Cooperativa Código Libre
Feminism and cooperativism to make our lives possible II
In this article we present and transcribe an interview with two members of the worker cooperative Código Libre, with the aim of investigating the ways in which the organization resolves in practice the conceptual approaches of feminist economics. More specifically, how, from its economic logic, it puts people’s lives and needs at the center, while at the same time it has tools to solve gender inequalities. Likewise, since the cooperative is dedicated to software development, the aim is to highlight the importance of the feminist and cooperative perspective in a key economic sector such as the technological one. This is the second in a series of three interviews, the first of which was already published.
In the first article of this series of three interviews on feminist economics and cooperativism — of which this is the second — we began by highlighting the importance of the reproductive or care economy, which sustains the lives of all people and which is highly feminized. We stressed the need to make it visible and to consider it more consciously in our social organization, since otherwise the whole economy becomes unsustainable. We also recounted how in the last four decades women have massively joined the world of paid work without there having been any reorganization of the care economy, so that the reality of the “double workday” has arisen for them: one in the market, in exchange for money, and the other in the home in an unpaid manner. In some cases, a third, in the community, was added. At the same time, the neoliberal policies that have been implemented since then have reduced social, health and education services or removed them directly from the responsibility of the State and public entities, privatizing the responsibility for the reproduction of life, thus placing a greater burden on households and communities and, within them, on women’s free work time. We were saying that this was happening in similar ways in our country and in the rest of Latin America.
On the other hand, we recalled that modern cooperativism was born precisely in the heart of the popular sectors to solve concrete vital needs and thus, with a rationality different from that of lucrative companies that have profit as their ultimate goal. Thus, cooperatives are economic entities that must be efficient, and in themselves oriented to life. Moreover, because of their collective form of organization, and because of their need for integration with other cooperatives, they recognize in fact the interdependence in which we live. That is why they can resonate strongly with feminist economics.
Having done the review, let’s get down to business. This time we will present an interview with two members of the worker cooperative Código Libre: Cris Pacheco, from the Management and Administration Area, and Cecilia Muñoz Cancela, current President. The cooperative -made up of eight associates- is dedicated to software development and was formed in 2017 in Buenos Aires city. But before continuing, it is worth pausing for a moment to analyze the technology sector from a feminist perspective.
It is clear that the new information and communication technologies (ICTs), the Internet — among other digital developments — have improved people’s quality of life in many aspects. However, these improvements are not distributed equally throughout society. This is why we speak of the “digital divide”, which refers to inequalities in access, use, management and control of new technologies. Measurements taken at the local, regional and global levels indicate that this is a socioeconomic divide. In other words, the lower the level of income and/or wealth, the less access, use, management and control of new technologies.
However, since women are overrepresented in the lower-income sectors, this gap is also a gender gap. And when we analyze some aspects of today’s technologies from a gender perspective, some important notes come to light. But let’s take it one step at a time.
First, what does it mean to say that women are overrepresented in the lower income sectors? And why? The overload of care work that we talked about above generates a lower participation of women in paid work. That is, they work fewer hours -or none- in exchange for money, they do so in more flexible -precarious- ways, and with more unstable trajectories, entering and leaving the labor market (for example, when a member of the family group has to postpone or abandon paid work for care reasons, one of the women tends to do so). All this generates that, on average, men in society receive more income than women, generating what is called the “income gap”, which in Argentina is — according to INDEC data[1] — 26%. This means that, on average, for every 100 pesos a man receives, each woman receives 74 pesos. In other words, more money circulates among men than among women. According to the same source, women make up 65% of the lower income population. Conversely, they make up only 35% of the population with the highest income. This is also known as “feminization of poverty”.
The patrimonial data -related to assets and properties- point in the same direction. According to a report published by the Center for Political Economy last year, of the total number of people in our country subject to personal property tax, 34.5% are women, while 65.5% are men. At the same time, considering the value of the assets declared, 72% corresponds to the assets of men, while the other 28% corresponds to the assets declared by women. In other words, not only are women taxed half as much as men, but their assets have a proportionally lower value. The same conclusion is reached when considering income tax, in its four categories: of the total income taxable income, 76.2% corresponds to men’s income, while 23.8% corresponds to women’s income[2] .
In conclusion, in our country it can be clearly seen that socioeconomic inequalities are at the same time gender inequalities. They are not separated one from the other. And according to a study published by ECLAC in 2022[3] , poverty is equally feminized for the entire Latin American and Caribbean region. In short, if the digital divide is fundamentally a socioeconomic divide, it is clear that women are particularly affected. But let us now turn to the analysis of technology and gender more specifically.
ECLAC reports in a document published in 2022[4] that four out of ten women in our region do not have access to the Internet. It also states that only 37% of the lower income population has connectivity (when this percentage is 75% among the wealthier population) and accessing the Internet costs more than 14% of household income. The most interesting fact here is that 39% of women in this group have no income of their own. Connectivity difficulties are worse among indigenous, Afro-descendant and rural women.
For its part, UN Women states that worldwide only 22% of the people working in artificial intelligence are women[5] . For our country, according to openqube’s salary survey 2023[6] , cis males represent 77.9% of the total number of technology workers. In other words, the participation of women and diversities is really very low.
There are several problems here. First, women are being left behind in an economic sector with high present growth and great future employment potential. Second, technology is not neutral, and the scarcity of women among those who design technology reinforces the androcentric biases of technology, in the programs and algorithms it generates, in the research priorities and allocation of resources for different problems. In fact, technology and science in general are dedicated to solving issues and needs of all humanity. Gender biases in technology can therefore reproduce inequalities while making a number of issues invisible. We must also consider that access to and control of information and communication technologies and connectivity today are a means to access other fundamental rights such as work, education and health. Last but not least, access to these technologies today entails an important social capital[7] . Therefore, in the midst of the digital revolution we are experiencing, the inequalities we are pointing out deepen gender injustices.
Now it is important to ask ourselves: why are there so few women working in technological areas? Without having a definitive answer, we can point to several reasons. On the one hand, as already mentioned, there is already a lower participation of women in the labor market, due to the overload of unpaid care work, at home and in the communities. In the Argentine labor market, women have a 52.3% participation rate, while men have a participation rate of around 70.7%[8] . In other words, among all women of working age, only a little more than half work in exchange for money and, in general, they do so in precarious and “flexible” ways because they have to reconcile their work and family life, as if it were an individual problem for each woman and not the real problem: how we are organizing ourselves socially with respect to care and the daily sustainability of life.
But there is also, and in a totally related way, the problem of gender stereotypes and roles. Just as the role of caregiving is highly feminized, the technology sector is highly masculinized. And this can be seen in higher education, and even in childhood.
The problem can already be seen in the low number of women in “STEM” careers, that is, careers related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics[9] . According to the research carried out by the organization Chicas En Tecnología and published in 2022 in the report “Una carrera desigual. La brecha de género en el sistema universitario de Argentina”[10] 59% of university students in Argentina are women. But only 12% of them study STEM careers, while 31% of men do so. Another measurement indicates that 1 out of every 3 STEM students is female. However, in STEM graduate programs, a trend towards gender parity can be observed. However, as students at this level represent only 5% of the total student body, the balance is not balanced. With regard to university programming studies, the same report by Chicas En Tecnología states that female university students studying programming represent 1.1% of the female enrollment, while the figure for male students is 8%.
The Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento (CIPPEC) warns about the stereotypes with which boys and girls are raised and points out that, according to data taken in the City of Buenos Aires, as children get older, girls’ confidence in their performance in mathematics decreases[11] . Between the ages of 6 and 8, 33% of girls and 30% of boys perceive themselves as skilled in mathematics. By the age of 9/10, self-confidence decreases for both genders, but much more so for girls: 20% of boys feel good at mathematics, while among girls, only 11%. And one more fact: as early as age 6, 90% of girls associate engineering with masculine subjects.
Another very relevant issue in this process of increasing digitalization of our lives and social relations is gender-based violence in digital media. Violence in this area consists of the reproduction of sexist stereotypes and discriminatory discourse, threats, sexual harassment, invasion of privacy, non-consensual dissemination of personal images, among others. Digital violence or gender “cyber-violence” is exacerbated when it comes to attacking women in politics, social communicators, human rights defenders, journalists, and other public space referents.
It is also important to talk about gender violence in technology workplaces. According to a survey carried out by the organization Women in Technology and published in 2023 in the report “Gender and Organizational Culture in Technology”[12] , 6 out of 10 women and diversities went through situations of sexism, discrimination or sexual harassment in the work space. Thirty-five percent experienced sexual harassment in the last year. In addition, almost half of the gender-diverse people surveyed experienced some kind of hostility when expressing their identity; and about 25% of non-heterosexual people experienced discrimination when expressing their sexual orientation. In an affirmative sense, 59% of the people surveyed indicated that the company in which they work implements or has implemented actions with a gender and diversity perspective, and 46% stated that these policies achieved positive results. Among these actions, they mentioned awareness-raising activities, measures for pregnant women that go beyond those established by labor laws, policies to favor co-responsibility in care, creation of gender and diversity areas or committees, elaboration of protocols for action in situations of gender violence, or gender quotas for job roles in technology.
Another aspect of the digital divide has to do with the content that circulates on the web. Wikipedia is a clear example. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, of the biographies on Wikipedia in Spanish, only 23.2% are of women, and only 0.2% are of trans people and other genders[13] . Moreover, for every 9 male editors, there is one female editor in an encyclopedia that -in its Spanish version- has more than one and a half million articles[14] . Much more could be said about patriarchy and the Internet, but the subject is vast and profound, and exceeds the scope of this article. Much has been studied and analyzed by feminist movements, which have also been making recommendations for a fairer web[15] .
Finally, it is worth considering the world of video games, which is one of the most widespread uses of technology for children and adolescents in our country. According to a study conducted by Gala and Samaniego[16] , 70% of children between 6 and 9 years old play video games, and more than 56% of those between 12 and 17 years old also do so. One of the issues is that video games are usually gendered, i.e., they are catalogued as “for boys” or “for girls”, being active cultural factors of binarization. Thus, the ways in which males and females are represented in video games also reproduce binary and patriarchal forms of gender, as well as androcentric views of the world. The hypersexualized representation of women is especially notorious.
The workforce dedicated to this industry follows the patterns of software production in general. Gala and Samaniego themselves, based on a report published in 2020 by the Observatorio Industria Argentina Videojuegos, of the Asociación de Desarrolladores de Videojuegos Argentinos and the Universidad de Rafaela, provide revealing figures. Out of 55 companies surveyed, 21% of the workers are women and 18% of the companies are made up only of male workers. Of these, 3% are made up only of women. In addition: 59% of the female workers in these companies are engaged in non-technical tasks. But all is not lost. And feminist movements are always active. In 2019, women and diversities in our country launched the national section of “Women in Games” (“Mujeres en Juegos”), a global organization that advocates for a video game industry free of gender-based violence and discrimination.
In fact, feminist movements have been calling attention to this issue and pushing for measures to be taken at different institutional levels. Thus, last year the Declaration for March 8, International Women’s Day, of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women — agreed by all member states plus a number of civil society organizations — was dedicated to the issue of technology and the new digital era[17] . In its more than 30 pages, it stresses, among many other things, that women must be in the decision-making spaces that make up the new technological advances, otherwise the patterns of inequality and discrimination that currently exist can be perpetuated and deepened. It also points out that it is important to ensure that there is no gender or racist bias in algorithms and artificial intelligence training.
The International Cooperative Alliance, for its part, also took the opportunity in 2023 of its Declaration for March 8 to address the issue of technology in a gender perspective. It reports how cooperatives are carrying out actions to promote gender justice in this context of increasing digitalization, in terms of education and access to jobs and technological tools.
On the other hand, among many valuable initiatives that can be mentioned, it is worth mentioning the School of Feminist Economics organized by the Argentine headquarters of the DAWN network (Women for an Alternative Development for a New Era). The first edition of that School was held in our country in 2018, and took place at the Hotel Bauen worker cooperative. Since then it had four more instances. In 2023 it was held under the title “Challenging the algorithm: feminist perspectives from the Global South in the digital era”. Three days of local, regional and international exhibitions, debates, plus a series of study materials were part of this very rich experience[18] . It discussed how the emergence of the digital age coincides with the era of exponential growth of social inequality. They discussed how algorithms now regulate work, reproduce gender stereotypes, and worsen labor conditions through self-employment platforms. Also discussed was the massive tax evasion by large cyber companies, and its relation to the defunding of states that are then unable to provide care, education and health services, thus increasing women’s free labor time.
The DAWN network itself, together with It for Change — an organization dedicated to ensuring that digital technologies contribute to social justice and human rights — produced a document entitled “Towards a Feminist Approach to Digital Justice: Thematic Mapping of Critical Considerations”[19] , based on a dialogue between dozens of researchers and activists from different countries in the Global South. There they observe how the public space on the Internet is actually privatized and how the entire network infrastructure is monopoly-controlled. They point out that data and other common goods are privately extracted, just as connectivity is considered a market object. In this logic, bodies and all social relations are commodified, and violence is easily reproduced. Regarding gender issues specifically, just to point out one example, the document warns that the algorithms of labor platforms reward those who are willing to work long hours continuously, discriminating in fact against those who shorten their working hours or split their day to take care of their unpaid care tasks. Most of them are women.
With all that has been said so far, the importance of the presence of the cooperative sector, with its democratic and egalitarian potential in the technology sector in general, and in the software sector in particular, can be well understood. And even more so if it works with a feminist perspective. Without anticipating the content of the interview, it is noteworthy that the software cooperative Código Libre is chaired by a woman. In addition, they have been implementing measures for some time that recognize the care time of its members as work time, whether when they need to use the time for a medical shift, to take care of a dependent person, or to prepare their daily meal. They also differentiate retreats when members have dependents. Similarly, we must highlight the Seedbed Project, as an initiative that uses the same technological knowledge tools of the cooperative — in partnership with others — to promote the labor participation of women and LGBTIQ+ people in the world of programming. Likewise, we can see in this cooperative sector the deep economic integration of the entities and their good economic performance, at the same time that -still- the lack of regulation for worker cooperatives in our country leaves them in a weak place in terms of social security. Much more can be highlighted, but for that, let’s go to the interview.
How did you choose the name?
Cecilia Muñoz Cancela (CMC): We were born very close to free software development projects, linked to university extension projects and university incubation on free technologies. From there it must have happened spontaneously. Today we continue working and militating for free software.
What is the territorial scope of the cooperative’s activity?
Cris Pacheco (CP): Today federal and sometimes international. We have worked with clients from Canada, for example. And today one of our clients is here in Buenos Aires, another in Córdoba…. Although because of the virtuality they end up being companies that are based in one city but their workers are all over the country.
What is the cooperative’s production and marketing process like?
CMC: Unlike other sectors, in software the demand is quite big. So we do not advertise our services, but, in general, we manage an offer quite linked to the Federation of Cooperatives to which we belong, FACT[TIC] (Argentine Federation of Technology, Innovation and Knowledge Work Cooperatives). In that sense, there are many offers circulating, different possibilities arrive and, in general terms, we move within that scope without having to make a very aggressive job search. In addition, we do not sell products, but services. And, in general, we keep the clients we have over time. We don’t just deliver something and leave, but we work continuously doing maintenance or strengthening the work teams.
On the other hand, we put a lot of energy into working on projects that we find particularly interesting, from the technical challenge or, above all, from the social and political challenge. For example, in terms of technological sovereignty and/or developments with social impact. Several of us at Coope are trained in this area, so we are particularly interested in it.
What do you do specifically?
CMC: Software. Sometimes it is to maintain things and update them, sometimes it is for developments, and then there is the type of project. Sometimes it is for commercial projects, more traditional, a travel company, a company related to agriculture or any other issue. Sometimes it is for the State, for example, we recently worked on a large project that several cooperatives did for INTA. And sometimes we develop projects that are, let’s say, a little more born and bred at home or in the sector. For example, the Seedbed project that we are now starting. [Further developed below in the interview].
How do you set the prices?
CP: When we set up, we did it around a project that lasted a couple of years. When that project was finished and we had to go out to look for clients, we were faced with the question of how to formulate prices, taking into account that we were a young and small cooperative to enter into negotiations. I believe that the contact we have with the Federation helped us a lot. The “what prices do you charge, compas?” The hourly values can vary according to the project, or according to the expertise. It is not the same for a person who is just starting out as it is for someone who has been developing for ten years, who we call a senior. It is not the same the size or the time the project takes. But, in general, what we do, in order to start talking after understanding all these characteristics that the client or the project will have, is to have a common hourly value. Today we know, more or less, how much is being charged in the market.
CMC: Sure, and the values are quite standardized and also, actually, quite dollarized in the sector because software, in general, is an export product and is a commodity. There is a certain margin of commercial intelligence, but, in general terms, there are quite transparent standards. What we do, what we do all the time and also many cooperatives of our Federation -which has to do with the spirit of how we work- is that for the projects we especially want to promote, we make a great effort in relation to the price. Because, precisely, as the price is dollarized, it is very difficult to carry out social impact projects if we think of it only from a commercial point of view. So, most of the cooperatives that have educational or social projects, we make a sort of internal account to guarantee the sustainability of the cooperative, with the emphasis on our retirements, labor rights and basic equipment. For example, working for the State, which always pays with a long delay and in pesos. If it were for a purely economic rationale, we would end up never working on this kind of projects. But there are projects that particularly interest us, or have to do with the development of free technologies. We have been doing it since we were trained, and sometimes we don’t even realize it, it is in our nature and in our daily work. But, in reality, in commercial terms, it is an effort.
Could you please elaborate a little more on how you work on economic integration with other cooperatives?
CMC: Software development requires multiple profiles. In general, the vast majority of the clients we have, whether they are social impact projects or not, are inter-cooperative projects. And there are different levels of technical collaboration. We could not have grown, for example, in the number of members if it had not been for the quality of inter-cooperative technical collaboration. New people joined our cooperative, and they were quickly able to work in the inter-cooperative team where there were management capacities of those profiles, which we did not have inside the cooperative, that is, we could not have managed them.
Integration has provided us with a lot of support, and now we are also sometimes supporting new cooperatives that are joining us. They ask us. And by sharing the practices you have, you are also enriched. Those of us who come from the social sciences and other fields would always like to have time to write and think, to systematize and organize much more. Because sometimes there is a lot of “Cris meets someone and tells him”, and there is no manual for that. It would be great to have a repository of material and to have more capabilities in that sense. There are some things that we have been doing, last year and now we are continuing, in a project of cooperative platforms called Coopcycle, it is a sharing platform. It is a project that started in France and FACTTIC worked hard to adapt it to Latin America, and to Argentina in particular. There you realize the power of doing this work and the role you have from your sector, what you can contribute.
CP: And a project of this kind that aims at this social impact, at this cultural struggle -because it is not only a software- could not have been done by any of the cooperatives alone, even if it is one of the largest ones. Because not all technology development cooperatives have the profiles that can address this social dimension. Código Libre participated in this project. There are things that have to do not only with the specific territory or with the fact that the application can be downloaded, but also with usability, with culture, with how you transform what you want to transform, with which social actors, in which reality the distribution cooperatives are here -which are not the same as in France. So, there are a lot of things that require specific knowledge that are not necessarily those of software development.
CMC: Two colleagues from the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, Denise Kasparian and Julieta Grasas, also worked on this project, and there is a clear team of cooperatives and the Germani Institute is also involved. It is good that we can make synergy between research practices, applied research, and others from the academy, because there are things that do not end up being registered or there is knowledge that does not end up being put at the service. Sometimes I participate in a Congress and I see that the discussions are going in a certain direction. While others of us are working eight hours a day in a cooperative, solving things on a daily basis and without the time and energy to systematize them. The singular experience is very good but, also, as a sector, in order to be more powerful, it would be good if we could pave the way and not stumble so many times over the same stone.
There are many times when we make synergies and there are other times when we still need to find a way around it. It seems to me that one of the challenges has to do with what Cris said, that it is not enough to develop a cool technology. There is a whole part of the cultural battle and also the commercial dimension of these platforms that is important. Then, what happens is that these cool software tools exist but they are not used. That is where I think we have a great challenge in articulating with other sectors and with other actors.
There are some very interesting initiatives of alternatives in terms of technological sovereignty, of building our own technology. Because any technology, if we buy it abroad, is an outflow of foreign currency, and you are buying software when you can provide jobs here and also develop technologies that are more secure, because data is not traveling anywhere.
But it is not enough for the software to exist; it is also necessary to see how it enters into a transformation dynamic. Again, the fantasy that software is going to transform everything. And it won’t. Unfortunately not.
How do they solve the distribution of tasks, work and time inside and outside the cooperative?
CP: We had a path there. We went from a stage in which we identified tasks and had the illusion that we could all solve everything, from putting the pitcher with the glasses on the table to managing when you don’t get the electricity bill, to another one in which we could have the tasks more divided. Today we are a small coope but we have an administrative part, a commercial part, and we have the compas who spend most of their time in software development. Many times what happens to us because we are a small coope is that several of the areas fall on the same person. It is precisely these skills that are a little more “soft”, that have to do with other skills, with another level of management, another set of skills, that not everyone has. And that, in general, is where the difference between genders can be seen. And there are super transversal tasks that, in reality, are neither of administration, nor are they of the personal area, nor are they of development, but have to do with maintaining the transversality and horizontality of the cooperative.
For example, in the monthly meetings. We have an all-day meeting that we dedicate only to the cooperative. And there, for example, we talk about what we want to do this year in the cooperative and, suddenly, we have to brainstorm and identify what tasks are necessary in each sector to achieve that, and there is an organizational management task so that we can all participate in it. That management task, for example, which is to make a spreadsheet where we can all fill it in, and see that we all go through it, could be done by any person. These tasks are a little more transversal and more general than the specific administrative or development tasks. This task cannot really be delegated. Because there are people who are not used to manage, to have all the things in their heads, knowing that there is a time. Because that is also what it is: managing time. We are organizing birthdays, aren’t we? Well, let’s do a little bit of everything and, in fact, the ones who raise their hands afterwards are always the same ones.
CMC: Of course. So today we have separated the work by areas. And we try to relate the areas to packages of hours. We set up this structure and this allows us to visualize a growth structure where we will be able to add associates to these areas. At the beginning, when there were only a few of us or we were less organized, there were six of us, in the previous stage, the work was more closely related to what each individual did with a name and surname. Then the person and the task were very much mixed up. Now with the areas, we started to be able to rationalize a little and to give more entity to the task packages. Then, as Cris was saying about the more transversal tasks, we organize ourselves as follows: we have an assembly, which we call assembly although it is not, a weekly meeting of an hour, an hour and a half at the most, where we put in common issues related to daily decisions on resource management, ideas, proposals, issues related, above all, to economic distribution and, above all, linked to the objectives we are setting ourselves, also in terms of labor rights. And, afterwards, decisions to be made about the clients. So we all participate from our place in the decision making process of substantial issues: clients, large projects, office, non-office, labor insurance, and so on.
Now we have incorporated one more meeting, weekly, also for one hour, where we work on planning issues that concern us. For example, the organization of our birthday, if we want to do something: RUM, multipurpose meeting. What we do in the RUM is to put in common, which is something we felt we needed in order to rationalize the tasks and not to make the reproductive tasks invisible, which is something that systematically happens when things are going well. It seems that “they do it by themselves”, that is a bad thing in organizations, in general. So, after much discomfort, we identified it. The RUM allows us to share with everyone what we are doing that week. “Hey, I’m working on this”, be it projects with clients, tasks related to administration, commercial, institutional relations or whatever. We have a space that is, more or less, half an hour, where we share and it is written down. This way we know the tasks that each one had this week and what they are doing. And we decided to keep this transversality because it maintains the spirit of a certain involvement that we consider necessary in the cooperative’s identity, beyond the fact that we are becoming more and more sectorized according to the specializations.
We started, as I think almost all organizations do, with a kind of “we all do everything” thing, and then there was no milk in the refrigerator because we were all going to buy it and no one was buying it. Then, we started to sectorize more but we said: There are certain things that concern all of us and if we believe that we have a democracy where each member is a vote, we need the necessary, basic information for that. So we have: Weekly assembly, RUM, plus monthly face-to-face meeting. We established this face-to-face standard, physically, body and soul, once a month. In fact, it has a big cost because we stop working for all the clients, which means that we do not charge that day. And we give ourselves the seven/eight-hour day to discuss strategic planning, more significant decisions, growth strategies. Those are our planning devices.
What about the Board?
CP: Of course, then there is the Board of Directors, which meets once a week. There is a constant back and forth. In the Board we deal with legal and administrative matters and take them to the Assembly. The Assembly issues mandates for tasks and there we distribute the tasks and, in general, the Board centralizes them. Afterwards, there are people who collaborate in specific tasks. We do not want the Council to be an island that ends up being a Management, because in the end the rest would not know anything about it.
We will have to see what happens if we continue to grow, but we try to maintain, at least, that tension between each one can do as many hours per day what he is trained to do and what he feels like doing, but also a certain involvement in the decision making process. Because we want to increase the number of retreats, but for that to happen, certain conditions are necessary…
If at the Assembly we said “this is a two-page document that must be read”, well, then everybody has one paid hour a week to read it. It is contemplated, or we all load the hours in time sheets where we can see, more or less, what we are dedicating more time to and, also, to know what we are offering to our clients.
And we know that we have three different workdays: one of four, one of six and one of eight hours per day. The reality is that our ideal per month is to have those days, or four, or six, or eight. We may be doing more, just because of this growth crisis, some people, not all.
CMC: And what happens, for example, when we are working on projects is that in general, we never sell more than six hours of a person’s time in an eight-hour workday to external clients or for projects. So, the person, normally, sells six hours to a client and then there is an hour for lunch and an hour for these cross-cutting issues. It’s all very streamlined. For productive tasks it is easy because you sell hours to the project or to the client. But when the issue of reproductive tasks appears, it becomes more difficult. The reproductive aspect becomes invisible, so we start to develop strategies.
The structure of selling hours has its A and B sides. Sometimes it happens that when you have legal or economic responsibility in an organization, if it is eleven o’clock at night and something is exploding, you are busy. It’s not that “ahh, my workday is over”. And there is a question of the mental burden of what it implies to be responsible for certain things. So, the logics of hours, for me, work very well with the logic of software companies, of capital companies.
But also this “owning/owning” is a strategy of capital, of copying. And, in fact, it happens with the delivery platforms, doesn’t it? You see the people who work for those platforms and the level of involvement they have with those companies that are nobody and are nowhere, and they also achieve a certain identification, even when they are the most ubiquitous thing in the universe. What happens to the cooperatives? I was thinking, we really own our businesses. We don’t eat the curve, we really are owners. But, nevertheless, we stop to think about this rationalization and the limits in relation to this, to what happens with certain reproductive tasks and these tensions that we see all the time, don’t we? It happened to us, for example, in a previous moment of growth crisis, that we were suddenly working 12 or 14 hours, and working on weekends. And it was like “OK… This was for a better life, wasn’t it?
And how do they deal with the issues of reproductive life today?
CP: There is a tension. We have the right to recreation, we have a life outside the cooperative, we have studies, we have care responsibilities. We want to go to work eight hours because it is healthy to work eight hours, or even less.
The cooperative recognizes our care hours. If a coworker has a sick child and has to go to take care of it, she spends the care hours, she does not have to make them up, the cooperative pays for them. Then, there is the B side that, in reality, the tasks of that coworker are done only by her, and if she does not do them today, she has to do them tomorrow with tomorrow’s tasks as well. I don’t know if we will ever solve that, but we have peace of mind, on the one hand. I compare with my previous work experiences, and I have the peace of mind that if my son gets sick, I send a message and nobody will have any problem. In fact, they will tell me “take care of what you have to take care of”. Where is the accent? To make this match: I have to take him to the doctor, I take him to the doctor, I don’t have to, later on, take anyone’s face.
So, we are on this constant path of recognition of rights and, also, of ceasing to reproduce the logics in which we were raised, in which we are immersed. This invisibilization of reproductive tasks is not something we invented. All the tools that we can identify and that we believe that the cooperative can give us and owes us, is also because we believe that the work space has to be a safe space so that you can lead your personal and work life without any kind of conflict. In other words, you don’t have to choose between motherhood and work, right? Because it is madness, it is macabre, if you think about it. But nevertheless we are very used to that, we come from there. In fact, there are things that we have today that we identify after years or after a long time of saying “Why do I feel bad about this if it shouldn’t be bad?” And then we start to develop tools from the cooperative.
And how was the process to reach this recognition?
CMC: First, we began to make them visible. It was impressive how we made them invisible. All of them, eh. And we began to make them visible, a little, among ourselves, a little in therapy [laughs]. It was a very virtuous dynamic between the personal and the group. It was also part of the growth crisis and to begin to feel certain discomfort. And it helped us a lot to participate in other spaces, to go to the Women’s Encounter and other places where these issues were discussed. We also began to study. We bought many books at the marches. And also sharing with comrades from other spaces. It came from many sides. And from there we began to think of instruments, such as the recognition of care tasks in the payroll. Now, as we were saying, the tasks in fact, even if they are postponed because the person is taking care, they accumulate, depending on who they fall on. So, sometimes, a certain tension persists.
Then, the recognition of menstrual management, which is a few pesos. Before, we used to charge an hourly rate that was exactly the same for everyone, regardless of any role, function, expertise, personal situation. Then we evaluated that in order to be able to charge everyone the same, in fact, we needed to stop making inequalities of vital situations invisible. In this respect, it helped us a lot to take things that other cooperatives were already doing. Installing something when other cooperatives were already doing it, also gives you a base.
This helped us a lot, we were able to discuss and there was a very good predisposition to make care responsibilities visible. So now we have a percentage recognition when we have dependents. Very few things make a difference in the income we have, one of them is that. Another very small percentage, almost symbolic, is related to participation in the Council, because the Council is also part of the hourly packages, but it implies a lot of responsibilities and it is not a position that tends to have a high turnover. It is not that people are desperate to be a Councilor. So we wanted to make a minimum recognition of that. And then, we add vacation time for seniority on an annual basis. In addition, we have 30 study days per year, which each one of us can take as we see fit, chatting and agreeing.
And we also bought the equipment. We try to recognize as much as possible all these expenses, and everything necessary for the home office. Or going to the office. For example, we do not give an extra hour to people who come from far away. In other words, a person who comes to the office in two and a bit, almost three hours of travel, can work one hour less because of that travel time, one hour remains in the coope’s account, another one goes for it. We also pay for lunch when we come to the office. This is also to encourage attendance. If you have to come, you don’t have to spend the day before making your lunch. There is also a recognition of care work there.
How much of this do you have systematized?
CMC: Now, there are also tensions with some of these criteria, as there are with care. Suddenly the colleague who is in charge of management and administration tasks has the recognition of her travel time, but in reality, in practice she cannot work one hour less because she does not have enough time for the amount of tasks she has to do. However, we understand that this is a temporary situation, because we are thinking of adding a person for administration. But there is a moment in which we have a tension between a number of rights and the effective possibility of making use of those rights due to the dynamics of work in terms of specific responsibilities.
But it does not mean that these mechanisms that you are discovering as coope, you are discovering them, and you are exploring in any case the problematic that emerges with them.
CP: And everything we implemented today was not unrelated to the fact that there were people in the coope who did not understand what we were talking about, “if we all charged the same”. At one point, we were two cis women and four cis men. We had to start discussing from somewhere what was happening to us, negotiating between that guilt that one feels, I feel guilty for asking for something that I think I deserve, but I don’t know if I deserve it that much. With what we put together we are paving the way for the people who will come after us, including our own partners, too, understanding that they are not exempt from having someone under their care tomorrow, be it an adult or a child. So, in this sense, the discussions were interesting. In the sense that we were in the transition of ourselves identifying something that made us wrong, that did not allow us to move forward — be it a glass ceiling, a sticky floor, whatever names we want to give it. And at the same time, conversing with our partners who, to say it somehow, in patriarchal mandates, are mostly kind, that is to say that you can raise an issue and you will not receive certain types of violence that in another space you will. I believe that conversations are pleasant in the coope, or more pleasant than in other spaces.
CMC: Yes, they are possible to begin with. There are other spaces where there is not even a place to start chatting.
CP: And there is also a moment that maybe because of our personalities, because of our life histories, because of our trajectories, there comes a moment where you don’t ask for much permission, either. “This is how it is, this is what is happening and I am your partner and I am as much a part of this cooperative as you are.” Conversing from there and not from a “Do you think it would be good to talk?”
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And how did the Semillero project mentioned above come about?
CMC: In FACTTIC, our Federation, we work in a space called Espacio en Deconstrucción, which is a gender space within the Federation. There, for example, after detecting a problem that has to do with the sector, which is very masculinized by cis-males, we asked ourselves what we could do to modify it. And part of the issue had to do with the fact that, many times, the processes of incorporation of associates reproduced gender logics and biases from the very basis of how many resumes you could receive, of which gender identities and from there on. Obviously, many things happen before that have to do with how many women or other gender identities study technology. In general, the technology sectors, in and of themselves, are already expelling. You go into a toy store and you see all the light blue ingenuity and pink broomsticks and kitchenettes on the other side. So there is a very systematic question that, what it does, is to generate exclusions in the sector of certain identities. We are not the cause but we are not the exception either, so, from there, we came up with an idea that we are now presenting that has to do with a seedbed of associations with a gender perspective, which would be a platform where we disseminate and motivate so that we can offer our searches for associations and, also, that people can offer themselves as associations without reproducing, or trying to neutralize as much as possible, most of the issues that generate gender biases. So, this is a platform that we want to make. The platform is www.semillero.coop.ar (Link)
In fact, the seedbed has the double objective of being in itself a software development project, that is, as a concrete work, and at the same time of being a school project in the sense that there are certain profiles. That is what we do whenever we can: we use the project for training, putting together a combo of experienced people with less experienced people and, in a way, the project is a stimulus. This has the counterpart that you are training someone who, otherwise, you would have to train them outside or with other resources or with internal resources of the cooperative.
We submitted the Semillero project to INAES, and we are seeing if we can obtain funding from there. It has already been endorsed by the Gender area of INAES and by the Legal Department. We hope it will be approved.
And the Semillero calls us very much as a project because we, from all this we had the opportunity to continue growing as a team and we wanted to do it with a gender perspective. We wanted to incorporate it in the process of searching for partners. It was something that motivated us and called us, we felt that we were moving something. And the people that joined us and that we began to link to the cooperative, some stayed and others did not.
But we have already incorporated this and it has revitalized us a lot. It gave diversity to the cooperative, associates with very different life stories. And we bet on that. We bet on growing in diversity to try to circulate energies, dynamics, points of view and projects.
And we also tend to go to spaces that exceed our cooperative. The Espacio en Deconstrucción, which belongs to the Federation and is the origin of the Semillero project. There is a lot of work and effort there. It works on the basis of a weekly meeting. It was to present a project, but it was an inter-cooperative space where to begin to put in common, where other points of view appear, where to feel that we are working for a transformation that we understand as a boomerang. Perhaps we exchanged with other cooperatives on how to develop criteria for the recognition of care tasks. We work this way in the projects, we replicate this logic quite a lot.
Now we are thinking, for the first time, that FACTTIC will go to the Women’s Meeting as FACTTIC, no matter how many of us there are, but we are trying to think more organically.
How had they gone to the Gathering so far?
CMC: We went as a cooperative on our own. In fact, the cooperative paid for most of the trip. We usually pay for trips related to the cooperative’s tasks. The colleagues who program go to programming events or to Federation events in different places. Also trips for different courses or workshops.
CP: I think that trip was like a big victory, too. We didn’t ask for much permission either. It was the first time. And the fact that a software development cooperative pays for its associates to travel to a Plurinational Meeting of Women and Diversities is remarkable because we also understand gender issues as something transversal, necessary and as part of our cooperative. We do not provide training on gender issues, but everything we do is impregnated with it. Because we understand that if it is not from there, we do not want anything.
CMC: And in the search for new associates we also linked up with the organization Contratá Trans with its program, and the people we added, in part, came from there. We started to articulate with the Ministry of Gender, which has the Trans Labor Quota with the database and there the articulation was very good and we moved forward with a training, beyond the ones we did internally, by Contratá Trans. We saw that the technological tools available for this kind of issues were not adequate. For different reasons we were not able to take advantage of that database, and from that problem the seedbed project was born. However, now we are working with the Mocha Celis labor exchange and we are doing better.
Anyway, there is a common problem that we cooperatives have, which is that when we go out to explain to people, especially to people trained in the world of technology -which is highly competitive and in great demand- what a cooperative is, many times they do not know what it is, and many of them have prejudices.
CP: “Those of the government”, “those that the government banks you”.
CMC: From there we thought of a platform with a communication strategy to disseminate some issues about cooperativism, so that when the person comes to the interview he/she has already seen at least a short video about it. Because many times a lot of energy is lost, with people who say “Oh, I love your project but I really work and in the afternoon I give you a hand”. There is an idea of not understanding each other as companies. With the platform we want to disseminate technological cooperativism and the possibility it has to provide jobs, and at the same time not to reproduce gender biases. Stereotypically, a cis-male takes a two-month course and introduces himself as an emperor in software development. And in the interview he says “And what do you have to offer me? Because, besides, there is this thing that software companies demand a lot, and they spoil you, so a whole logic of spoiled children is reproduced. Because, of course, “I am in great demand, I get a job wherever I want or I can work abroad”.
CP: “And besides, I’m a cis-male, you have to give me things”.
CMC: And with women or other identities it’s the other way around, they come up apologizing and saying they don’t know, even though they have a master’s degree maybe.
CP: I remember one of those curricula that had an award.
CMC: We learned a lot from that. We saw that these were things that if we did not pay attention, we would reproduce.
The impostor syndrome, which is a concept that I don’t like very much, but you understand what it points to. You see what a colleague says and you see yourself reflected there. And those things generate positive feedback. And then you say: if I have already seen it, I have already understood it and I am going through this: why not do something?
And how was FACTTIC’s In Deconstruction space put together?
CMC: FACTTIC is ten years old, Código Libre has been part of the Federation for five years. Previously, according to what we learned from our colleagues, the need for organization would have arisen, as in other places, from situations of violence that raise the problem, and for which it is evident that organization is necessary. And there were talks given in the plenary sessions and workshops to make gender issues visible. Historically, FACTTIC had been working in a space, according to what I was told, which was called Gender Space. When we joined, there was a space called EFI (Espacio Feminista Intercooperativo — Intercooperative Feminist Space) which was called that way precisely because they had the spirit of transversalizing as much as possible and not being colleagues trying to… Because, also, this situation is reproduced, which is a bit tricky: women dealing with “women’s issues”. Anyway, it is important to mention that when we joined, there were already women colleagues who were already dealing with the issue, putting their bodies and raising the discussions and that is very valuable, because what we did does not start from scratch, but others came before to break the ice and to lay some foundations on which we could continue to build.
Did it have to do with the fact that the space was made up only of women?
CMC: Actually, they wanted to be women because of the need to have their own space where their voice -silenced and made invisible in the “mixed” spaces- could be heard, but at the same time the need for the actions and interventions to permeate all the spaces, in a transversal way, was debated.
CP: I fell into the same trap, actually. The women were the ones who, afterwards, had to make up that hour in their coope. There was no work possible in that sense if there was no work, also, internal and where your coope supports you. Because, otherwise, in reality, you are the one who is there, doing, and then you have to carry and discuss with the others, there is a double game going on all the time.
CMC: That is a tension. And, now, the EFI stopped working actively in that line, or it worked well because, at some point, this other Space in Deconstruction was set up, as if they were the same and they are linked,
ED is a space where there is a diversity of gender identities, not just cis women. And it began to promote these issues. One is that of the Semillero and another, which is more political, has to do with the fact that FACTTIC is reforming its statute and we are incorporating quota and some issues. Because, for example, the entire Board of Directors, except for one heroic colleague, are cis-males. More or less the same as in 80% of the cooperatives. And there are cooperatives that do not have any female partner.
So the proposal is a minimum quota of 30% of the Council’s directors and a commitment to actively work to improve the situation, reduce gender bias, and that the Council takes on the task of explaining, every year, what we are doing to change this situation.
CP: To do and to be accountable. It says so explicitly.
CMC: Two, three plenary sessions ago, an evaluation was made of what we were doing and one of the EFI colleagues, precisely, said: we are still a majority of cis men. From that moment on, the issue was already installed. And that is how this issue of the Semillero was born as a software and militancy project, thinking that it would solve many things.
For me, the great challenge is also that these wonderful and divine ideas are not transformed into a URL that no one enters. But to give life to these issues. There are many projects around that have these dynamics and many that work very well, too. There is an issue of invisibilization of these successful cases, which also exist. We have to be able to articulate with other organizations, also, to be able to face these challenges, which have a size that goes beyond the technological aspect.
CP: I think the Seedbed project was the first thing we started to do in Espacio en Deconstrucción. And from there it was a bridge for discussions of the realities of other coops we are participating in, as well as to see what we would do every 8M.
CMC: I don’t know if we took the five years. Today it happens that there are coops that are in situations, perhaps, as we were a few years ago regarding some things and there is a certain synergy.
CP: It also has to do with the amount of work we had before, which was less. If you were there or not on 8M, it didn’t make that much difference. But when we had more work we said: “8M I won’t answer a message”. And now it is like that, on March 8th you don’t answer a message.
CMC: There are technological decisions that have a strong side. For example, when we talk about sexist algorithms, there is a whole crossroads in this that we are passionate about, we are very interested in. So far we have been watching it happen. We expect the Semillero to be a good excuse to put technical equipment and head and join our love for what we study. So, I believe that there, from the technologies and the challenges of the 21st century, there are little things we have to do, specific to our sector.
Do you remember any other decision you have made in the coope, or any other mechanism you have implemented or any other debate you have had, even though you have not translated it into action, in relation to time management, both in terms of work within the coope and in terms of articulating work time with life time in general?
CP: I think that what always occupies us is, in the policies we take, always what is at the intersection of gender and class. It seems to me that it comes up all the time, very strongly. And it is partly seen in the responsibilities we have. It is not the same if you have a responsibility or many responsibilities being a cis woman, being a mother. Not to mention if your motherhood takes place in a single-parent home context and where the father is not a father. And that’s where the personal is political. We are a cooperative immersed in a society that has all these issues. It seems to me that militancy is to try to make all this visible, to take concrete policies and, afterwards, to make them effective in these tensions we were talking about a while ago. I think that one of the reasons why we do not get to write is that we go faster than we can type, because we are constantly in transformation.
CMC: And there is another thing that also takes us a lot of energy and resources in the coope that we are trying to address more and more, which is the Career Plan. We are always flirting with changing the name because we don’t like the semantic burden of that term. So far we have not come up with a fun one like RUM. We don’t like the career concept. But what we want is to put on the table the formative paths and expectations and what we want to work on. And there we have a lot of pending work and things that we are doing with colleagues who are reconverting and the cooperative banks and accompanies what it implies, both from the economic and organizational point of view, that rearrangement. Within the software world there are many areas of specialization and we have colleagues who want to specialize in something and, for example, today they are working in other things that are not only that, so it is pending and on the agenda to see how we are moving towards the colleagues being able to work more and more in something that has to do, directly, with their interest.
Then, there are other issues related to rights or social security that also keep us quite busy. Retirement is an issue that other cooperatives have already solved with some strategies. We, for the time being, do not. And our expectation is always, starting from the labor rights that exist in the relationship of dependence, to try to have the same or better ones. That is the bet. Strategies that go in that direction, obviously, come into tension with the short-term cash capacity.
What regime do you have?
CMC: Common monotributo associated to a cooperative. The issue is that no matter what category of monotax you are, you retire with the minimum. So, we are working on that. There are instruments such as private insurance that we can pay, mutual funds or some savings that we can make in some other way. Maybe some asset or something that can be distributed later. We have to finish putting it together, we are trying to think of things.
We also pay supplements to have a prepaid social security system for those of us who need it. Those of us who have social security because of some family or work-related issue do not. But this way we all have a certain standard of benefits.
We are also evaluating incorporating into the commons some other expenses linked to education. Like the organizations that have the school supplies box at the beginning of the year.
CP: In any case, it is about collectivizing situations that appear to be personal but are not. And at the same time they are diverse.
CMC: And there are issues not directly linked to the gender issue but to the home office. Equipment is guaranteed with computers, chairs. And to accommodate the management of the cooperative for this diversity of situations, which implies a lot of things. If an associate joins and works 100% virtually. That person is part of the cooperative, he/she will have a vote like everyone else. So, first of all, it is a delicate decision how to manage the addition of people, so that we can all decide that this person joins. But, at the same time, what devices do we set up to get to know that person? Or if he/she joins to work in the office, how do we manage to get to know the associates who do not want to move from their homes with the new associates? And how can we sustain a policy where a certain face-to-face meeting takes place so as not to say that someone becomes a member of the cooperative when you have never met that person in your life beyond the fact that you see him or her on a small screen? So there are tensions to manage that have to do with styles and logics and work styles that are not necessarily crossed by a gender issue but are crossed by other issues of personal styles, family issues.
All of this involves a lot of management. And a lot of resources are wasted because this implies, for example, that sometimes a colleague comes one day to meet the associate nine and then that day he did not work for such and such client and so it has a direct economic impact.
CP: Or specifically the two computers that we bought for the two colleagues who work all the time in the home office so that they have, precisely, the necessary resources to keep working with the client, because you have to come to work, the dynamic is to share the space with the new person, but in the normal dynamic, to work. And that implied the purchase of specific equipment that is used twice a month.
CMC: And in the decision to buy or not to buy, you calculate what is gained and what is lost, in a social balance. It is not only an economic rationalization. It is to ask ourselves how do we want to grow? These are things that make up the very democracy of the cooperative.
We also have to decide when we add 100% virtual people. Do we associate someone who lives in Rosario to the cooperative, or do we think that it is healthy for the organization to consolidate as a human group to continue seeing each other every x amount of time? These steps take time, resources and make us what we are. And I think that sometimes they are also very invisible, even for us.
CP: What is the name of the task, that role? What is it?
Making the group work.
CMC: Someone has to do the negotiating in that tension. we do it constantly with many things, all the time. And somebody has to do it and, by and large, we’re the same people. Because it comes out of us, and because we can’t ignore it. Doing and not doing, both bring consequences. I think that’s one of the biggest phrases we use when a discussion gets stuck: “Implementing this is a problem because… Well, but not implementing it, too, is a problem. Let’s pick which problem we’re going to grab.”
And in the growth process, these decisions are handcrafted. We make them, we try them out. The pandemic also changed everything.
CMC: For the studio we have one day a week. Nobody takes it, in fact, part of the issue was last year when we created a dynamic that worked weird, not that it was a total success but it was not harmless either: we created a dynamic of pairs by drawing lots to share with each other how we were doing with the subject of study to see if that was a stimulus because it happened to us a lot that we all left what we were studying. It worked a little bit.
CP: About study days, they count for both formal and non-formal education, we value both.
CMC: With care there is no limit today. There could be someone who joins in and makes an abusive use, if you will, or one that is not what we imagine, and since it is not made explicit, it could become a problem. Today, the truth is that we take less leave and less hours than we could really take. Without going any further, I have my son sick, I could be taking the day off and I am not taking it. Cris goes to the doctor but then…
Are all the things we talk about in the internal regulations?
CMC: No, we have a working agreement, an initial document. We are gradually in the process of formalizing it as internal regulations, even if we have not yet submitted it to INAES, but we want it to have that weight for us, with everything systematized. All the things we discussed are in the minutes of the Assemblies.
And with the study days something interesting happened. At the beginning we never took them. New people joined us, we told them that these days existed, and they started to take them. That was very good because it encouraged the rest of us to say “that’s good, it can happen”. Now, they take them, but nobody asks for a certificate of delivery of the work, or proof of the exam. Well, it would be good to have a more orderly procedure. We should try to be more neat and tidy.
Not only for control, but also to have information about what the partner is doing, what he is training in. If there is a partner who takes a day off every week, commercially, for example, it would not be an issue of the partner, whether it is right or wrong, what he is studying or not, but it would imply that economically it could be affecting our sustainability. Any one of our clients that momentarily goes down puts us in check. We are relatively up to date with our accounts, we do not have an accumulation of capital, therefore, they are all situations that work, but if we are not careful, that is the risk. It is not that the cooperative does not want to support me in my doctorate. Today we are founding members and we are clear that we do not want to jeopardize the sustainability of the cooperative, as a matter of appropriation. But not everyone has to think like that, and it would not be bad if someone thinks like that. So, to think about the devices contemplating these issues is a challenge we have now.
REFERENCES and BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] INDEC Trabajo e ingresos Vol. 7, n° 10. Evolución de la distribución del ingreso (EPH) Tercer trimestre de 2023. Últimos datos disponibles a la hora de entrar este texto en edición.
[2] CEPA AAVV (2023) El 8M en perspectiva económica: de las brechas de género como desafío estructural, a las herramientas presupuestarias como forma de avanzar (2019–2022).
[13] PAZ, J. (2022) “Feminización de la pobreza en América Latina”, en Notas de Población N° 114 • enero-junio de 2022 • págs. 11–36. CEPAL, Naciones Unidas. https://hdl.handle.net/11362/71
[4] VACA TRIGO, I. y VALENZUELA M. (2022) Digitalización de las Mujeres en América Latina y el Caribe: Acción urgente para una recuperación transformadora y con igualdad, CEPAL y Ford Foundation, Naciones Unidas, Santiago de Chile.
[5] ONU Mujeres (2020) Las mujeres en ciencias, tecnología, ingeniería y matemáticas en América Latina y el Caribe. Montevide, Naciones Unidas.
[6] https://sueldos.openqube.io/encuesta-sueldos-2023.01/. obtenido el 26 de febrero 19:00 hs.
[7] Gutiérrez, E.; & Larrosa, J. M. C. (2022). Redes digitales, capital social y pobreza. Un análisis para la ciudad de Bahía Blanca. AWARI; 3, 1–11.
[8] INDEC Trabajo e ingresos, Vol. 7, n° 9. Mercado de trabajo. Tasas e indicadores socioeconómicos (EPH). Tercer trimestre de 2023
[9] Puede leerse también en algunos lugares como carreras STEM, por sus siglas en inglés: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
[10] CET (2022), Una carrera desigual: la brecha de género en el sistema universitario de Argentina. CET y NCR Foundation: Buenos Aires.
[12] https://mujeresentecnologia.org/imet/ 27 de febrero 16:50 MET, Mujeres en Tecnología (2023) “Género y Cultura Organizacional en Tecnología”
[13] https://wikimedia.org.ar/2023/09/07/wikipedia-en-clave-de-generos/
[15] Recomendamos leer los Principios Feministas de Internet. https://feministinternet.org/principles
[16] “Videojuegos y género: aportes para pensar la industria en Argentina”. Romina P. Gala (1) y Flavia Samaniego (2) (2021), EN Cuaderno 130 | Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación (2021/2022). pp 79–95
[17] Comisión de la Condición Jurídica y Social de la Mujer, 67º período de sesiones, 6 a 17 de marzo de 2023, Consejo Económico y Social, Naciones Unidas. “La innovación y el cambio tecnológico, y la educación en la era digital para lograr la igualdad entre los géneros y el empoderamiento de todas las mujeres y las niñas”Mujeres por un Desarrollo Alternativo para una Nueva Era
[18] Se puede acceder a más información sobre todas las ediciones de la Escuela y a parte del material en https://www.economiafeministadawn.org/.
[19] DAWN-It for Change (2023) “Hacia una mirada feminista de la justicia digital: Mapeo temático de consideraciones críticas” https://www.dawnfeminist.org/library/hacia-una-mirada-feminista-de-la-justicia-digital-mapeo-tematico-deconsideraciones-criticas
