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Technical women and women-in-tech

Author: Iris Meredith

Date published: 2024-10-07

After my last post and the reaction to it, I got to thinking about tech's misogyny problem, and it's a strange kind of thing. The tech industry is and will likely remain misogynistic: women are comprehensively excluded from senior or technical roles, relentlessly abused and have serious trouble making headway in tech careers. However, there's also a massive amount of writing and literature that gets put out about how the same companies are doing wonderful things with women in tech, and we regularly see profiles of women tech leaders be given pride of place in industry literature and suchlike. I've been trying to resolve this contradiction in my head for a while, and I think I've finally reached a conclusion: the way that much misogyny in tech operates is by creating a category of women-in-tech that's distinct from technical women or women who have technical skills in the wider sense, and in fact has very little overlap with it.

Women-in-tech as a phenomenon exist primarily to be a target for abuse in half-a-hundred little ways. Whether we're drawn in to make a fundamentally sexist environment look accepting to gain clout for companies that don't deserve it, to take responsibility for the faults of men that can't possibly be held accountable for anything, or simply to be used as a combination punching bag/sex object by men in the workplace, we exist to suffer in place of those (largely white, overwhelmingly male) whom the tech industry is actually built for.

Performative stupidity

Inasmuch as women-in-tech are tolerated in the majority of technical spaces, it's in order to make the men in the space feel higher in status. The most obvious way for this to happen is for women-in-tech to work in technical spaces, but to be obviously more junior and more stupid than the men. This means that, in my experience, there's an unbelievable amount of pressure on women-in-tech to be performatively stupid or ignorant relative to the men in the field: in order to maintain our livelihood, we have to model being less competent than we are in order to soothe the egos of fragile men. Oftentimes, this pressure and mode of thinking runs so deep that men in technical spaces are actually incapable of registering when a woman makes an important technical contribution: similarly to the phenomenon I discussed earlier, the source of the statement being gendered female will lead to it being automatically discounted with very little thought. If a woman-in-tech becomes technically capable enough that the fact of it can no longer be ignored, she will be rapidly punished for it by way of gaslighting, bullying and eventually just being pushed out of the field. Of course, this means that tech companies and tech teams end up selecting for women who are beaten-down enough to accept the status quo, further reinforcing patriarchal norms. The emotional effect of all this is honestly pretty devastating: a lot of us have real trouble maintaining any level of faith or confidence in our basic ability to deliver good work, we're constantly burned-out from having to do emotional labour for man-children and we feel aggressively devalued by the people whom we're working for.

Another angle is for the women-in-tech that are elevated to be working in technical companies, but not actually be doing anything technical: this is common in situations where a woman-in-tech needs to be elevated as a leader. It's not uncommon, for example, for women working in HR in technical startups to be elevated or talked about in the media as being tech leaders. To be fair, they often do pretty damned well at what they do, and the women doing this work deserve to be respected as leaders, but none of this takes away from the fact that when women-in-tech aren't being kept at a junior level or pushed out of the field entirely, we're told that the only way for us to advance in tech is to move into lower-prestige, stereotypically feminine roles. This is pretty crushing, and once again puts the burden of emotional labour on people who really shouldn't be doing it.

The end result of both of these dynamics is that it allows tech to maintain a veneer of acceptance while, behind the facade, male egos are maintained and the patriarchal structure of tech remains as solid as ever. The pattern is particularly insidious because it allows companies to look as though they have excellent gender balance and even praise themselves for leading in this space: in fact, in the worst cases the companies, having systemically discounted women's experiences, don't understand why they're having so much trouble. Meanwhile, women are pushed out of tech, subjected to abuse and comprehensively ignored when we point any of this out.

The lightning rod

As a preface to this section, I have to state that white women are obviously capable of being racist, men of colour are capable of being sexist and homophobic and that identity in general does not shield you from being a bigot. I ask you, for the duration of this section, to set that aside and consider how this fact might be abused in a sufficiently toxic environment.

Beyond all this, a major feature of women-in-tech is to act as a lightning rod for complaints about unfairness more generally. It's a pretty well-known phenomenon that, in any given situation to do with privilege, responsibility for oppressive actions or generalised bigotry tends to fall on the people in the privileged group with the least privilege along other axes. This leads to a phenomenon (which is observable in lots of places, but above all in the corporate world) where people with very little privilege along most axes are relentlessly harassed along the one axis where they do have some privilege. Hence, we see black men being disproportionately held responsible for sexism and predatory behaviour, and while the accusations sometimes have substance, an awful lot of the time they just don't (read about Emmett Till for a particularly brutal example of this dynamic at play). Similarly, it seems that prefacing the word "woman" with the word "white" gives people carte blanche to simply spout misogyny: while white women are obviously quite often very racist, so much of the time what's being said has either a) nothing to do with race or racism at all, b) is only tenuously linked to the above or c) is individualising responsibility for systemic policy that the woman in question has nothing to do with. Noted plagiarist James Somerton is particularly guilty of using this rhetorical method to mask his misogyny. This dynamic often works within groups as well: it's notable that the white men who are most often held responsible for racist and sexist acts in companies are usually poor or working class, or in Europe, Eastern European or otherwise less prototypically white men than we might expect.

Obviously, this is an extremely complex and multilayered phenomenon, and to go into it in detail would be beyond the scope of this article. However, this means that women-in-tech (particular women-in-tech who happen to be queer or people of colour) disproportionately wind up being held responsible for bigotry and oppression in tech. On some level, it makes sense: we have less structural power than the people who are ultimately to blame for most of this, and complaints and opprobrium directed at us are more likely to see results, because on the whole, we do tend to care more about these issues. It's also unbelievably unfair that we have to bear the reputational risks and the risks of harassment (which, as we'll see below, are much higher for women than for men) associated with being held responsible for much of the bigotry and oppression that takes place in a company, while simultaneously being much less able to actually do anything about it. It goes without saying that this is deeply convenient for the people in an organisation with real power: Matt Mullenweg and his ilk can sit comfortably without ever having to worry about being held accountable for their bigotry, while all the hostility against their company is channelled through the same marginalised people as the ones doing the complaining. Beyond all of this, having to constantly be hyper-aware of our vulnerability to being used in this way is exhausting, and will burn a woman out like nobody's business: we all have a responsibility to better ourselves and to not perpetrate privilege and oppression, but humans are fallible, limited creatures. The more time we spend thinking about and trying to shield ourselves from the risk of having our reputations destroyed in the service of someone whom we can guarantee has never done any of that work in his life, the less time we have to do the work we want to do and make serious technical contributions. That is, in itself, a form of marginalisation.

Punching bags

This last point isn't quite so academic, but it's very real. The amount of abuse that we as women-in-tech are expected to absorb is abhorrent. We are consistently treated like shit, subjected to threats of death and rape by people on the internet, spoken about in the vilest terms and, far too often, actually assaulted or killed. Then, when we point out the sheer amount of actual, real violence that's directed against us by people in our spaces, we're told that we're being overly dramatic and that we need to grow a thicker skin.

I am fairly regularly called violent, demented and mentally ill by anonymous commentors on the internet, ranging from pathetic fascists on HackerNews and ranging all the way up to Jordan Peterson himself. While part of this is unfortunately just a reality of being a trans woman on the internet, Ludicity , when he saw some of the comments that I've drawn, was actively shocked and angry: apparently some of what I catch is significantly worse than anything he's ever gotten. And he's a brown guy on the internet with a much larger following than I have: I'd have expected him to catch at least some properly vile racism. The level of sheer, unmitigated misogyny that any woman in tech with a public-facing presence is subjected to is that bad. Taking the discussion offline, things get even worse. The work culture at Activision Blizzard was perhaps one of the more grotesque examples of the sheer, vile harassment we experience, but it's not unique. This happens everywhere, and the disturbing thing is that when we bring it up, it's seen as a weakness in us that we can't cope.

The sum of what's been written seems clear: women-in-tech as a construct seem to exist primarily in order to suffer abuse. Actually being technical or making a technical contribution is, by-and-large, irrelevant, and women in the wide sense are not accepted or allowed into tech: we have to force ourselves into the women-in-tech mould and take all of this abuse on.

The broken-hearted ones

The situation as described above is naturally abhorrent for any woman that exists in technical spaces. Being shoehorned into a very particular social model, forced to do emotional labour that nobody else wants to do, scapegoated, subjected to abhorrent levels of abuse and then discarded unceremoniously when we're worn out and can no longer be useful... we're being forced to reinforce the worst kinds of patriarchy while our existence is used to shield the companies doing the reinforcement from accountability for their role in propping it up. Nobody deserves that, whatever they do or whether tech is genuinely something they're passionate about or not. With that said, I want to focus in on the effects of all this on those of us who genuinely love tech and computers: women like me, in short.

We genuinely love computation and care about it a lot. Nothing makes us happier than talking about and writing linux device drivers, developing libraries for the Finite Element method or designing distributed systems. We're dedicated security researchers, core contributors to Python, IndieWeb creators and a hundred other members of the technical ecosystem. In short, we're brilliant, we really want to contribute to the state of technology and computers: this is what we were put on this earth to do. Which means that being rejected and mistreated by the very spaces where we would naturally fit hurts like nothing else.

The damage to our sense of our own identity is unbearable: the spaces that we love and that we want to contribute in tell us that we're only good for stroking egos, cheap sex and being abused. The things that we're the best at are comprehensively rubbished because of who we are, and we're told that we're only allowed to be good at things that fit the narrative that these spaces have, which is that we're worthless and only good for making children (if that). We're routinely abused, verbally beaten down and threatened with death and rape.

We try and make our own way in the world: pushed out of the prestigious spaces where the abuse is the strongest, we make a meagre living on the margins of technology, some of us in the public sector, some of us trying to scrape together freelance and contract work, some of us trying to build more involved businesses, knowing that it's an uphill fight every step of the way. We're exhausted, burned-out and broken down.

We're lost, often alone, and things often get way too much. Sometimes, all we can do is weep. We live, and we learn, and we keep building our beautiful and brilliant things. And yet, the heartbreak of rejection is always still there, in our hearts and in our eyes.

It shouldn't have to be this way.

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