The Culture of Women in Tech

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

Mariann Hardey

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789734263
• eBook ISBN: 9781789734256
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

This book offers a critical analysis of the contemporary and global tech culture and exposes the gender bias of masculine tech ideology and stereotypes. 

Is the place of 'women in tech' immovable from masculine leadership practices? And what are the cultural, social, personal and economic consequences of gender as a point of difference in the context of work in the tech sector? 

Mariann Hardey examines the rise of entrepreneurial work and leadership, the contemporary urban setting of global tech work, and specifically women's place in tech clusters. The book engages with attempts by women to establish and then sustain their professional status and long-term careers, despite predatory social media trolling and inappropriate sexualized behaviour. Based on a series of commentaries from research undertaken by the author about workers located within 'tech cities' in the UK, USA and East Asia regions, the work exposes the serious problem of women's position in the industry. While this study continues to be critical of the conceits of masculine tech ideology, prejudices and stereotypes, the work contributes to recent calls to help find solutions and ways forward.

1

Tech Work After TechnoFem

I am 58 years old, I got into tech a long time ago. I am an “old feminist” […] Whatever you do, believing in and being respected for what you are doing is everything.

Acer, f, Digital Publishing, US.

This chapter is about framing women tech workers' socio-cultural place through a theoretical understanding of feminist theory about male tech culture. The ‘suitability’ of women's position and the types of professional positions and duties women assume in tech clusters are strongly rooted in the relationships between ‘difference’, ‘power’ and ‘activism.’ Compared with prior research on the tech industry or Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) organisations, I take a long-term view and criticise the ‘suitability’ of women's employment in tech clusters in three significant respects (see Fig. I.1). First, I consider how female tech employees put in place patterns of resistance in reaction to both the tech culture of ‘men only’ and their feeling of a global connection with other women in the sector. This contrasts with the image of tech clusters as simply regional spaces with progressive ways of working (Duffy & Schwartz, 2018; Kenny & Donnelly, 2019; Virani & Gill, 2019). Second, I stress that the capacity to find and maintain employment works at a hierarchical level that favours men's access to networks and important gatekeepers. Third, I emphasise the importance of digital activism and advocacy as a type of symbolic capital to help employees from various backgrounds. I start with the section, ‘Technofeminist scholarship’, where I present the main feminist theoretical context, specifically to define the different power relationships and describe the masculine culture traditionally connected with tech clusters. Following this, the section ‘Adding “gender” to the social shaping of technology’ considers the ways in which an understanding of the technology – society relationship might be extended to illuminate the context of gender difference in forms of production, work and skills training. The next section, ‘“Difference” as a point of conflict in tech’, highlights the wider accounts of ‘difference’ and the limitations of categories (in the way that talking about such categories can in itself be limiting) in order to understand hidden acts of discrimination and power relations. The final part, ‘Shifting women's autonomy online’, discusses the socio-political transfer of feminist activism and the extension of the circulation of feminist discourse into digital spaces, reflecting the important transfer of support and the visibility of new collective techniques of intervention opening up to women tech employees.

Technofeminist Scholarship

Technofeminism is the cornerstone of the theoretical viewpoint of this study. My interest in this field arose from the early cyberfeminist assessment of internet spaces as locations of empowerment and opposition to patriarchy (Sheridan-Rabideau, 2009; Spender, 1996; Wright, 2005; Youngs, 2004). Technofeminists have shown since the late 1990s and early 2000s that the culture, roles and practices of technology are far from gender-neutral (De Hertogh, Lane, & Ouellette, 2019, pp. 5–6; Griffin, 2010; Haas, Tulley, & Blair, 2002; LeCourt & Barnes, 1999; Wajcman, 2006). In this sense, the strength of technofeminist accounts come from their critique of the predominantly white male field of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist writers' interest in women's roles in relation to technology (Wajcman, 1991b). In conjunction with technofeminist analysis, work and organisation and social theory studies have helped to create a rich corpus of empirical research critical of the reproduction of gender inequality in the workplace (e.g. Acker, 1998). A stream of this scholarship focuses on gender inequality in male-dominated STEM fields to reveal how women's numerical under-representation means that those who do succeed despite these are forced to act as ‘gender tokens’ (Alfrey & Twine, 2017, p. 29) and shows that women's employment is devalued and under-resourced (Botella, Rueda, López-Iñesta, & Marzal, 2019; Cheryan, Ziegler, Montoya, & Jiang, 2017; Duffy & Schwartz, 2018; Sassler, Glass, Levitte, & Michelmore, 2017). At the crossing point of technofeminist studies and work and organisational theory, it is evident that institutionalised misogynistic views of women's duties and roles have historically characterised the kinds of professions they enter and work they take up. Such structural constraints have been particularly restricting in job strategies and discursive traditions regarding women's jobs in the high-tech and Information and communications technology (ICT) sectors (Kelan, 2007; Kenney, Massey, Quintas, & Wield, 1993). Early cyberfeminist research helped to address the ways in which gender identities and gendered understandings of labour were integrated into new technology-sector positions; how these roles were set for patriarchal workplace systems; the identification of gender bias in education and training; and, finally, the lack of possibilities for women to excel in technology (Cockburn, 2009; Game & Pringle, 1983; Phillips & Cockburn, 1983; Wajcman, 1991b). Technofeminist accounts benefit from these early critiques wherein women's bodies are treated as contested spaces (Frost & Haas, 2017); gendered identities are extended beyond the female/male binary (Van Doorn, Van Zoonen, & Wyatt, 2007; Dumitrica & Gaden, 2009); and new digital contexts are viewed as spaces for empowerment (Baer, 2016; Loney-Howes, 2018; Mendes, Ringrose, & Keller, 2019; Ringrose & Lawrence, 2018). Where technofeminism succeeds is in recognising the personal context of digital and technological settings as a means of considering opportunities for women (Almjeld, 2019); and in creating new accounts of activism that go beyond the restriction of physical vs digital spaces and interactions (Carlson, 2019; Clinnin & Manthey, 2019; Yavuz Görkem, 2017).

The increased attention of feminist scholars to the impact of STS has reinforced calls for inequality assessment to concentrate on the mutual shaping of gender and technology (Hoch, MacKenzie, & Wajcman, 1987; Mackay & Gillespie, 1992; MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999). The most recent studies about technology, ICT and computing have begun to document gender discrimination and the dominance of white, male professionals in STEM fields (Cheryan et al., 2017; McClelland & Holland, 2015; Moss-Racusin, Molenda, & Cramer, 2015). In drawing together a combination of gender scholarship and organisation studies, we can identify four ways in which women are typically reported to respond to the lack of diversity, the first and second concerned with changes to women's behaviour: (1) by softening or hiding their femininity; and (2) by overcoming gender difference through discursive positioning (Alfrey & Twine, 2017; Dasgupta & Stout, 2014; Grossman & Porche, 2014); (3) through the different strategies that they apply to negate the ‘leaky pipeline’, for example, anticipating penalties or backlash for not acting within shared gender stereotypes (Clark Blickenstaff, 2005; Makarova, Aeschlimann, & Herzog, 2016; Raabe, Boda, & Stadtfeld, 2019); and (4) through actions and initiatives aimed at increasing a sense of belonging, such as online advocacy to get women into STEM (Gonzalez-Gonzalez et al., 2018; Pietri et al., 2019; Smith, Handley, Zale, Rushing, & Potvin, 2015). As a result, the absence of gender diversity continues to be reproduced through the dominant masculine tech culture (Baer, 2016; Fotopoulou, 2016).

The value of technofeminism is based on the multiplicity of views and innovative methods that have helped to open up boundaries around feminist studies to consider inequality from the point of view of distinct groups:

As feminist scholars who specialise in digital rhetoric, we work to destabilise the political and rhetorical structures that oppress women and marginalised groups […] we call for feminist reorientations that more deeply – and meaningfully – consider the inequalities of all people. (De Hertogh et al., 2019, pp. 5–6)

This shared goal underscores the ethos and tone of the analysis presented here, supporting its interrogation of the core assumptions behind tech culture, along with a strong and ardent call (shout) for more meaningful and long-term engagement in the heritage of tech work and the shaped experiences of the workers. The value of this approach is in the multiplicity of reframings and rhetorical reflection taken up by technofeminists, combining queer analysis of social media (Dadas, 2016), work on digital feminist methodology and the impact of technical practices (Frost, 2016; Frost & Haas, 2017) and the politics of exclusion (Gruwell, 2015; Hayes, 2017). Indeed, as De Hertogh et al. affirm: ‘What was once a new “subfield” is now a thoroughly established one with a catalogue of influential publications and a broad intellectual and theoretical range’ (De Hertogh et al., 2019, p. 5). However, this ‘subfield’ is far from mainstream, and on occasion is overlooked in favour of less contentious rhetoric that aligns to traditional methodologies and theory. This tendency may in part be explained by the subjectivity formed within technofeminist accounts that ‘positions interventions as both goal and method for research’ (Almjeld, 2019, p. 57) – an approach that is also advocated by De Hertogh et al. in the quote above. Practically, for this study, this means applying longitudinal analysis to the unique experiences and positions of the women tech workers, their professional spaces and the digital points of contact that surround them. The study can thus be read as symbolic of the intervention desired by the women included in it who voice the challenges and complexities of tech professional spaces, and consider ways to construct solidarity and inclusivity in an exclusive culture. One of the most challenging aspects of technofeminism is directly related to the call to consider ‘more deeply and meaningfully’ the ‘inequalities of all people’ (De Hertogh et al., 2019, p. 10). This challenge has been enthusiastically taken up through a variety of intervention approaches: for example, to administer digital literacy programmes in response to deficient support for girls in education; to do activist work within feminist communities (Almjeld, 2019, p. 59) and to build confidence to enter the field of technology more broadly (Hussain & Amin, 2018). This call also acts as inspiration for this research, enabling me to take issue with the un-shifting and permeating effect of male tech culture.

The above foundation signals an important transformation to the dynamics of work and the possibilities for new social relationships through technology. This is not to state that new technologies arrived and removed previous social relations, but to acknowledge that there have been, and continue to be, fundamental shifts in the changing practices of women and men through new forms of connectivity and sociality (Wajcman, 2006). Clearly for tech workers such as those we are interested in the tech labour market is characterised by heightened gendered culture and a hierarchical sexual division of computational expertise, knowledge and education (Alfrey & Twine, 2017; Botella et al., 2019; Yoder & Mattheis, 2016). The early feminist scholarship highlighted the significance of the prominence of men at the centre of the story of technology, to the exclusion of women. As stated above, a more contemporary reading of this categorisation is challenging the constraints of a dualistic presentation of gender difference and may introduce caution as to whether feminism's methods and values continue to have meaning. I would counter, strongly, that as technology continues to become deeply embedded in daily life, the application of feminist theory should assume renewed significance in scholarship that speaks to the complexities of constant connection, bio-citizenship, digital data metrics and many other contemporary conditions (Allegrini, 2015; Blair, Miller, Ong, & Zastavker, 2017; Secules, Sochacka, & Walther, 2018). However, while there are concerns about the lack of diversity in tech and the impact of inequalities across STEM, the positionality of these discussions does not automatically sustain feminist scholarship and in some case does more damage, reinforcing deeply ingrained attitudes about educational and occupational segregation. My focus is not so much on the subject of feminism, and its tensions, but rather on the ways in which women who are acting under the auspices of women's rights and activism in tech clusters, as ‘women in tech’, redefine and reconfigure the significance of inclusion and equality, which is what unites them. In this way, the specialist areas and functions of work are created within what Garcia presents as a gendered institution – for example, in her consideration of women police officers: ‘Such an institution holds within it the symbols and perception of gender in its ‘processes practices, images and ideologies, and distribution of power’ (Garcia, 2003, pp. 335–336). The danger with such an inherently gendered institution (e.g. inherent in roles and interactions; knowledge and production) is that it has resulted in the segregation of the professional status of women disproportionately into low-level areas, who go on to have much less prestigious careers – if they remain. Therefore, work within a gendered institution such as tech may be understood as an unsuitable space for a woman seeking equality of opportunity, collective and individual voice, safe and fair working conditions, secure terms of employment, and recognition.

Adding ‘Gender’ to the Social Shaping of Technology

Technology, as later chapters set out, is increasingly relational in terms of the type of work conducted, interactions experienced, and professional roles successfully achieved. Writing about the domestic sphere, Cockburn (1992) powerfully establishes how the design, production and adoption of technology in the home affected household divisions of labour and gender inequality. Cockburn uses the example of the microwave oven to underscore how the professional expertise behind and construction of a household appliance intended to make things easier in the home (to speed up cooking) reinforces gender roles and power structures. Though the microwave is not a computational technology in line with a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop or software, its design and manufacture are illustrative of the cultural meanings (especially of gender and work) in which our interactions and understanding of the technology are implicated. In examining the production of the microwave oven, we get a sense of the gendered power dynamics and institutional and professional structures evident through technology.

Today, we can notice how the most popular social media platforms are designed, owned and traded overwhelmingly by wealthy, white men (Bell & Belt, 2018). The fact that women consumers spend more time on social platforms and using applications adds another level of complexity with regard to power dynamics and the visibility and marketing of user data (Pew, 2017). The concept of the social shaping and construction of technology here is extremely important and relevant to our knowledge of the meanings involved in professional tech spaces. While the specific technological object may vary across scholarship, we are drawing on a body of research firmly grounded in an awareness of the effect of technology, combining multiple factors such as geography, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, class and other identity markers (Almjeld, 2019; Beck, 2015; DeLuca, 2018; Duffy, 2016; Griffin, 2010; Hardey, 2019a). That we take near-constant connectivity for granted strengthens such arguments, as envisaged in what Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (2002) call technology's ‘social shaping.’ The rise in popularity of social media platforms and smartphone apps is a fine illustration of such social shaping in terms of the various methods enabled by technology (Hardey & Atkinson, 2012). In evaluating such trends, there is a clear synergy with the technofeminist agenda as to how we consider the impact of technology in everyday life, and how we should examine structured inequality. It is striking that the consideration of women's status in STEM fields has indicated, to date, that women are far outside the most senior professional roles (Hardey, 2019a, 2019b; Soe & Yakura, 2008); that dynamic forms of inclusiveness are linked to how women in technical or engineering positions ‘manage’ their gender (Wynn & Correll, 2018); and that white and Asian women are more likely than racialised and gendered minorities to be accepted by male-dominated tech teams (Alfrey & Twine, 2017).

As will become clear in the course of this book, gender inequality is not the only problem faced by tech employees; in other ways too, their experiences are contrary to much of the celebratory writing about the opportunities of digital spaces and about co-creative methods of democratising – possibly neutralising – tensions in technology and computing (see Howard Rheingold's (2002) Smart Mobs: The next social revolution; Bruce Sterling's (2005) Shaping Things; William Mitchell's (2004) Me++: The cyborg self and the networked city; Charles Leadbeater's (2008) We Think; and James Surowiecki's (2005) The Wisdom of Crowds). There is much to be admired in these utopian visions of technology, but we should be conscious of a distinct critical lens, disturbed by the ubiquitous vision of social media and ‘alone-to-one’ connectivity (Turkle, 2017), along with the disruption it causes to society (Baym, 2015; Raine & Wellman, 2012) and to the capacity to think for ourselves (Carr, 2011). In my view, the combined effect of social media and constant connectivity can assist in greater access to different types of technology, education and skills development. Yet the labour processes involved are deeply enmeshed with elite networks and corporate investment, some of which may not have the users' best interests at heart. This brings to mind Almjeld's observation that technology is neither ‘neutral [n]or saviour’ (Almjeld, 2019, p. 57). Indeed, if we cannot agree on the extent of the gender divide that exists and endures, or unpick the cause, then we risk turning the dominant masculine cultural tech narrative into a ‘type of self-fulfilling prophecy’ (Almjeld, 2017, p. 88). The rise of a critique of technology's cultural importance allows us to debunk the myths of openness and meritocracy and concentrate on the new relations of power.

In response to the above, I strive to think beyond the early scholarship binaries of female vs male and to bring forward more of an advocate view that embraces the complicated nature of tech interactions. By ‘advocating’, I mean highlighting the way tech employees behave in reaction to the nature of tech culture, and seeking to overcome discrimination and find a better way to speak about difference, fairness and diversity. In a firm nod to the toxicity and hierarchies of sexual difference at work and home, Judy Wajcman reflects on how ‘Mastery over technology has long been seen as a key source of power for men’ (Wajcman, 2006, p. 7). Wajcman later cautions against any premature celebration of a digital age in which the ‘link between technology and male privilege is finally being severed.’ (Wajcman, 2006, p. 7). This study is an opportunity to resituate technofeminist strategies and understand new gender–technology interactions that seem to promise new and favourable circumstances for tech workers, but also depend on traditional masculine tech culture toxicity. It is a chance to explore how a system of discrimination, misogyny and oppression affects the situation of women in tech, both as subject to dominant masculine tech cultural constructs and as employees in a struggle for equality. It is also an opportunity to examine these issues through a comparison of global tech spaces. Here, I seek to theorise the dual inequality of technology and gender and to offer a set of counter-arguments that arise from the perception that women are ‘unsuitable’ for professional careers in tech.

‘Difference’ as a Point of Conflict in Tech

Technologies and identities entwine and construct new meanings. In this context, we need not only to apply a theoretical and critical framework, but to respond to a variety of cultural, social, political and technological contexts that are subject to change. While there is much writing and research concerning technology and gender, much of it is fixated on the category ‘women’ (a critique that might be held up about my own work in this area). To date, limited work has investigated differences within this category in terms of age, class, race and education, among others. One exception is Alfrey and Twine's (2017) analysis of consistent patterns of belonging among LGBTQIA+ workers who held technically skilled positions in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Endorsements
• Copyright
• Dedication
• FM-CON-01
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Tech Work after TechnoFem
• 2. The Problem with the Label ‘Women in Tech’
• 3. Taking up Space as a Woman in Tech
• 4. Finding Work and Working through Masculine Tech Toxicity
• 5. The Place of Women's Activism in Tech Clusters in the Era of #everydaysexism and #MeToo
• Conclusion: A Suitable Job: How Might Women and Men Find an Equal Place in Global Tech Clusters?
• References
• Index