed within a social structure that de-commoditises it (Halbert, 2006: 439). The definition of patent-eligible subject matter analogously reflects a focus on the industrial. It consists of manners of manufacture, machines and compositions of matter.3 It is the products of industrialised labour, as opposed to care labour (Halbert, 2006: 439; Doagoo, 2014: 191–8).

Copyright and patent regimes evolved from and continue to rely upon patriarchal notions of the individual ‘creative genius’ and the ‘inventor paradigm’ – both whom were envisioned as male. Historically, copyright protection was only addressed to the ‘high arts’ of sculpture, painting, literature and music – fields dominated by men, excluding (until recently) female ‘crafts’ such as needlework, knitting and quilting (Wright Citation1994).

Feminist critics point out that it is women’s labour and their attendance to social reproduction functions which allow men to immerse themselves in the production of knowledge and art, and that individual works of (male) authorship are therefore impossible (Halbert Citation2006). Even today, white male authors are significantly over-represented in copyright registrations in the US (Brauneis and Olia Citation2018). Similarly, feminist scholars have critiqued the ‘inventor paradigm’ of patent law (Gearhart-Serna Citation2009). Women have long been excluded from the inventor role by lack of access to the resources that would allow them to claim patents, and by misogynistic public cultures that devalue women as original, novel authors and inventors. More directly, the inventor paradigm encodes values and epistemologies which are inherently male and Western, and devalues non-conforming knowledge systems (Gearhart-Serna Citation2009). Consider ‘traditional knowledge’, a community based resource, held by and passed down within communities. Traditional knowledge has been associated with indigenous subjecthood and gendered feminine – it is seen as ‘instinctive and pre-modern’ in contrast to the scientific, rational, developed ways of knowing, epistemically associated with masculinity (Gearhart-Serna Citation2009).

If copyright laws do not adequately value women’s creative work, it may mean that the laws themselves should be amended, expanding existing protections so that additional categories of creative works are clearly accorded copyrightability. This assumes that copyrightability will enhance creativity and the distribution of creative works in a way that is favorable to the greater good of women. Women who fail to fully commercialize their creative works may lose income. The impact of commercialization upon the control they have over their works is a bit more complicated, as commercialization usually requires an author to relinquish all control over her copyrights or ownership of the actual copyrights themselves. Women who manage to retain ownership of their copyrights, but do not aggressively police unauthorized uses of their copyrighted works, may lose both income and a measure of control over their works. All of this is true for men as well, but there may be gendered differences with respect to the number of female versus male authors who are realistically able to commercialize, control, and protect their creative works. Portions of any detectable disparities may be attributable to the nature and form of the works themselves, rather than the sex of the authors, but there also may be gendered differences in the mediums through which women and men creatively express themselves. If women are disproportionately disadvantaged by too little copyright protection for particular types of creative works, application of feminist principles would suggest that copyright laws need to be amended to create copyright parity between the genders. Expanding copyright coverage might then be envisioned as “leveling the playing field.” However, this assumes that, substantively as well as rhetorically, after the playing field is “re-graded,” women ought to be out competing equally with men in a game contrived by men that has objectives and governing rules devised by men and is refereed by men. In this respect at least, an expansionist or maximalist position on copyright scope can be characterized as contrary to some of the values of feminism. Certain copyright use and access restrictions may not mesh well with culturally significant roles and activities of women. Copyright protections constructively impose complicated formalities, such as licensing and permission procedures, that generate uncertainty and transaction costs, which can complicate creative productivity and the distribution and end uses of copyrighted works. If female authors, intermediaries, or consumers are disproportionately inhibited by copyright law strictures or have less access to competent legal advice and assistance, feminism would propose that the ways in which copyrights are applied or enforced by the courts should be altered in ways that better facilitate actualization of the goals of the copyright system with respect to women. One specific, complicated, and interesting question is whether female authors are disproportionately burdened, or benefited, by the relative absence of legal formalities that must be complied with in order to secure a valid and protectable copyright. At one time, the procedural requirements for securing and maintaining full copyright protection for a newly created work required an aspiring copyright holder to comply with somewhat complicated copyright notice, deposit, registration, and recordation of transfers and licenses provisions.41 The Copyright Act of 1976 and subsequent Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 significantly reduced formalities,42 vesting works created on or after January 1978 with copyright protections at the moment they are completed,43 and eliminating the notice requirement as of March 1989.44 Though U.S residents must register copyrighted works in order to bring copyright infringement suits,45 registration can be virtually coterminous with the filing of the pertinent complaint and supporting documents.46 This diminution of formalities, particularly the elimination of the notice requirement, has been vigorously criticized47 because it has effectively created a presumption that everything that is potentially copyrightable is copyright protected. The absence of copyright notice on a work no longer communicates anything meaningful on the subject of the copyright status of the work or about who holds the rights. This makes it more difficult to ascertain whether a particular work actually is copyrighted, what the scope of the copyright might be, and who needs to be contacted if licenses or permissions are to be obtained.

 [*308]  Intellectual property law has taken property beyond its roots in the tangible - those things we literally hold dear. That extension has loosed legions of academics through many hundreds of articles to fervently debate the appropriate extent of property rights in ideas and their expression. 56 From the fine to the technological arts, the burning question is whether increasing "propertization" of those intangibles reflects an improved understanding of the appropriate (and even just) reach of individual ownership or, alternatively, whether Blackstonian absolute domains run amok.

Examples can be found across the full gamut of intellectual property regimes. Patent law's subject matter has been extended to cover business methods 57 and the "stuff of life," 58 putting those areas of the formerly public domain behind private fences. 59 Proponents, depending on their normative persuasions, may laud the expansion as encouraging economically beneficial increases in innovation 60 or as just recognition of inventors' natural rights. 61 Opponents agonize over the effects on future innovation, competition, 62 and impaired access. 63 Similarly, some praise trademark law's expansion into  [*309]  dilution and anti-cyber-squatting as avoiding incipient consumer confusion 64 or as limiting incentive-dampening free rides on others' investment. 65 Still others denounce those same expansions as clogs on competition 66 and muzzles on free speech. 67

This metaphor of masculine parentage is closely tied to the notion of the heroic author. Romantic notions of authorship, like patriarchal notions of fatherhood, entail a lineal and simple causality between the effort or activity of authors and the works they develop. 106 The romantic image encompasses the sense of masculine isolation identified by relational feminists. 107 The text itself becomes the feminized "other" against which the author is differentiated. 108 Moreover, the myth of singular paternity ignores the contributions of other, often invisible contributors to the work and raises the image of the author to iconic status. 109 The author is thus envisioned as a discrete and solitary individual, separate from both the community that consumes the work and from the relational network of shared understandings and cultural images within which the work arises. 110

Gendered formulations of ownership stem from the paternity metaphor as well. Feminist commentators have noted that the "substantial similarity" test for copyright infringement echoes historical doctrines of family law in which patriarchal control over the purity of biological reproduction was premised upon familial likeness. 111 This parallel is graphically, if unwittingly, illustrated by recent directors' comments that label ClearPlay and similar viewing  [*547]  technologies as a "bastardization" of their films. 112 In this formulation, copyright closely parallels the character of paternalistic marriage, custody, and paternity laws that have been identified as intended to control female reproduction in order to ensure legitimacy of offspring and concomitantly control inheritance of land and chattels. 113 Debora Halbert thus notes that such discourses led inevitably from masculine notions of textual authorship to paternal conceptualizations of property and ownership; as much as a man's child or wife was regarded as his chattel, so were his texts. 114

The steady march of IP regimes across the global South has not been without resistance. We see the use of countervailing strategies and the application of IP law as a legal vehicle for ‘facilitating (or thwarting) recognition of diverse contributors to social discourse’ (Sunder ). The linking of identity politics (issues of recognition) with intellectual property (issues of redistribution) highlight the efforts of individuals from marginalized communities to resist appropriation and benefit materially from their own cultural production. Intellectual property law thus becomes more than a tool for incentivizing creativity and emerges as a terrain of struggle for social relations. The language of this struggle is voiced in terms of human rights, as both the Universal Declaration for Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights affirm the right of all peoples to be recognized for and materially benefit from their cultural creations.

However, the struggle of marginalized communities to benefit from their own production is not an even or fair one: the field is tilted. Their IP claims often do not succeed, not only because of the way the law is constructed, but equally because of their unequal bargaining capacities and resources (Sunder ). Consider how in India, Brahmin supremacy was sustained by their monopoly over education and the learning of English, and enforced by a violent system of intra – and inter-caste social restrictions and punishments (Chandra ). Even today, the upper-castes perceive themselves to be the natural inheritors of scientific research and practice in India; there is an appalling under-representation of Dalits, indigenous, and lower-caste groups in India’s leading scientific and technical institutions despite the fact they far outnumber the Brahmin minority. Access to knowledge production systems and to the markets that value this knowledge continue to be blocked by compounded access barriers. More pertinently, it is worthwhile to ask whether those long excluded from particular types of knowledge can truly be empowered upon the terrain of an alien epistemology built in tandem with social and political hierarchies whose very existence relied on scientific and moral justifications of inequality.

I have attempted to investigate the multiple ways feminist perspectives might be applied to intellectual property. Women who identify with feminist thought may take any number of positions on the issue of intellectual property, from endorsing a system that protects the authorial autonomy of women, or, by contrast, offering a critique of the underlying assumptions of a property discourse founded on a masculine construction of knowledge. While work has been done on the history of authorship and the ways women were either ignored and/or used to define the boundaries of literary texts, much less has been done on the contemporary state of authorship from a feminist perspective. Additionally, there is a need for a more direct feminist interpretation of the growing case law on copyright, patents and trademarks. 156 Feminism can provide a study of intellectual property with both a different viewpoint on the law and a method for articulating a different process. The alternatives grow from the case examples of women's creativity-quilting, knitting and feminist publishing to name a few. These examples suggest that whether "natural" to women or not, a different relationship to creative work can be articulated from a feminist perspective. • This is an approach that recognizes collaboration as much as individual contributions, recognizes that the author (of a quilt, dress or book) and the reader/user form an important relationship often based upon mutual respect, recognition, and care, and that there is no need to construct a definition of literature or "high art" premised upon reactive boundaries that declare what goo'd work is not-the work of women. A feminist perspective works at the foundation of the legal system by changing the assumptions upon which much of the law is based. Thus, there would ultimately have to be changes in the law that would reflect changes in the underlying social structure. The ultimate threat posed by the system of intellectual property, as currently conceptualized, is that it may further erode the values that can still be found in the types of creative endeavors that women produce. We can hope that by understanding the alternatives a feminist interpretation makes available, at least some creative people will be provided with a cultural space where creation is about more than property rights. Of course, a structural critique must be tempered by the fact that numerous women have turned the traditional system of intellectual property to their benefit. In the end, much as in the beginning, it is difficult to see a single feminist interpretation applying here. However, the many different interpretations create a more complex and richer dialogue on intellectual property, one that seems important to continue

Traditionally, IP scholarship and jurisprudence has not focused on race and gender inequality. However, these issues are receiving renewed attention in feminist scholarship and in critiques of existing power structures by those concerned with the treatment of people of color, women, and indigenous peoples in the international arena. Analytical inquiries that explore the rights of minorities, women, and indigenous peoples enhance the debate about IP reforms. Further, a focus on the least advantaged segments of society, such as blues women, shifts the debate to focus on the empowerment of artists who create, and not on empowerment of large conglomerates that control IP in the United States and abroad. Part I of this Article, briefly discusses the tenets of critical race theory to show that it can be useful in explaining how IP law has disadvantaged African-American artists and fostered their subordination. Part II explores how feminist critiques of IP benefit from examining the treatment of black women, using blues women of the 1920s as a focal point. Part III examines how the treatment of indigenous peoples parallels IP deprivations of blacks and women.

Many legal scholars increasingly recognize that the examination of race in legal discourse serves to illuminate the merits and values of the law.5 In contrast, before the 1980s, legal scholarship “virtually ignored legal theorizing based on the perspectives of people of color.”6 The invisibility of race in legal discourse changed with the advent of critical race theory (“CRT”) in the late 1980s, following the development of feminist legal theory in the prior decade. Critical race theory is not a unified construct, but it does set forth four core tenets.7 First, it posits that “race and racism are endemic to the American normative order.”8 Second, it posits that legal structures are “part of the social fabric . . . [which] constructs and produces race and race relations . . . [in support of] white supremacy.”9 Third, it contends that the construct of “colorblindness” in legal jurisprudence “ignores and cements the racial caste system constructed in part by law,” and thus perpetuates inequality for subordinated groups.10 Finally, CRT proponents advocate that “[legal scholars should be] working toward a norm of ‘racial equality’ where different groups will not continue to suffer the oppression and subordination they have suffered.”11