In the symphony of technological progress, the Internet of Things often surfaces as a technological revelation—an expansion of connectivity, automation, and the promise of a seamless hyper-modern existence. Yet beneath the sleek surfaces of connected fridges and voice-activated homes, a more unsettling narrative emerges: one where the internet, an archipelago of algorithms and data, intersects with one of civilized society’s most persistent and corrosive legacies—the systemic subjugation of women.
**The Silent Architectures of Digital Domination**
The Internet of Things (IoT) manifests as objects woven into the very fabric of domestic life, yet it carries the imprints of its creators. For every smart thermostat or wearable fitness tracker, there lingers architecture designed with a myopic lens. The underlying assumption that men, and their desires, dictate utility frames these technologies in ways that both reflect and perpetuate power disparities. A seemingly benign device—like a voice-activated assistant—becomes a conduit for the same narratives of patriarchal control that have shaped household economies for centuries. Far from being neutral platforms, these systems encode hierarchies, making the invisible visible in their very operations.
Consider this: the majority of domestic IoT innovations are predicated on the idea that someone must maintain—someone with the time, inclination, and authority to oversee. The default user remains the overburdened caregiver, typically a woman, while the tech itself is marketed as a “luxury” or “ease for modern men.” In this tension lies the paradox—the tools that should liberate only reinforce the very structures they claim to streamline.
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**The Spectral Power of Default Modes**
Every piece of hardware has a default: a preset default, and it is rarely, if ever, female. The default smartphone size, default car key fob, even default body size in ergonomic designs—all echo an unexamined male standard. In the IoT realm, this phenomenon metastasizes into daily experiences. Voice recognition, for instance, was historically calibrated on the pitch of men’s voices. The result is glitches, frustrations, and, subtly, erasures of existence when a system chooses to ignore or misinterpret the input of its primary female users.
This isn’t merely a matter of technical oversight; it’s a manifestation of a larger architectural unconscious—where invisibility is coded as normative and, therefore, desirable. A child’s fitness tracker might report incorrect calories burned because its algorithm assumes a child of a certain weight corresponds to a boy’s typical frame. Or a smart home assistant that defaults to calling women “honey” when a male voice requests, “Alexa, turn on the oven.”
A system’s default is a political statement—one that communicates, without words, which bodies, which identities, which voices are meant to be optimized for and which are considered secondary. Such defaults are the digital equivalent of the “ladies’ section” behind the men’s in a department store: a space that only exists to serve the male gaze.
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**The Illusion of Disconnection: Home as a Battleground**
The private sphere, once touted as a sanctuary from gendered dynamics, is now contested terrain within the IoT ecosystem. In theory, technology promises to lessen physical drudgery—disembedding effort from time—and offering efficiency. But when an alarm clock is synchronized to a male-dominant sleep cycle or smart lighting is scheduled based on the activity of a primary male breadwinner, an insidious question arises: to whose rhythms shall the household conform?
The IoT-enabled home paradoxically exacerbates the very labor divisions it appears to alleviate. If a child’s smart toys are curated with ads for toys explicitly marketed as “for her” or “for him,” it isn’t just a matter of marketing—it’s about training young minds into the assumption that technology isn’t universal. Similarly, a GPS home alarm system might be calibrated to trigger an alert if a woman leaves the house at night—because, the logic insists, someone in her body requires closer monitoring than their neighbor would if he were on the same journey.
This is what philosopher Jane Bennett calls the “thing-power” of objects: how inanimate devices assert agency, and in many cases, enforce norms of safety, movement, and self-presentation. Yet in the context of domestic IoT, this power is profoundly skewed: a house equipped with surveillance systems, motion detectors, and safety protocols that prioritize patriarchal constructs of vulnerability only deepens the gendered chasm between who is deemed safe to navigate unescorted and who is not.
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**The Algorithmic Veil: Surveillance as the New Intimacy**
The IoT’s omnipresence is sold as convenience, but beneath this veneer lies an architecture of persistent observation. The home becomes a labyrinth of sensors, each feeding into streams of data that feed corporations, law enforcement, and, inevitably, algorithms that profile and predict. For women, this surveillance is rarely about security—it is more often about control: who can access this data, who owns it, who benefits from its processing.
Companies selling smart jewelry or wearables that claim to “protect women” by GPS tracking implicitly acknowledge a societal norm: that women require monitoring to ensure their own safety, and that their freedom demands a technological chaperone. Such devices normalize the idea that a woman’s body isn’t an autonomous entity but one to be watched, contained, and safeguarded against her own agency.
Algorithms, particularly those that govern IoT systems, learn from historical behaviors—often replicated from existing power imbalances. Predictive models designed to anticipate user habits might flag a woman’s late-night study as “out-of-place” even as they ignore an equivalent pattern from a working male in her household. Thus, while the IoT constructs a façade of modernity and liberation, its inner logic often replicates societal structures that have long denied women equal access to space and decision-making power.
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**Beyond the Binary: What Would Truly Inclusive IoT Look Like?**
To dismantle the IoT’s implicit misogyny requires more than a surface revision—it demands a reckoning with who writes these systems, who designs their defaults, and who gets to inhabit them as equal participants. Inclusion starts with representation at every stage: engineers who consider intersections of gender, race, and class; algorithms trained on diverse samples to reveal their own biases; and systems calibrated to adaptive, not static, human experiences.
What might a future of IoT look like if its developers prioritized fluidity over division? A fitness tracker that does not prescribe a single weight or body type? A voice assistant that defaults to no pronoun, rendering the choice irrelevant rather than essential? A home automated by artificial intelligence that doesn’t assume which family member is responsible for meals, household errands, or bedtime rituals—one that asks instead, “Shall all members benefit equally?” Rather than reinforcing the assumption that any one person—a parent, a spouse, an employee—must bear the burden of a system, technologies could be designed to decentralize labor and responsibility.
Such a future would also entail interrogating the very definition of security. A truly equitable IoT shouldn’t be defined by tools that keep women in; it would instead design environments wherein bodies, regardless of gender, aren’t policed for existing. Privacy, respect, and bodily autonomy must be the cornerstones of inclusive technology—ones that don’t assume vulnerability or assign domestic roles but treat all users as sovereign beings within the architecture.
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**Toward a Feminist Tech Future: The IoT Must Be Reprogrammed**
The fascination with the Internet of Things—as a phenomenon that transcends gender—is predicated on a false neutrality. Yet this technology, like all its predecessors, carries traces of past oppressions. To build a different future, we must resist the notion that convenience comes at the expense of equity. The IoT must evolve from an extension of patriarchal systems into a framework that dismantles them.
The challenge isn’t to adapt feminity into tech; it’s to construct a world where femininity, masculinity, non-binarisms—all can simply exist. A space where smart systems don’t ask, “Does the user follow societal norms?” but rather, “How can these systems support autonomy?” The IoT shouldn’t be the Internet of Abusive Men; it should be the Internet of Mutual Care—invented, designed, and inhabited by all.
Until then, what we think of as “innovation” may be, beneath the surface, little more than the latest chapter in a long, gendered story.
