Abstract
The tech firms of Silicon Valley are one of the most vibrant sectors of the American economy. They offer well-paying, desirable jobs that are even a bit “cool” and prestigious in the larger society. But these relatively privileged workplaces are also notoriously male dominated and often have a “boys’ club” culture that makes them “brotopias.” While women in general are underrepresented in Silicon Valley firms, Black and Latina women are especially so, representing percentages of the tech work force that are only in the low single digits. Whites and Asians, both East Asians and South Asians, are the dominant racial groups both numerically and socially in these firms. Yet despite these gender and racial disparities, Silicon Valley embraces what France Winddance Twine calls a “myth of meritocracy,” that they only hire and promote based on merit and that their lack of diversity simply reflects a “pipeline problem,” a shortage of women, especially Black and Latina women, who study computer science and engineering.
This is the situation that Twine takes on in Geek Girls: Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley. Using an intersectional lens informed by feminist, critical technology, and comparative race and ethnicity perspectives, the book seeks to unpack the mechanisms behind the gender and race disparities in Silicon Valley. As it does so, it seeks to show how these mechanisms simultaneously create and maintain these disparities while also legitimating them as based on merit.
Twine draws on interviews with and surveys of 87 Silicon Valley tech workers, 65 women and 22 men, between 2015 and 2019 and supplements this with a variety of external polls, blogs, and other data about the industry. The focus of the analysis is on the interviews and background information provided by the 65 women, in which they recount how they got into the tech world and the experiences they have had working there. The great strength of this sample of women tech workers is its intentional diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, class background, and cis/trans gender identity. A special strength is that the sample allows Twine to give informed attention to South Asian (Indian) women, both immigrant and native-born, who are a distinctive and influential group among the women engineers of Silicon Valley.
The multidimensional diversity of the women Twine interviews is the basis of her analysis of the distinctive pathways by which women of different race, ethnic, and class backgrounds find their way into tech jobs. In particular, Twine is interested in what these personal pathways reveal about the social and symbolic capital the women’s backgrounds and circumstances give them. This capital can include parents or friends who are engineers or know someone working in tech or can offer educational or financial support or even just know something about tech work as a possible career choice. It can also include a degree from an elite college. She then shows how this capital (or lack thereof) shapes the obstacles and opportunities available to women from different backgrounds as they launch their careers, seek Silicon Valley jobs, and attempt to persist and succeed in these jobs.
To conceptualize how degrees of capital are stratified not only between women and men but among women based on race, ethnicity, and class background, Twine draws on Isabel Wilkerson’s concept of caste. Caste here refers to a systematic and institutionalized system of status ranking (who is “better”) based on people’s social identities. Perhaps Twine was spurred to think in terms of caste by her close analysis of South Asian women in her sample who were from middle-class but upper-caste Indian families. In any case, it is an innovative theoretical choice. It allows Twine to focus on how the social network and cultural resources from women’s backgrounds differentially intersect with the cultural presumptions and practices of Silicon Valley workplaces about who “fits” as the ideal worker, presumptions that reflect the dominant groups of White and Asian men. This analysis reveals how hirings and promotions shaped overwhelmingly by social ties and cultural fit are construed and understood in the industry as based on “merit.” I would like to have seen Twine connect her thoughtful caste analysis to the closely related sociological literature on status inequality, however.
After Twine sets up her theoretical apparatus and describes her research methods in the early chapters, the book turns to an in-depth, chapter-by-chapter focus on what the interviews reveal about the pathways faced by several varieties of Geek Girls, beginning with Black Geek Girls (“Silicon Valley’s 1 Percent”). Rarely do these women have families with the economic, class, and social connections to help them as they develop skills and seek Silicon Valley jobs. All along the way, they face intense social isolation in a world where no one is like them. Furthermore, in a process that illustrates their low-caste status, they face “glass walls.” This is Twine’s label for how these women, regardless of their skill level or accomplishments, face a harder time moving horizontally, say from one team or one job to the next, than do men and other women with comparable credentials. Since horizontal moves from team to team and job to job are built into the tech world and how one succeeds within it, this is a serious impediment for Black women. Reading these stories, it is clear how the numbers of Black Geek Girls are kept so low. Only the grittiest, most talented, and luckiest survive.
Subsequent chapters look at the stories of first-generation geek girls, second-generation geek girls who benefit from parents and relatives who are engineers, and transnational geek girls from South Asia and Latin America. The South Asian example is especially interesting because Indian, in contrast to mainstream American, culture views engineering as a valued, gender-neutral pursuit that is an asset to family honor and middle-class mobility. This facilitates a broadly supportive network of class and caste connections that aid such women in the pursuit of Silicon Valley careers. The final two chapters turn to new institutions, such as all-women coding camps that teach specialized skills and offer job connections, and social movements, such as the recent rise of the Tech Sisterhood, that are working to change things for all women in Silicon Valley. It is good to have this hopeful note because it is clear that there is a lot of work to be done to dismantle what Twine calls Silicon Valley’s “occupational caste system.”
Twine’s overall analysis is persuasive, and anyone interested in women in tech will learn from this book. That said, the book could have done a better job of integrating the first, theoretical chapters, which stand alone in a fairly abstract manner, with the detailed chapters on the varieties of Geek Girls and the pathways their backgrounds afforded them. In particular, I would have liked to have seen the key concept of caste more explicitly integrated with analyses of the later chapters. These are minor problems in an informative book.