Monika Viktorova
About My Guest
Monika Viktorova is a tech and AI strategy consultant based in Toronto, Canada. She specializes in AI and tech ethics and is passionate about avoiding dystopia by creating a brighter future with tech instead. She's bi, a first generation immigrant from Bulgaria, and an avocado-toast-loving millennial. In her off time, she likes rock climbing, reading voraciously and long walks with good tunes. Monika believes in using introspection and self-reflexivity to keep interrogating her own biases and be a better ally and force for change. You can reach her on Twitter @mviktoro.
Shervin Talieh:
Okay. Great. Today we are here for another conversation as a part of the On Misogyny series. I'm excited about this conversation. I think it's going to touch on a lot of new areas and areas that I don't have a lot of experience or knowledge. And so with that, I'd like to introduce my new guest. Please tell me who you are and tell me something about yourself.
Monika Viktorova:
Thanks, Shervin. Thank you so much for having me on. I really, really believe in this project, and it's a pleasure to be here. My name is Monika Viktorova. I am a consultant in AI strategy and tech strategy more broadly. And I specialize in AI ethics, which is broadly the field that's dedicated to making sure that ethical principles are actually operationalized for AI. That's my day job and what I spend a lot of my time thinking about. But I think about identity like a series of lenses that we view the world through. And I think, especially in the North American context, we often bring like, this is my job and this is what I do as a first lens. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just interesting because I don't think that's necessarily the case everywhere. So that's my first lens. That's what I do. It's what I spend my time thinking about.
I am a Bulgarian Canadian. I was born in Bulgaria. I immigrated to Canada when I was young. I grew up in Western Canada. And then I moved out to Montreal for school. I went to McGill. Both of my degrees, they are in biochemistry so I actually come out of a health background.
But I've always been a little bit of a generalist and a dabbler. I've always been really interested in social justice movements, in governance, and politics more broadly. That comes out of growing up in an activist family. And I think as a result of those interests, when I was in school, I also did things like... I minored in women studies. I was really interested in feminism. I did a bunch of activism, especially around women's issues, LGBTQ issues. And it's also kind of where my interest in AI ethics and tech ethics more broadly comes from.
I'm also a millennial. I think that's another lens that kind of contributes to my interest in systems of power and how we can change them, how we can dismantle them. I think my generation face some pretty unique challenges and we're bearing the brunt of consequences from the decay of various social institutions, especially as we come into our own in terms of being at the age where we should be in leadership positions and facing a lot of economic hardship. Potentially being the first generation that's going to do worse than our parents economically. And also having to deal with like, this very, very new landscape in terms of tech and how we interact with that. So those are the big lenses.
I am a bisexual woman. I'm Caucasian. I think those lenses are ones that also make me think a lot about my place in the world, how I experience it, what I face in terms of my interactions with systems of power, and also my privilege, and keeping an eye on not potentially reproducing oppressive dynamics and oppressive systems. That is the broad, I think, set of lenses that I use to sort of look at the world.
Shervin Talieh:
Thank you for that. That was many, many layers to that. And maybe let me take in a little bit... What are your earliest memories of sexism?
Monika Viktorova:
I think about sexism in a couple of different ways. I think there's kind of more covert sexism and more overt sexism. When I think back to my earliest experiences with it, I think, my earliest experiences were probably more covert. I remember being a kid and being called bossy, right? We call little girls bossy, which is very weird because we prize leadership qualities, but when little girls exhibit those, they actually get negative feedback with something like the word, bossy. I think a lot of my earliest memories are that and mostly dealing with that in school.
And then I think, in terms of kind of overt sexism, just experiencing like micro macro aggressions. My first memory is, I would have been about 13 years old, 12 or 13, and I was out on the street, it was summer. I was home in Sofia, in Bulgaria, and a man walked past me and wolf-whistled at me. And I remember being in shock, and I remember not really understanding what had happened. Being very confused. I was a kid so I didn't really understand what that meant.
I remember thinking like, "Does this mean I'm a woman?" And I guess I remember really feeling that this interaction that I had with street harassment with this older man who had whistled at a child on the street, I remember feeling very clearly that the way I was perceived by the world was potentially changing, and that I was no longer really quite just a kid anymore, which is... that's terrifying to think about. A kid having those thoughts, right?
I have many friends who have similar stories. Many women friends who have similar stories of experiencing street harassment as children, or potentially worse kinds of sexual violence as children. And just that idea that like you kind of "become a woman" when you start experiencing this kind of sexual violence or sexual harassment, it's very pervasive and it's very distressing and disheartening.
Shervin Talieh:
I can't help but think that one of the themes here is that men are deciding when you're going to enter this next stage of your life. You are not consulted on this. You had no agency, in fact. This man with his actions, which is a form of assault, he made that decision for you. And I suspect it's difficult, if not impossible, to go back to thinking of yourself as a child. Is that correct or incorrect, what I just said?
Monika Viktorova:
Yeah. I really agree with that. I think that's a great way of putting it. There is very much a series of experiences that I think many girls go through as they are experiencing puberty and growing up that are encountering very unfortunate gender norms, that are being foisted on top of them before you even really have the ability to process what's happening, right?
Because when this incident happened to me, I was a kid. I remember feeling that shock and being confused and thinking, "Am I a woman now?" But then for the most part I kind of put it out of my mind and I didn't think about it until many, many years later when I actually kind of had the context and the ability and the tools to dissect that incident and think, what happened was really screwed up. It's totally unacceptable, and horrifying. And how commonplace it is for women is horrifying. But I didn't even realize it at the time and I think that's very much the experience of a lot of young girls. Like you said, men making decisions for them instead of them being able to grow and develop and start to understand themselves and understand their sexuality and understand how they're growing up and who they want to become.
There's a great quote by the hilarious feminist writer Lindy West in one of her books, in Shrill. And it goes something like, "Feminism is the long slow realization that the things you love hate you." She uses that quote to really describe her experiences growing up and being part of like nerd or geek subculture and wanting... loving the characters, loving the sci-fi, and the genre, and being really excited about the actual material and then getting these very sexist reactions by mostly male fans or people in her social circles. Like, "Well, you can't... You're not a true fan. You're just a girl who likes these things." And I think that that's also a very common experience, especially for girls. Especially if they have interests or are in spaces that are more male dominated, you do get a lot of these reactions of, you don't belong here, this isn't your space, and as a man I've made that decision for you.
Shervin Talieh:
I'd like to come back to that but before we do, you mentioned that this experience happened to you in Bulgaria before you immigrated to Canada. Is sexism different, based on your experiences, between Bulgaria and Canada?
Monika Viktorova:
Yeah, I definitely think so. Just to be clear, at that point I had immigrated to Canada but I was home and I was visiting some relatives. I immigrated when I was seven and this incident happened when I was a little bit older than that. But to go back to your question, yes, I do think that there are differences. And it's been kind of weird as a member of the diaspora and as an immigrant who straddles this cultural divide to experience that.
There's this saying in Bulgarian, [foreign language 00:13:17]. It's a little bit hard to translate but it translates to, not a fish and not a crab. And that's very much the experience of being an immigrant, or at least how I experience being an immigrant. You're not quite one thing and you're not quite the other. But the thing that's very powerful about not being quite one thing and not being quite the other is that it gives you this very interesting perspective and it allows you to spot those differences.
And so one of the things that I noticed that I always thought was kind of really fascinating to me was that... I grew up in a family where both of my sets of grandparents had gone to university and done STEM degrees. Both of my grandmothers were actually engineers. One of them was a chemical engineer and the other was a telecommunications engineer. And this was at a time when being an engineer was just not a commonplace thing for a woman. And so I really grew up with this idea that that was very, very normal.
I remember moving to Canada and growing up and seeing that that was actually quite different from the experiences of a lot of my peers and a lot of their family histories. That was quite unique. And it was so widespread. I think as a result of just communism prizing STEM fields, especially, so many of our family friends who were women were in these professions that had been very, very exclusive and very misogynistic and very exclusionary of women even at that time. So that I think is quite a difference and also had a profound impact on my upbringing on how I saw the world.
But then at the same time, that doesn't at all mean that Bulgaria had sold sexism and misogyny by and large. Even during the careers of my grandmothers, the people who were in power, who were the governance structure, the communist party, were predominantly men. There was not a lot of meritocracy. It wasn't that sexism had been transcended in any way, it's just that the permutation looked a little bit different than how it looked in Canada and in North America more broadly. And so that was kind of interesting.
The other thing that I think about a lot is, now as I grow older, and I'm kind of in that age where a lot of my friends are starting to have kids and have families, one of the things I've really noticed is this difference between how caregiving happens in like North America versus back home in Bulgaria. This came to the forefront, especially because I've just been seeing some of my close friends in Bulgaria have kids. The men are actually quite involved with taking care of their kids, which sounds like it shouldn't be that shocking, but in North America we have this phrase or popular refrain that people say like, "Oh, wow. Isn't it amazing that your husband is babysitting?" And it's like, "Well, he's not babysitting. He's parenting his own child." The caregiving labor that he's providing should be expected equally from him and his partner.
That's a quite a big difference from what I've noticed. Men are much, much more involved with the upbringing of children. I'm kind of proud to see that. The flip side though, again, is that it... I don't necessarily think that that means that gender relations, especially in gender norms and marriages, have completely equalized or anything like that. I actually think just the permutations of gender norms and of patriarchal expectations in marriage in Bulgaria just look slightly different. But there's still a lot of traditionalist garbage around like what the woman's role is, et cetera, et cetera. It's just that one element of taking care of kids is quite different.
Shervin Talieh:
Would you call that sort of performative?
Monika Viktorova:
No. I don't think it's actually performative at all. I've been learning a little bit about this concept called... like it's high context versus low context cultures. So high context cultures are ones that are... Like a lot of Eastern European cultures are ones that think about the community as a whole. And also the idea of respecting your elders and your relationality to not just your immediate family unit but your broader family and family friends and community in general.
Whereas low context cultures are more individualistic ones. Like the States, for example, or like Canada, that really center around the individual. It's like, what are the individual's needs? What are their wants and their desires? It's a little bit more focused on like, what do I want, when do I want to get it, and less of a community mindset. And I think that the fact that Bulgaria is a high context culture, again, it doesn't solve sexism but it does equalize, I think, that responsibility for caregiving labor in a way that low context cultures do not.
Shervin Talieh:
That's fascinating. Let's shift to another one of your lenses. You are in technology and you do some really advanced work. You're in a field that is still very new and very early on around AI. Broadly, can you talk to me about sexism and misogyny in tech?
Monika Viktorova:
Yeah. Absolutely. I do think that the field is a great site of exploration for issues like sexism, like racism, issues of systemic power structures, because as we continue to sort of grow out our AI capabilities and we become more and more reliant on technology, we are creating systems that we interact with. And so to the extent that we want to make sure that we don't reproduce oppression in those systems is really, really important. And so I do think the field quite actively grapples with a lot of the sexism and misogyny [inaudible 00:20:57] in tech.
I think one example I can give that's very, to me, quite glaring. I was at a conference some years back on AI and emerging technologies, and there was a demonstration there by someone who creates robots and powers them with AI. They actually had a demonstration of them talking to the robot. Robots are enabled with like an [inaudible 00:21:35]. It's using AI to kind of talk back so it was a fun, little interactive skit, I think. Definitely would probably be one of the things that people would remember very strongly from the conference because it is cool to see a person talking to a robot.
But the thing that I remember thinking about as I was sitting there was, "Why is the robot wearing makeup?" Because the robot was in a kind of female body chassis, so she had breasts, she had long hair, and she was wearing like eye makeup, mascara, and lip gloss. She was Caucasian-presenting and very much sort of aligned with like this kind of Western or European ideal of beauty. And I just remember sitting there being like, "It's a robot. Why did you put makeup on the robot? That is so weird. That's such a weird design choice." Because the robot could have looked like anything.
And I think that it's almost a failure of imagination to believe that robots have to look like us. Wouldn't it be more interesting to have a robot that had visual sensors all around its head as opposed to in just two places like how humans have eyes? That question floated at me and I remember thinking like, "It's going to go unnoticed probably by a lot of people here," but it really stuck out to me as one of those examples of like, this design team made some deliberate choices to create a robot that looked like a certain standard of femininity and of visual... comporting to vary regressive and narrow beauty standards.
Shervin Talieh:
As you're talking about that, it feels like that was most likely a man [inaudible 00:23:59].
Monika Viktorova:
Well, the person who was presenting was not a man. It was actually a woman. That's not that weird. To the extent that sexist norms get perpetuated, I think women can perpetuate them just as easily as men can, if not more. There was a recent study that got published. It was about how students perceive teaching assistants. In the study, this student body class had interactions with two teaching assistants. Everything was virtual so they only really had interactions with them through like text, and submitting assignments, and comments, and grades, and stuff like that. So the only thing that they had to go on in terms of gendering these two TAs were their names, and one was a female name, and one was a male name.
And the course evaluations of the TAs came back and the female TA had much lower course evaluations. I think five times as many negative evaluations than the male TA. And the funniest part about that is that there actually weren't two TAs. There was just one TA, and she was a woman. She just had two different profiles. That's pretty striking and to the extent that that actually is aligned to decades of research. Like women in the workplace tend to be perceived more harshly when identical resumes are presented to hiring managers. The resume with the woman's name on it tends to get worse evaluations. There's decades of research around how perceptions of women doing identical behavior to men tend to be worse.
But the fascinating thing about this particular study is that the women in the class, like the female students, were more likely to give the female TA a negative evaluation than the male students. So I actually think that, unfortunately, a lot of us are dealing with internalized misogyny that we actually have to confront, and to question, and to try to unlearn.
Shervin Talieh:
Have you experienced sexism and misogyny directly in your career in tech?
Monika Viktorova:
Yes. Definitely. I think, a lot of it, again, it's more in that category of like covert sexism. There was a performance evaluation that I had once that was like kind of boiled down to, you show too many emotions and you need to show fewer, which I thought was quite interesting. In all fairness, that is true. I am a wearing my heart on my sleeve kind of person. But I thought that was interesting and I wonder like, if I had been a man, would I have received that same kind of evaluation? I don't know.
But, yeah, absolutely. I've been in lots of rooms where it's just been me and a bunch of men. I have experienced comments that are totally unacceptable directed at me, or I've heard comments that were directed at other female colleagues that I had to call out. So, yeah, I've definitely come across it. I've been personally really, really lucky for the most part.
I've had an incredible series of mentors. A lot of my bosses have been women and I've been able to learn from their leadership and grow because of their encouragement and their support. So, have I experienced it? Yes, I have, but I also have experienced just the buoyant power of having a network of women that I can turn to and draw upon who have helped me along in my career.
Shervin Talieh:
I want to switch gears a little bit. You and I met through Telepath, and I think there was a post around the actor, Armie Hammer, who apparently has an appetite for kink, and S&M, and some other stuff. I want to try to stay away from labeling him because I really don't know the man or anything. But what was interesting about that was, I think, this connection around what he has an appetite for and what he was engaged in and how that comes up against the second wave of feminism. I'd like you to sort of take this little bit that I've shared and see if you can sort of connect those dots and tell me your thoughts on this topic.
Monika Viktorova:
Yeah, absolutely. Yes. For context, the post on Telepath was around the revelation that Armie Hammer had with a number of partners expressed desires around kink and kinky sex, and specifically it was like, he had a cannibalism fetish and some other kind of dominant tendencies and he'd sort of express that to partners, which actually is like, all good, all cool, all fine. Except, it turned out that he hadn't actually been practicing consent with those partners and so I think a couple of them had come forward to say that he had crossed their boundaries and not respected them. He wasn't practicing kink, because at the foundation of kink is that everything that is done is consensual. It's a consensual power exchange.
And I thought it was a really interesting discussion on Telepath because I have this background in women studies. I've spent some time reading second wave feminists and exploring the issues around there. But I also was a peer sexual health educator for many years in college and have a lot of just firsthand experience talking about sexual health with strangers and being like a resource for that kind of information. So I'm always very, very interested when I see these discussions to kind of see people's thoughts about them and sometimes their discomfort and sometimes their biases.
Because I think sex is still very much a taboo subject and kink and BDSM even more so. And so to the extent that I thought it was a really interesting kind of thing to see on Telepath. I think the piece you're referring to is that someone had commented that there was a feminist psychoanalyst by the name of Jessica Benjamin, who had argued that BDSM relationships broke down because once a dom realized that a submissive was enjoying the experience, they lost interest.
Actually, I'm not familiar with Benjamin's work at all but that argument comports with a lot of arguments made by the sort of antiporn and "sex negative" or radical feminists of the second wave. Women like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, which I think a lot of people are familiar with, were sort of proponents of the idea that heterosexual sex always had an exchange of power that harmed women and benefited men. This is like, mind you, kind of a reductionist. I'm trying to explain like decades worth of philosophy and writing in a couple of sentences. Explore further, read more, because there are some interesting ideas still worth engaging, I think, even if we don't necessarily agree with those viewpoints anymore. But, yeah, that was a sort of segment of feminism in the second wave.
And the kind of opposing camp, sex positive feminists, thought that like, yes, there are power dynamics, especially that are put on women by men. There are gender norms that permeate sexuality and sexual experience for women. Things like, the orgasm gap, where straight women are much less likely to have orgasms and sexual encounters than bisexual or gay women and it's because their male partners aren't getting them there. But sex positive feminists by and large believe that there is a potential for sexual liberation, for sexuality that exists outside of the male gaze, and sexuality for women, and LGBTQ folks, and people across the gender spectrum who are not men that is more liberating.
And so those two kind of camps really clashed. And I thought it was interesting that it got brought up in this discussion about Armie Hammer, because I do think that when BDSM gets brought up in media, the taboo nature of it tends to make people squeamish and make people get sometimes a little bit judgmental and kind of try to shut it down and say like, "Well, this is out of bounds," without exploring the fact that it's not the exchange of power that's inherently wrong, it's whether or not consent is present. And that BDSM without consent is abuse. It's not acceptable and it doesn't meet the standards for ethical or healthy relationships at all. It was definitely... it was a fascinating discussion and I really enjoyed seeing people tangle with what's kind of a difficult subject.
Shervin Talieh:
So in the spirit of me trying to distill something that should not be distilled into a simple takeaway, but let me... Is what I'm about to say directionally accurate? That one of the distinctions between the second [inaudible 00:36:26] is this notion that kink is not by definition necessarily wrong or bad so long as there is consent, which is I think what the third wave and potentially the fourth wave would advocate for? So in the second wave there's just no space for kink whatsoever.
Monika Viktorova:
Yeah. I think that's a decent way of framing it in so far as to say that even within the second wave there were feminist who were sex positive, but I do think that you're right in the sense that third wave feminism mainstreamed sex positivity in a bigger way. And to the extent that, I don't know if we're still third wave or fourth wave, there's debate amongst feminists exactly which wave we're at. But I think the democratizing influence of the internet really supercharged those ideas, because it allowed for a lot of consciousness raising, and sexual health education and healthy relationships education that previously was actually very difficult to find to be accessible to everybody.
And I remember, in the early 2010s being parts of feminist spaces online on feminist blogs or on YouTube, where I was able to learn so much. That's not knowledge I would've gotten in sex ed class, right? We don't really tend to teach kids about healthy sex, about healthy relationships to their bodies, about how to have healthy relationships with other people. It's knowledge that we're missing out teaching kids as young as possible about stuff that's really, really important, especially the healthy relationships piece.
And so, yeah, I do think that third wave feminism, and especially online feminist spaces, have helped to create an environment where things like kink are less stigmatized, healthy sexual practices, like how to have ethical and consensual kink, be a part of your life. Learning about those things is just so much more possible now with online spaces than I think it was previously.
Shervin Talieh:
You've touched a couple of times in our conversation on how women knowingly or unknowingly are also continuing through the reign of sexism and misogyny in some cases. What should be done to sort of address that?
Monika Viktorova:
That's a great question and it probably doesn't have just a singular answer, but I think... There's a concept in feminism that I wish would gain a little bit more viral traction called self-reflexivity. It's the idea that you should be able to look inward and be introspective, and think about, where's the reaction that you're having to the situation coming from. Is it a reasonable reaction or might there be some bias? Potentially even unconscious bias. Bias that you haven't recognized you have. I think asking ourselves to look inward and to think about our reactions to things is really important.
Especially because... To make sure that you're not reinforcing sexism yourself as a woman, it's worth thinking like, "How do I react to other women? Am I potentially reacting in a way that's more negative than I would be if the person was a man, for example?" And I think that concept can also stretch far beyond just sexism and misogyny to making sure that we are anti-racist, and anti-ableist, that we combat homophobia. I think it's worthwhile for us to look at ourselves first and think like, "Can I actually address my own reactions to things first?"
Shervin Talieh:
Boy. Wouldn't the world would be a better place? It's something I need to practice more definitely. So final question I want to ask you, and you've been generous and being honest and vulnerable, and I'm really grateful for that, Monika, how optimistic are you about feminism or maybe a different lens sort of that we will combat and hopefully see an end to misogyny?
Monika Viktorova:
I think I am optimistic. It's who I am as a person. And I think it's important to be optimistic. I think change comes from optimism and from being able to envision a better world and from working towards that vision. There's a couple of different things that make me optimistic. Like I was just saying, I think the fact that these online spaces have opened up where people can really share and learn. In the past, I think, women might not have had those spaces. And all kind of marginalized groups are able to have spaces online now where they can gather and share and commiserate and learn. I think that's an incredibly powerful force. I am really grateful to be living in a time where that's the case and that definitely makes me optimistic.
I also think, the fact that that work is happening and that people are becoming more engaged means that we are addressing systems of power. Not just from a very kind of broad level but also on a micro level. Like addressing them within our relationships and within our marriages and our partnerships. So I do think that it's fueling a lot of positive momentum and I'm very hopeful that that can continue.
One reason I might be a little sort of less optimistic is that, I think there's a sort of natural limitation to feminism. I'll explain what I mean by that because I think it's important to qualify it. Feminism is the fight for equality, but it truly has been a movement by women and people of other sort of gender identities to liberate themselves, and to expand what is the definition of being a woman, right?
We started off without even having the vote and being confined to the house, into the private sphere, and being caregivers and mothers first. And over the last century, we've really expanded that. We've expanded the definition of what it means to be a woman. Women can work now. Women can be astronauts and physicists. Women can be vice president. Shout out to Kamala Harris. Women can hold positions of power. Women can be leaders. In addition to being caregivers, and mothers, and friends. And so over the last century, we've done this work. And there's still much work to be done, especially in making the movement more inclusive of people with different racial identities of LGBTQ folks. There is a ton of work to still be done but it has really expanded what it means to be a woman.
Unfortunately, there hasn't been a commensurate movement to expand the definition of what it means to be a man, right. We still think of men in this very sort of toxic masculinity, ideal of like a warrior or a protector. We still think of men as leaders, and as people who work, and as people who have that public presence. They make the decisions, they bring home the bacon, et cetera, et cetera.
We haven't really expanded the definition of what it means to be a man into men can be caregivers too. Men can be really good fathers and brothers. They can be good friends. They can be people that support their communities. There's a Gloria Steinem quote about this that I really like. It goes something like, "Women are always saying, 'We can do anything that men can do. Like men should be saying, we can do anything that women can do'." And I think that that work is work that men have to undertake. They have to create that movement for themselves and liberate themselves from those gender norms in order to expand what being a man means.
Shervin Talieh:
Wow. Thank you for that. I don't think anyone's ever shared anything like that with me. That was... Yeah, you've given me a lot to think about. It's specific and it also speaks to how we can't expect women to fix the problem that men have created for them. I think that's been part for the course unfortunately for far too long. Monika, thank you so much for your knowledge, your wisdom, your time, your patience with me during this conversation. Thank you so much.
Monika Viktorova:
Thank you so much, Shervin. I really, really believe in these conversations, and I think what you're doing on your project, those are the small steps, right? The small steps that kind of lead to a bigger movement and to creating the kind of world we want to live in.
Shervin Talieh:
Thank you so much.