Editorial

One year ago we published a Bulletin on "Women & New Technology". We presented the situation of women in developing countries - those who work on the production line of micro-electronics industries making silicon chips - and of the women in industrialized countries - those whose lives and jobs are being automated  at an ever-increasing speed. We had a huge demand for this Bulletin . Many groups wrote to us about their work, sent us papers and requested more. We felt the  time  was ripe to bring interested women together.

In June 1983 we organized the first "International Women & New Technology Conference", here in Geneva, Switzerland. With enormous difficulty we managed to bring women from Hong Kong, Philippines , India and Malaysia to the Conference. And to our delight 5 Japanese women from the group "Women against the computerization of society " case under their own steam. The remaining 50 participants case mostly from Europe, with 3 from USA and 3 from Canada.

It was a hectic , hard-working event. In 2 days we went through 3 plenary sessions and 9 workshops. We barely had time to catch our breath. The most important thing
that happened was that women came together on this vital issue, and talked. We talked from different political standpoints sometimes, and from very different cultural and geographical standpoints. The women from Asia emphasized the devastating effects on health of working in the electronics industries . Women from Europe and North America presented the horrors of remote-working and automation of jobs and health.

Beyond this, however, the aim was to identify some specifically feminist strategy for dealing with the complexities of New Technology in our world. One plenary and three workshops were dedicated to this, yet inevitably it was insufficient. Some of the actions proposed to help women gain control over technological change are:

- demystifying what technology is about; for exaaple the "Hoaen and Coaputing Group" in England have bought a micro-computer and are training women to use it for their own groups,

- organizing women in the workplace, both in the electronics factories where they produce components of New Technology, and in offices where it is usually women who use word-processors, micro-computers etc.

- spreading inforaation rapidly on the health hazards of working with chemicals used in electronics manufacturing.

- preventing technological research which is harmful to women; for example the use of sex-determination tests to terminate pregnancies of female children.

Those proposals are broad and perhaps not so easy to carry out, but they are a beginning and they do represent the ideas of 60 women researchers and activists from
18 countries around the world.

This Bulletin brings together the presentations and workshop reports froa the Conference. There were two plenary presentations, "Demystifying New Technology" by
Ursula Huws, and "Taking back our Future" by Bettina Berch. Other presentations were aade in the context of a specific workshop, and are presented here together
with the workshop reports.

The most iaportant outcome as a whole was that the women present were all concerned with creating and sustaining an International Network on Women and New Technoloy to support action internationally and to provide appropriate, women-oriented technology. This Conference was the first step in that direction.