Alfrey, Lauren and France Winddance Twine - “Gender-Fluid Geek Girls: Negotiating Inequality Regimes in the Tech Industry.” Flashcards
What are three ways women respond to a “chilly climate” (like being excluded in STEM)
(1) They downplay their femininity
(2) they neutralize their gender difference through discursive-positioning
(3) they leave work in STEM fields, a pattern
referred to by scholars as the “leaky pipeline”
What does this study find on women who belong to the racially dominant groups
in the tech industry, and who present as gender-fluid?
they are better able to manage their status on male-dominated teams.
However, black women who identified as LGBTQ did not report the same inclusion and acceptance from their gender fluidity
What is a “spectrum of belonging”
the dynamic forms of inclusion or
exclusion that women experience according to their race, sexuality, and
gender presentation
How much someone can belong based on group membership
What is Geek culture, and why is it important in the workplace?
Geekness is measured by one’s technical skills, but also by specific personality traits, styles of dress, interests, forms of cultural
knowledge, and gender presentation. (star trek and anime nerds)
In the workplace, they are described as white, Asian, and male.
they argue that “geek” culture symbolizes a type of normative masculinity that is racialized and class-inflected.
What are inequality regimes?
“loosely interrelated practices, processes, actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender and racial inequalities”
Seems geek culture contributes to this
What happens to heterosexual women who were conventionally feminine?
routine microaggressions in their interactions with their male coworkers
“I’ll be in a meeting and no one makes eye contact with me, they make eye contact with each other”
“When I make a decision, I get way more questions than the other guys”
Can often increase to violent behaviour (ex. screaming)
Explain how being white and gender neutral allows women to assimilate into gendered workplaces.
race and gender-neutral style positioned her as an “insider” within a male-dominated team and company.
As a consequence, she was insulated from the microaggressions and gender-based discrimination that women who were conventionally feminine reported.
What was different about the LBGTQ white and Asian workers (who identified as gender fluid)?
avoided the routine microaggressions reported by conventionally feminine women
What did sam (white nonbinary person) say is the issue for women at work?
the meanings attached to femininity are the problem for women, saying, “It’s femininity that really doesn’t correlate well with certain professionalized roles.”
[engineering] such a non-feminine space, more ‘nerdy masculinity space’
How did Cameron (korean nonbinary person) say about issues at work?
When asked to describe her coworkers, Cameron said: “90 percent of the people who taught me about technology in that store were cisgender men, and mostly white.”
She explained that at work, she learned to keep a “lid on” issues of gender
discrimination and racism
How is Jasmine (black women) evaluated differently from her white male peers?
another guy basically posted a porn . . . a sexually averse thing. And with both of
these guys, they (my managers) were like, “Okay, you get a pass. They’re new. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s okay.”
And there was empathy there. But when it came to my little faux pas . . . I feel like there wasn’t empathy
She is held to an impossible standard
A challenging interaction with a customer, during an internship that was
designed to train recent college graduates, abruptly ended Jasmine’s transition into a high-paying tech company. Yet the egregious behavior of her
two white male peers-was not grounds to fire them.
Can a black androgenous women be “one of the guys?”
In short, despite being gender-fluid and wearing the androgynous tech uniform, Jasmine never achieved the status of being treated as “one of the guys.”
(race holds you back, cuz white and Asian are dominant in the tech field)
What is the “leaky pipeline”?
When women cannot fit in (like Jasmine)
They will have to leave the field entirely
