The Good Robot Podcast: Feminism & Tech Converge

The Good Robot podcast offers listeners an engrossing premise -- Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney ask expert guests in each episode: what is good technology? Is ‘good’ technology even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? Each week, they invite scholars, industry practitioners, activists, and more to provide their unique perspective on what feminism can bring to the tech industry and the way that we think about technology. With each conversation, The Good Robot asks how feminism can provide new perspectives on technology’s biggest problems.

The podcast is tied closely to the book, "The Good Robot" published by the co-hosts of the podcast, and available in late February.

In this edited collection of essays, leading feminist scholars, technologists and activists show why technology needs feminism. Cutting across disciplinary differences and intergenerational divides, the essays demonstrate the breadth of feminist thinking about technology. From Buddhist approaches to making AI ‘compassionate’, to indigenous cultural perspectives on re-thinking relationships between humans and AI, this book offers powerful and provocative alternatives to the status quo.

For some contributors, good technology means making AI more inclusive. For others, it means stepping back from new technologies altogether and ‘getting off’ social media. University of Cambridge AI ethicists Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney bring together a variety of top thinkers in the field, who provide diverse and expansive responses to the question of ‘what is good technology?’.

Each essay acts as a bright spark, an illuminating snapshot of how feminism is reshaping the way we think about technology. Collectively, the essays create a constellation of ideas, laying out a path for us to build a better technological future.

Co-host Dr Kerry McInerney (née Mackereth) is a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where she researches anti-Asian racism and AI and Asian diasporic approaches to AI ethics. Kerry is an AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, where she brings complex conversations about gender, race and artificial intelligence to wide audiences.
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Her work uses feminist and critical race theory to examine how histories of race and gender shape contemporary technologies, with a specific focus on artificial intelligence. Her scholarship on this topic has appeared in journals such as Feminist Review, Public Understanding of Science and Philosophy and Technology. Her work on AI-powered hiring tools has also been covered by media outlets like the BBC, BBC Today, Forbes, the Register, and the Daily Mail, among other international outlets.

Co-host Eleanor Drage was previously a Christina Gaw Research Associate on the Gender and Technology Research Project, where she helped resolve AI ethics issues at a major technology multinational using feminist and anti-racist theory. She has presented findings to a range of audiences including the United Nations, NatWest, The Open Data Institute (ODI), and the Institute of Science & Technology. She is the co-host of The Good Robot Podcast, has appeared on popular shows such as The Guilty Feminist, and is a TikToker for All The Citizens' data rights channel. She holds an International Dual PhD from the University of Bologna at the University of Granada, where she was an Early-Stage Researcher for the EU Horizon 2020 ETN-ITN-Marie Curie project “GRACE” (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe).

Dr. Nomisha Kurian is The Good Robot's Youth Inclusion Consultant, and is working with Kerry and Eleanor on developing innovative teaching services and educational programs from The Good Robot podcast. Nomisha is a Teaching Associate at the University of Cambridge. She is currently researching the role of human-centered design in empathy-driven technology and presented her work on children's wellbeing at the UNESCO Artificial Intelligence and Education Forum. She recently became the first Education researcher to win the Cambridge Applied Research Award for "outstanding research with real world application", for designing and delivering interventions for 286 low-income and state-school students across the UK to widen participation in higher education. Previously, as a Yale University Henry Fellow, she used international human rights law to design an anti-bullying framework for marginalized youth. Her work has most recently been published in the Oxford Review of Education, the British Educational Research Journal, and the International Journal of Human Rights. 

One of my favorite episodes was the December 12, 2023, one with Jess Wade on rewriting Wikipedia. Wade explains the lack of feminist authors and people of color on Wikipedia and the disturbing lack of feminist issues covered.

Every few weeks, the co-hosts have a shorter Hot Takes episode on the biggest issues in tech. The August 1, 2023, episode about Musk's name change from Twitter to X and the lack of female representation in the tech industry was particularly illuminating.

Check out The Good Robot. It's refreshing to listen to a technology podcast that is hosted by two women instead of Elon Musk-type dudes. The co-hosts are articulate, brilliant, and explicit enough to render complex topics graspable for most listeners.