Why Technology Is Feminism’s Most Powerful Force

Over the long arc of modern history, technology has been one of the most effective engines of women’s liberation—independently of the attitudes or intentions of the mostly male people who built it. From washing machines and telephones to reproductive technologies such as IVF, technological changes have expanded women’s autonomy by enabling their education, paid work, entrepreneurship, and personal freedoms. By reducing the burden of physical labour needed to enable a household to survive and function, these advances have loosened the link between sex and economic dependence. In emerging economies grappling with energy poverty, the pattern is even starker: electrification has proven to be among the few reliable forces capable of freeing women from gruelling labour, while sharply reducing the risks of childbirth, early childhood mortality, and maternal death.

The scale of this transformation is difficult to overstate. For most of human history, 1–2 percent of women died as a result of pregnancy or childbirth, making reproduction one of the leading causes of female death. Today, in many high-income countries, maternal mortality has fallen to under one death per 10,000 births. Child mortality shows a similar pattern. Globally, the share of children who die before the age of five has fallen by more than half over the past few decades alone, largely due to advances in sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, and neonatal care. These declines were not driven by shifts in attitude or ideology, but by technological interventions that made survival routine rather than exceptional.

Feminism is a political movement, while technology is a set of tools. Yet, over the past two centuries, the most reliable driver of women’s autonomy has not been ideological persuasion or legal decree. Technology has accomplished what moral exhortation rarely can: it has changed the incentives. Modern technologies—particularly those that reduce physical strength requirements, expand access to information, and automate domestic labour—have done more to advance women’s bargaining power than most explicitly feminist political movements, precisely because they alter the underlying constraints of human life rather than attempting to moralise them away. Moral attitudes fluctuate, laws can be ignored, and cultural norms can resist change. Constraints, once relaxed, can rarely be tightened again. Feminist outcomes are best measured, then, by the extent to which women gain real autonomy, safety, and choice in their daily lives.

In a well-known TED talk on social progress, the statistician Hans Rosling (1948–2017) focuses on a single technological advancement: the washing machine. Relieved of hours of physically demanding domestic labour, his mother gained time that she was able to spend reading, educating herself, and cultivating interests beyond domestic subsistence. This is how, as Rosling puts it, “You get books out of the machines.”

Before the invention of the washing machine, laundry had to be done by hand. The soaking, scrubbing, wringing, and boiling of heavy fabrics was a physically demanding and time-consuming task largely borne by women. This is still the reality for millions of women today.

And before you can even begin to wash clothes, you first have to collect water—a task also disproportionately allocated to women and which, in many societies, consumed hours of each day, limiting the time left for education and employment. Technologies that deliver clean drinking water at the turn of a tap have been among the most consequential yet least celebrated advances in women’s lives. Piped water systems, sanitation infrastructure, and, more recently, desalination technologies in water-scarce regions have freed entire communities from the tyrannies of rainfall and geography.