In the technology space, women’s voices aren’t celebrated nearly enough. Filling that gap and opening up crucial conversations is what drove Dr Catherine Ball to pen her new book, Converge: A futurist’s insights into the potential of our world as technology and humanity collide.
Associate Professor, Dr Catherine Ball is a scientific futurist, speaker, advisor, author, founder, executive producer, executive director and company director working across global projects where emerging technologies meet humanitarian, education and environmental needs.
She was also a finalist in our Women’s Agenda Leadership Awards back in 2017 for her work with the application of drone technology across Australia.
With mountains of insight from years of research and professional speaking, Dr Ball decided to put her knowledge into one, easily accessible space – a book, which she says she wanted “written from a human’s point of view, not a technologist’s point of view”.
She also notes that the book is “written from a mother’s point of view, it’s written from a woman’s point of view in a woman’s voice.”
Described as “an optimistic study on life as we know it, and the decade ahead”, Converge presents insights into how technology and science are providing answers to many of the challenges the world is facing today – food shortages, war and conflict, the decline in local manufacturing, health and ageing, and global warming – and asks why we are not embracing these technologies more widely.
Dr Ball recognises that the answer is most often that people simply don’t know about them, which is why she’s written such an engaging and accessible book– to open our eyes to the wide world of technological advancement.
STEM subjects directly affect all of us and whether we’ve studied it or not, literacy in this space is imperative for our collective future. Dr Ball points out that this is especially important for women as we’re often the ones left out of the conversations surrounding the future of science and technology.
Even when women are the main users of a technology, it’s not often developed with our needs in mind. Dr Ball gives the example of when health apps were created on phones but developers didn’t think to include period trackers, and she notes that even now the existence of period trackers might be weaponized against women in the US.
“No technology is good or evil,” she says. “It’s how we use it, the rules we put around it, the applicability of it and how we can use it to liberate people and to make life better. And that comes down to everybody having their say about how they want it to be used.”
“Women need to be around the table to work out what it is that they want.”
If used for good, Dr Ball believes that technology can be a strong liberator for women.
“It’s still a man’s world in many ways,” she says. “And the MeToo movement and the women’s uprising movement or the women’s uprising in Iran – we’re seeing now a space and a place for revolution in a way that’s being accelerated by digital technologies that we would never have seen, the speed of which should be taken as a massively powerful opportunity to make change now to set ourselves down a hopeful future.”
And while it can sometimes be easy to slip into cynicism regarding humanity’s future, Dr Ball’s book pushes this hopeful future by taking on a deeply optimistic tone.
“I’ve got a two year old and a four year old so as a mother, I can’t be anything other than optimistic, hopefully optimistic, but also sanely reasonably optimistic, in that we actually have in our hands the power to decide what happens in the next 10 years,” she says.
This optimistic perspective is what she believes will guide the way we approach climate change, civil rights, social mobility, the digital divide, preventing modern slavery and empowering women and gender diversity – all things happening right now.
“We can either have technology happen to us or we can happen to technology, and that actually is in our power,” says Dr Ball.
To the women wanting to reclaim this power and make big things happen in the STEM space, Dr Ball has some powerful advice: “Your network is your net worth.”
“You need to actively contribute to your network and you need to actively curate your relationships and conversations that involve you so that you are invited to things,”she says. “And when you get invited to things you say ‘yes’ and you turn up and you own it.”
Growing her network and nurturing relationships was a strong driver for writing her book and Dr Ball doesn’t plan to stop there. She’s in the throes of writing the next four books and says Converge is the first one in a trilogy.
“When people get hold of the book, and there’s something in the book they don’t understand or don’t like, they need to reach out and tell me,” she says.
“Communication is actually four dimensional. It’s not just me producing a book– I produce a book to instil conversation and to have a connection.”