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Jill Dimond started working on the Hollaback! app, which allows women to log and map incidents of street harassment by submitting their stories when they occur, while doing her Ph.D. work that looked at violence against women and its relationship to technology.“I thought it would be a great research project to look at the ways in which we could use technology as an activist tool and what the relationship is between technology and social movements,” Dimond said.

Dimond, now based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, started her Ph.D. based on her own experience as one of the few women in the tech world. After her first year of study, she found the issue ran deeper than she’d imagined.

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“There’s a broader problem with how women are treated and I thought that women’s voices were missing in the design of technology,” she said.

At the time, Dimond was volunteering at a domestic violence shelter, when she realized there were some distinct issues those women were facing that designers of technology were not considering.

“I did a research study looking at the ways in which women had to contend with privacy issues using Facebook, applying for jobs, sending text messages,” she said. “They would be stalked by their abusers and they really had a tough time managing their privacy settings.

“That’s still an issue today.”

So Dimond, along with the Hollaback! team, developed an app to give women a voice.

“In one of my studies, I looked up the effects of sharing those stories,” she said. “What I found was a frame shift: Before, they thought it was their fault they were harassed, but after they shared their story on Hollaback!, they shifted the way they thought about it. They began to see it as a problem that was larger than themselves, larger than an individual.

“And they stopped blaming themselves and connected it to this broader movement.”

For more information on the app and the movement, visit ihollaback.com.

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