UC Berkeley

Engineering Inequality: Rethinking Inclusion in the San Francisco Bay Area Tech Industry draws on in-depth interviews to analyze how the organization, culture, and interactions within tech companies contribute to persistent gender inequality in the industry. Most tech executives attribute this gender imbalance to the educational pipeline, or the shortage of women graduating college with computer science degrees. I argue, however, that this perspective ignores the divergent work experiences men and women face once they make it through the educational pipeline. I investigate multiple facets of the tech industry that contribute to gender inequality, from the interplay between gender and belonging, to the gendered role sorting within tech companies, to the language that workers and companies use to discuss workplace diversity.

The first empirical chapter, “Vanishing Women: Gender, Presentation, and Belonging,” examines the meaning of belonging in the tech industry. Although tech companies make claims toward egalitarianism, many women find it difficult to fit the image of what I call the ideal tech worker. Within this context, women often take steps to neutralize their gender at work, using androgyny strategically to cope with working in this male-dominated industry. Some women who were otherwise conventionally feminine in their non-work lives donned a “tech uniform” of jeans and t-shirts in an effort to blend in at work. Others discussed more dramatic changes to how they think about their own gender identities, including, in some cases, changes to the pronouns and names used at work. Although it is often argued that more women are needed in the tech industry to broaden perspectives and change company culture, I find that the women currently working in tech are not so much changing the culture but are being changed by the culture.

The next chapter, “Glass Walls: Gender, Role Sorting, and Unequal Trajectories,” examines the different career trajectories of men and women in the tech industry. Although the pipeline perspective assumes that technical training stops at graduation, men are often informally coached to learn technical skills by their coworkers. It is often assumed that men without STEM backgrounds are capable of learning technical skills. In some cases, they are transitioned from non-technical roles to more prestigious technical roles. In contrast, women are excluded from these coaching opportunities and are steered out of technical positions altogether. Because women hit a “glass wall” when it comes to technical positions, they are effectively excluded from some of the most desirable positions in the tech industry. Many women are also diverted towards uncompensated “diversity work” within their companies, which ranges from organizing implicit bias trainings to collecting demographic data on behalf of their companies. That is, women are underrepresented in technical positions not only because they do not have the educational credentials to be hired, but also because they are not given the same opportunities as men to transition into these roles. I argue that the gendered steering that takes place within tech companies exacerbates occupational segregation and reifies ideas about who is appropriate for technical work.

The final chapter, “We’re Better Than Most: (Re)Defining Diversity,” catalogs the meaning of the term “diversity” within the tech industry. Although most respondents acknowledged a “diversity problem” in the tech industry more broadly, they nevertheless constructed their own companies as “better than most” in terms of diversity. They make this claim by drawing favorable comparisons with other tech companies and using expansive definitions of the term diversity. This chapter demonstrates how individual tech workers and their companies can rationalize the lack of diversity within their workplaces, and might explain why efforts to increase diversity have stalled.

The dissertation provides a new understanding of the organization and culture of Bay Area tech companies and how individuals working within them experience and navigate their workplaces. I argue that the culture and organization of tech companies play a critical role in reproducing inequality in the tech industry. Company cultures that perpetuate specific images of what an ideal tech worker looks not only make it difficult for women to find acceptance, but also lead to real career benefits for men. If men and women are systematically steered into different roles within tech companies, this will exacerbate gender segregation within the industry beyond the segregation produced by the educational pipeline alone. Furthermore, I argue that by using expansive definitions of diversity and convincing workers that they are making good faith diversity efforts, companies impede more meaningful efforts to increase diversity among those who are underrepresented in the industry.