‘Different isn’t free’: Gender @ work in a digital world

Abstract

US society is thoroughly computerized and the majority of its population engages in activities involving computers. Why, then, does computer science and engineering (CSE) remain highly male-dominated and seemingly impervious to desegregation? This study explores how CSE professionals in corporations and universities navigate and subvert male hegemony to persist. I document practices in CSE that reproduce the ideological union between masculinity and competency, including hazing, bragging, and bullying. These practices, much like rites of passage, also serve to indoctrinate CSE workers to the core values in computing knowledge production, including constant observation, combative work styles, and male hegemony, all of which differentially impact women. Women who persist in CSE describe their experiences as wearisome, constrained by a fear of being different, and thus further marginalized. I argue that processes and value systems by which people become computing professionals reflect a gendered, technocratic culture, one that reproduces labor segregation in CSE.

“The revolution will not be supervised”: Consent and open secrets in data science

“…This ethos is the latest example of how "brogrammers [have] sought to monopolize this power through an alpha male affect in the workplace that encourage[s] the technological ends and aims of an 'elite' subgroup" (Hicks, 2013: 87). Past research has revealed how sexist norms and values are imported into computing classrooms, labs, and workplaces (Carrigan, 2018;Cheryan et al, 2009). Here we have inverted this methodological approach to understand how sexist culture in data science is exported to society and to what effects.…”

“…Acts of ignoring. Workplace culture in data science tolerates and black boxes the systemic problem of sexual harassment, which reproduces oppressive gender relations in the field (Carrigan, 2018). This may be a reason why data science remains stubbornly segregated, more so than more scientific fields (Cheryan et al, 2017).…”

Taking the human body seriously

“…Important work has been done by feminist theorists (e.g., Acker, 1990Acker, , 2016Schnabel and Breitwieser, 2015). I am sympathetic to other feminist ethnographic perspectives, such as gender and body performance in digital work (see Carrigan, 2018) and other theoretical positions, such as the somatic marker theory, which attempt to explain decision-making processes through bodily feelings and emotions -but these are out of the scope of this study. Similarly, the critical somatic view should not be confused with the field of somatics (related only to first-person perspective bodily movements), although there may be some common areas such as the social implications of kinaesthesia.…”

“…The social study of the human body can be undertaken from many different perspectives (see Blaikie et al, 2003 for a discussion). Dreyfus (1996) These interpretations have been further developed to study gender and technology (Carrigan, 2018), bodily senses and organisations (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2015;Van Maanen and Kunda, 1989), somatic power structures (Michel, 2011), somaesthetics (Gallagher, 2011;Shusterman, 2008), and somatic ethics (Rose, 2009).…”

“…Finally, I used a specific strand of critical theory that is deeply rooted in critical hermeneutics and phenomenology. Further research into somatic practices could explore the political and cultural aspects of the body, such as socio-cultural (re)production (Wacquant, 2006), the concepts of body capital and physical capital (Shilling, 2012), and the nuances of the reproduction of gender mediated power structures in the context of technology use and management (Oreglia and Srinivasan, 2016;Carrigan, 2018). The mechanism of reproduction of power structures relates to the exclusion or inclusion of certain (bodily) knowledge.…”