Commentary: Dominant technology is harming women, and alternatives are starved for resources

There is an implicit war underway within the tech world between good and, if not quite “evil,” then at least “not good.” Good is not winning because it’s massively outgunned.

Nowhere is this easier to see than in the exploitation and harming of women.

Big Tech is making a fortune in ways that are not obviously in the best interests of the women in our lives.

For example, algorithms such as Instagram’s steer women toward posts with unrealistic content, which the companies know fuel deeply unhelpful social comparisons. As New York University professor Jonathan Haidt and others have noted, this leads teen girls in particular to become depressed, anxious and prone to eating disorders, self-harm and even suicide. One study found that unplugging people from social media greatly improved their well-being and happiness.

Men are also affected in ways that are unlikely to be helpful to women. For example, TikTok and other algorithms steer young men to misogynistic content in the “manosphere.” Raise your hand if you’re happy to learn that one of every five fraternity members say they watch pornography that involves rape.

Some might wonder why there isn’t more government regulation. Why don’t the tech companies bear more responsibility for the content that goes out over their platforms? Why don’t we have something like an “FDA for algorithms” that evaluates any new technology’s impacts on society before it gets deployed to millions (or billions) of users? One answer comes from the political clout of Big Tech — the “Big Four” tech companies alone spent $64 million on lobbying in 2023.

We’re largely left with nonprofit attempts to build “good” tech that tries to prevent or remediate the harms of our current tech Wild West. But those efforts are being starved for resources.

Consider, for example, Callisto. One reason so few women who experience sexual assault report it is because so many women fear they themselves are partly to blame. Callisto lets women disclose their assault anonymously into an encrypted digital archive. If another survivor later discloses the same offender, Callisto helps the survivors connect if they so choose. Seeing that one’s assailant did the same thing to someone else helps women see it’s not them, it’s him — no small thing for someone trying to deal with such a traumatic event.

Callisto also has the potential to hold more offenders accountable. Many cases come down to “he said, she said.” The presumption of innocence means the system is in effect designed to help men win and women lose. New federal Title IX rules now make it easier for colleges to use “pattern as evidence,” so connecting survivors, as Callisto does, makes it harder for offenders to lie their way out of being held accountable.

Note the fact that Callisto as a technological solution is an important part of what might make it effective. Only technology can ensure the sort of anonymity that makes it easier for some deeply traumatized women to be willing to share their stories and to be sure their reports really are kept confidential unless or until someone else reports against their same offender.

Recently, for want of $1 million per year, Callisto announced it was likely going to have to shut down. This is part of a larger pattern that has also affected other tech organizations trying to combat gender-based violence such as Safe & the City’s app Garbo and She’s a Crowd. Meanwhile, last year, just three companies — Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft — made around $230 billion in profits.

What’s the result of this imbalance? Big social problems have lots and lots of causes. But there’s a plausible case to be made that the current dominance of unhelpful technologies over helpful ones contributes to America’s epidemic of sexual violence: half a million rapes and sexual assaults every year and 1 in 3 college women raped or sexually assaulted by graduation.

While we wait for government regulation to eventually catch up, we should in the meantime be investing in technologies that try to promote social good. Who’s happy about an organization such as Callisto hurtling toward closing its doors for the equivalent of a half-hour’s worth of Meta’s profits?

This isn’t the world you’d want if you are a woman or someone who cares about the well-being of women.

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Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago and the Pritzker director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a member of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academy of Sciences. He can be reached at jludwig@uchicago.edu.

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