Gender-Fluid Geek Girls: Negotiating Inequality Regimes in the Tech Industry

Abstract

How do technically-skilled women negotiate the male-dominated environments of technology firms? This article draws upon interviews with female programmers, technical writers, and engineers of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual orientations employed in the San Francisco tech industry. Using intersectional analysis, this study finds that racially dominant (white and Asian) women, who identified as LGBTQ and presented as gender-fluid, reported a greater sense of belonging in their workplace. They are perceived as more competent by male colleagues and avoided microaggressions that were routine among conventionally feminine, heterosexual women. We argue that a spectrum of belonging operates in these occupational spaces dominated by men. Although white and Asian women successfully navigated workplace hostilities by distancing themselves from conventional heterosexual femininity, this strategy reinforces inequality regimes that privilege male workers. These findings provide significant theoretical insights about how race, sexuality, and gender interact to reproduce structural inequalities in the new economy.

Full text

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol 31 No. 1, February 2017 28 –50
DOI: 10.1177/0891243216680590
© 2016 by The Author(s)
GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS:
Negotiating Inequality Regimes in the Tech
Industry
LAUREN ALFREY
University of Portland, USA
FRANCE WINDDANCE TWINE
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
How do technically-skilled women negotiate the male-dominated environments of technol-
ogy firms? This article draws upon interviews with female programmers, technical writ-
ers, and engineers of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual orientations employed in the
San Francisco tech industry. Using intersectional analysis, this study finds that racially
dominant (white and Asian) women, who identified as LGBTQ and presented as gender-
fluid, reported a greater sense of belonging in their workplace. They are perceived as more
competent by male colleagues and avoided microaggressions that were routine among
conventionally feminine, heterosexual women. We argue that a spectrum of belonging
operates in these occupational spaces dominated by men. Although white and Asian
women successfully navigated workplace hostilities by distancing themselves from conven-
tional heterosexual femininity, this strategy reinforces inequality regimes that privilege
male workers. These findings provide significant theoretical insights about how race,
sexuality, and gender interact to reproduce structural inequalities in the new economy.
AUTHORS’ NOTE: Authors’ names appear in alphabetical order. Both authors contrib-
uted equally to this article. We would like to thank Jason Atwood, Allan Cronin, William
T. Bielby, Jo Reger, and the three anonymous Gender & Society reviewers for their instruc-
tive comments and feedback. We also thank the women and men who volunteered to par-
ticipate in our study and graciously gave their time. This research would not have been
possible without their strong support, since this study was conducted without research
funding. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to France Winddance
Twine, University of California, Department of Sociology, 3005 Social Sciences & Media
Studies, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA; e-mail: winddance@soc.ucsb.edu and Lauren
Alfrey, University of Portland, Department of Sociology, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd,
Portland, OR 97203, USA; e-mail: alfrey@up.edu.
680590GASXXX10.1177/0891243216680590GENDER & SOCIETYAlfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS
research-article2016

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 29
Keywords: race; sexuality; gender inequality; intersectionality; organization theory;
technology industry
Sociologists studying occupational discrimination have produced a
wealth of theoretically grounded empirical research on the reproduc-
tion of gender inequality (Acker 1990, 2006; Reskin 1988, 1993; Reskin
and McBrier 2000; Reskin and Padavoc 1994). A stream of this scholar-
ship developed into gendered organization theory. The foundational lit-
erature in this subfield contributed a number of key findings. These
findings reveal that numerically underrepresented women in positions of
power become gender tokens, and show that labor queues function to sort
women into jobs and to devalue those jobs accordingly (Kanter 1977;
Reskin 1988; Reskin and Roos 1990; Strober 1984). These structural con-
straints limit women’s ability to control goals, resources, and outcomes;
organize and oversee their own work; enjoy the same pay and monetary
rewards as their male colleagues; and demand respect at work and in
workplace interactions (Acker 2006, 443). Studies on gender inequality in
science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) have docu-
mented a prevailing climate that does not welcome women. Gender schol-
ars have identified three ways in which women typically respond to this
“chilly climate”: (1) They downplay their femininity (Eisenhart and
Finkel 1998; Faulkner 2000; Kvande 1999; McIlwee and Robinson 1992);
(2) they neutralize their gender difference through discursive-positioning
(Jorgenson 2002); and (3) they leave work in STEM fields, a pattern
referred to by scholars as the “leaky pipeline” (Blickenstaff 2005). The
limited numbers of black, Latina, and Native American women in STEM
has led to studies that focus primarily upon the experiences of white,
middle-class, and heterosexual women. An exception is Maria Ong,
whose research illuminated the challenges that black, Latina, and Filipina
American women physicists encounter when their bodily appearance is at
odds with the more “ordinary” and unremarkable white, male scientist
(2005, 596).
Our study departs from previous studies on STEM organizations in
three important ways. First, we argue that jobs in the technology industry
operate through a prestige system that differs from the “hard” sciences in
which access and success is dependent upon the acquisition of a specific
degree. The skills required for technical positions in the software and
computing industries can be self-taught or learned on the job. Second, in
striking contrast to the suggestion by male scientists that their endeavors
operate in a “culture of no culture” (Traweek 1988, 162), tech firms

30 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
market their products as designed to “make the world a better place.”
Their corporate discourses give the appearance of being democratic and
progressive. Yet a series of recent high-profile sex discrimination cases
and employee demographic data demonstrate that women are systemati-
cally excluded from leadership roles and technical positions at top tech
firms (Conner 2014; Harkinson 2014; Jacobson 2014). Third, research on
STEM has failed to provide an intersectional analysis of the ways that
race, class, gender, and sexuality operate together to disadvantage black
and dark-skinned Latina women. These women have experiences that
distinguish them from white and Asian women, who represent racially
dominant groups in these fields. We have learned from the whiteness stud-
ies literature that women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are racial-
ized and that their racial status can function as a symbolic form of capital
or as a liability (Frankenberg 1993; Twine 1996, 1999, 2010; Twine and
Steinbugler 2008). In this article, we examine how race, in addition to
gender and sexuality, intersect to structure the experiences of women
employed on male teams.
How do technically skilled women negotiate male-dominated environ-
ments in the tech industry? To address this question, we draw upon a
qualitative study of 50 technology workers of diverse gender identities,
racial and ethnic backgrounds, and sexual orientations. Here we focus on
the experiences of 18 women who are technical workers on male teams.
The majority of women employed at tech companies work with other
women in nontechnical positions (sales, marketing, human resources, or
recruiting). These nontechnical positions do not carry the same prestige or
power assigned to programmers or engineers. Examining how women
negotiate this occupational setting as racialized and gender minorities is
important for analyzing structural inequality in the new economy. Our
findings indicate that women who belong to the racially dominant groups
in the tech industry, and who present as gender-fluid1 and identify as
LGBTQ, 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. In striking contrast to
their white and Asian counterparts, they did not achieve a status as “one
of the guys” (Schilt 2006, 2011). We argue that these findings reflect a
gendered spectrum of belonging—the dynamic forms of inclusion or
exclusion that women experience according to their race, sexuality, and
gender presentation. We build upon the framework of Joan Acker (1990,
2006) and her concept of inequality regimes to theorize how women in
technical positions manage their gender and sexuality, embodiments that

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 31
are in conflict with the idealized tech worker. Drawing upon the experi-
ences of women engineers, technical writers, and programmers, we will
illuminate how this spectrum operates differently for women of varying
racial-ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and gender expressions.
INTERSECTIONALITY AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION IN
THE WORKPLACE
Since the late 1970s, feminist sociologists have demonstrated that
workplace cultures are not gender-neutral. In her analysis of the first
generation of women in a New York corporation, Rosabeth Moss Kanter
showed that numerical underrepresentation in positions of power was a
woman’s primary barrier to success. Consistent with her central claim
that gender was an organizing force in the structure of corporations,
Kanter observed, “While organizations were being defined as sex-neutral
machines, masculine principles were dominating their authority struc-
tures” (1977, 46). Building upon this research, feminist scholars have
complicated and strengthened this analysis to argue that gender ideolo-
gies structure how work is conceptualized and organized (Acker 1990).
Gender impacts the ways that jobs, positions, and hierarchies are concep-
tualized and created in organizations. Men’s advantages and women’s
disadvantages are opposite sides of the same inequality coin, produced in
and through organizational practices. As organizations structure social
norms, men and women routinely engage in practices of “doing gender”
that reproduce gender inequality, even if unconsciously (Martin 2003;
Schilt 2006; West and Zimmerman 1987).
In a groundbreaking study of transgender men, Kristen Schilt (2006)
found that respondents succeeded at being seen as “one of the guys” by
colleagues and coworkers following their transition. As a benefit of
being read as cisgender males, trans* men received higher pay, enjoyed
more authority, and experienced greater respect than they had received
as women, even when they remained in the same job. Gender transition
provided these respondents with new access to the “patriarchal divi-
dend,” or the myriad advantages that men in general gain from the
subordination of women (2006, 465). Despite this important contribu-
tion, Schilt’s findings leave unanswered the question of how nongender
normative women negotiate occupational cultures that privilege heter-
onormative masculinity. Our study considers this question and also
provides an analysis of how race and sexuality structure a cisgender

32 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
woman’s experience in an occupation symbolically defined as mascu-
line. By comparing the experiences of women from different racial-
ethnic backgrounds, we suggest that gender fluidity, or a presentation
of self that challenges gender binaries of dress and expression while
maintaining one’s gender assigned at birth, may allow white and Asian
women to find acceptance among male peers. However, we find that
black women’s particular racialization restricts their acceptance in the
same occupational climates.
Empirically documenting the reproduction of gender inequality in the
workplace (Schilt 2006) is a challenge because gendered expectations
about which jobs are best suited for women or men continue to be rein-
forced by ongoing occupational segregation.2 Here we offer a case study
of women who are negotiating twenty-first-century gender-segregated
occupational environments as programmers, technical writers, or engi-
neers. Their gender strategies illustrate both the enormous limitations that
gender schemas (Valian 1998) continue to place on women workers as
assumptions of essential difference, as well as the creative strategies
women may use in response to environments that fail to be gender inte-
grated. Our evidence suggests that gender distancing may only work for
racially privileged white and Asian women, and that these strategies rein-
force rather than undermine male privilege.
METHODS
Our study is based on interviews with employees working for technol-
ogy firms in the greater San Francisco area. With a population of 852,000
people, San Francisco ranks 13th in population size among U.S. cities
(U.S. Bureau of the Census 2014), yet it ranks first in the nation for the
number of tech workers. San Francisco has the greatest high-tech-related
job growth of any city in the United States. The tech workers who occupy
these positions are predominantly white or Asian, male, and typically
earn between $100,000 and $150,000 annually, placing them in the top
10 percent of the labor force.3 Interviews with tech workers were con-
ducted over a 24-month period.4 Research began in the fall of 2014 and
continued through the summer of 2016. Approximately half of the inter-
views were conducted in-person at the workplaces of participants5 or in
a nearby public café. The remaining interviews were conducted via
Skype. Interviews lasted between 60 and 120 minutes. Three avenues were
used to recruit participants for our study. First, we contacted a manager at

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 33
one tech firm who became a key informant. After securing an initial set
of interviewees, a snowball sampling method was used to identify
employees at other firms and at several start-ups. Second, one of the
authors attended a two-day “Tech Inclusion” Conference that took place
in San Francisco during September 2015. They contacted attendees and
presenters from the conference, and several of them agreed to participate
in the study. Snowball sampling was also used following these inter-
views. Finally, one of the authors regularly attended dinners at an under-
ground restaurant in the Bay Area and recruited San Francisco–based
tech workers present at these events.
This article analyzes the experiences of a subset of women drawn from
a larger sample of 50 men and women employed at tech companies. The
workers we interviewed were employed in a variety of technical and non-
technical positions at large firms and startups in the greater San Francisco
area, including (but not limited to) Dropbox, Google, Salesforce, Square,
Twitter, and Zendesk. While our sample is small, our case study provides
empirical evidence about a population of workers who are difficult to
access. Technology firms have been reluctant to release industry-wide or
firmwide data, which could illuminate patterns of bias in hiring, promo-
tion, and/or retention at tech companies. Given the absence of data on this
industry, it is clear that qualitative case studies are needed to provide
important data on the new economy.
This article draws on interviews with 18 women. Twelve of them were
white, three were Asian, two were black, and one was white Latina. Our
sample is also diverse in terms of sexual orientation: seven women identi-
fied as lesbian, bisexual, queer, or pansexual. Eleven identified as hetero-
sexual.6 Seventeen of our participants identified their sex as female, and
one as nonbinary trans*, although they chose to identify as female at
work. Respondents ranged in age from 25 to 44. Their annual salaries
were between $75,000 and $250,000. All of our participants had earned a
college degree or graduate degree. Twelve participants majored in com-
puter science, software, or electrical engineering, and six had earned
bachelor’s degrees in noncomputing fields.7 Among the six who did not
hold computer science degrees, four had completed coding boot camps
after college, and two had earned master’s degrees in technical writing at
elite schools (Table 1).
Prior to each interview, participants completed a survey that captured
basic demographic data, including their age, race, childhood home, gen-
der identity, sexual orientation, educational history, job title, and salary.
Interviews were semistructured, and in a subset of questions in the interview

34 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
guide, participants were asked to describe their workplace culture and
interactions with direct coworkers. This included how they evaluated
their “fit” with their team. All interviews were recorded and later tran-
scribed manually.8 Notes were taken during the interviews about the
respondent’s dress, physical features, mannerisms, and other details.
Utilizing a grounded theory approach, we coded interview transcripts
and used an open coding scheme to allow patterns to emerge inductively
(Charmaz 2006; Glaser and Strauss 1967). Coded transcripts allowed us
to identify a number of themes, including the form and degree to which
participants felt accepted by their male coworkers. Triangulated with
demographic information from surveys and physical descriptions from
interview notes, we discovered consistent patterns of belonging among
white and Asian LGBTQ women who identified as gender-fluid and/or
presented as gender nonconforming; these patterns differed from the
black women and heterosexual women in our sample.
TABLE 1: Demographic Data of Participants
Pseudonym Age Race/Ethnicity
Sexual
Orientation Job Title
Sarah 41 White Heterosexual QA manager
Mercedes 27 White Latina Heterosexual Senior software engineer
Anastasia 29 White Heterosexual Software engineer
Crystal 45 Black Heterosexual Master technical trainer
Kate 28 White Heterosexual Software engineer
Jaime 28 Asian/Filipina Lesbian Software engineer
Samantha 32 White Queer Engineering manager
Cameron 30 Asian/Korean
American
Pansexual Technical writer
Tasha 28 White Bisexual Back-end engineer
Rachel 25 White Straight Technical writer
Jasmine 28 Black Pansexual Security engineer
Joy 23 White Queer Data visual analyst
Alex 25 White Queer Software engineer
Becca 43 White Heterosexual VP of product design
Nicole 23 White Heterosexual Embedded software
engineer
Joelle 25 White Heterosexual Software engineer
Regina 24 White/Russian Heterosexual Software engineer
Britney 25 Asian/Chinese
American
Heterosexual Software engineer

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 35
A SPECTRUM OF BELONGING:
WOMEN ENGINEERS ON MALE TEAMS
Geek Culture as an Inequality Regime
Our interviewees frequently described geek culture as a central feature of
their workplace. What does it mean to be a “geek?” The term is currently
associated with a specific class-inflected form of masculinity, masculine
dress code, leisure activities, and personality traits. J.A. McArthur situates
this term in a historical context noting that “geek,” like the term “nerd,” was
once “an insult used to degrade and belittle intelligent outcasts” who dem-
onstrated domain-specific intelligence and passion, but lacked social skills
(2008, 4). More recently, “geek” has come to be a term used among millen-
nials as “a label for those who demonstrate expertise in a certain field”
(McArthur 2008, 4). This shift in meaning has paralleled the rise of the
software and computing industries, with tech CEOs and founders achieving
newfound wealth and power. Formerly something stigmatized, “geek” now
has become an aspirational identity. We find that geek culture operates spe-
cifically as a racialized masculinity that shaped the environments in which
our respondents worked. The tech workers we interviewed repeatedly
claimed that one’s competence as a programmer, software engineer, or tech-
nical expert is evaluated, in part, by the degree of one’s geek-ness. Being
perceived as geek is therefore a type of currency, a form of symbolic capital
(Bourdieu 1994). 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.9 Geeks were described as individuals
who enjoy computing-related hobbies, gaming, and watching television
programs such as Star Trek, and who are fans of Japanese Anime.10
These findings illuminate a dimension that was missing in the analyses
of Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher in their book, Unlocking the Clubhouse:
Women in Computing (2012). In their interviews with more than 100 com-
puter science (CS) majors at Carnegie Mellon, students described the
typical CS major as “a person in love with computers, myopically focused
on them to the neglect of all else, living and breathing the world of com-
puting, at the computer 24/7” (McGuire 2002, 67). In addition to the “all
or nothing,” antisocial work ethic identified by Margolis and Fischer, our
respondents characterized computer “geeks” as white, Asian, and male.
Thus, we argue that “geek” culture symbolizes a type of normative mas-
culinity that is racialized and class-inflected.
As pervasive as it is in the software and computing industries, geek
culture produces a unique occupational “inequality regime.” This concept

36 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
was first introduced by Joan Acker (2006) to describe the interlocking
practices and processes that reproduce structural inequalities in the work-
place. Acker claimed that all organizations have inequality regimes,
which include “loosely interrelated practices, processes, actions, and
meanings that result in and maintain class, gender and racial inequalities”
(2006, 443). Even organizations that have explicit egalitarian goals tend
to develop inequality regimes over time. These regimes do not exist in a
vacuum, but are built from “inequality in the surrounding society, its
politics, its history, and culture” (2006, 443). The concept of inequality
regimes informs our analysis of how gender discrimination is normalized
in technology firms and may be invisible to the men working on teams
that have few or no women. Although racial and gender discrimination is
not unique to the tech industry, the forms they take are specific to this
industry and the forms of work most associated with it. The equation of a
particular male embodiment with technical competence is pervasive in
technology firms. The women we interviewed regularly described how
these associations and assumptions negatively impacted the evaluations of
their work.
The Cost of Being Conventionally Feminine: Microaggressions on
Male Technical Teams
Our interviews revealed that heterosexual women who were conven-
tionally feminine experienced routine microaggressions in their interac-
tions with their male coworkers. Microaggressions are defined as “subtle,
stunning, and often non-verbal exchanges” that function as put-downs for
a person of a minority status (Russell-Brown 2009, 25). Although micro-
aggressions are often unintended and may be invisible to the person enact-
ing them, recipients experience them as hostile or threatening. In
monocultural and male supremacist work environments, microaggres-
sions are cumulative and may generate feelings of isolation, exclusion,
shame, or fear in women and racialized minorities. Discussions of micro-
aggressions have focused primarily on racial aggressions (Coates 2011;
Goldsmith and Romero 2008; C. Pierce 1970, 1974; Russell-Brown
1998). In this section, we provide an intersectional analysis of microag-
gressions experienced by two gender-normative, well-educated women of
different ethnic backgrounds.
Anastasia is a 29-year-old white, married, heterosexual woman, cur-
rently employed as a software developer. During the interview, Anastasia
was dressed in a black form-fitting T-shirt. She wore black plastic-framed
glasses, a wedding ring, and her shoulder length-blonde hair loose. She

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 37
decided to learn computer programming when her former occupation in
biological research failed to provide the income and upward mobility she
sought in a long-term career. With the financial support of her husband, a
computer engineer, Anastasia enrolled in a 10-week certification program
at an all-women’s coding boot camp in San Francisco. Upon her comple-
tion of the program, she secured her first job as a software engineer
through a referral from a female mentor. When asked if she ever experi-
enced challenges as the only female developer on an all-male team,
Anastasia replied,
I’m reminded every day that I’m the only female developer on my team for
sure. . . . I’ll be in a meeting and no one makes eye contact with me, they
make eye contact with each other. And I know this isn’t just in my head—
I’ve talked to other women who have had this issue, too. And even in small
meetings where it’s you and two other people, and they [male developers]
are talking to each other about your project! Or one of my male coworkers
and I will talk to dev-ops11 to ask questions about something . . . I’m the
one asking the question, the dev-ops person . . . turns to my male colleague
and explains [the answer] to him . . . it is really alienating.
Mercedes, another university-educated women, reported similar inter-
actions with men at her company. A 27-year-old married, white Latina,
Mercedes grew up in an upper-class family near Cancun, Mexico, and
moved to the United States to earn a master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon,
one of the nation’s top-ranked universities in computer science. Like
Anastasia, she had long hair and wore glasses, a white T-shirt, and jeans
during her interview. Mercedes worked as the sole woman on a team of
white men. When asked about being the only women engineer on her
team, Mercedes shared,
I didn’t really care [at first] being the only one. But then you started noticing
certain stuff. . . . When I make a decision, I get way more questions than the
other guys. . . . It took me forever to earn the respect of some of my peers.
And I’m kind of always freaking out that I’m going to make a mistake—that
everything I’ve been working on is going to disappear.
Microaggressions often escalate into openly hostile actions. Describing
why she left her team, Mercedes described a situation that began as a
microaggression but developed into overtly abusive behavior:
The reason I actually switched teams was because I was getting tired of my
manager . . . he would storm out to me and start screaming at me for something

38 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
that wasn’t even my fault. . . . And I was like, “Calm down . . . it wasn’t even
my fault.” I didn’t agree with him talking to me like that in front of everyone
else.
Outsider status was described as a serious problem for women on tech-
nical teams. Technical teams work collaboratively through a system of
peer-based “code review,” a process in which a person’s teammates offer
feedback on their code. A degree of discretion is therefore involved in
determining what constitutes a “good” or “bad” solution to a technical
goal or problem. Regular interactions among technical teammates tend to
foster a sense of intimacy and a commitment. In Mercedes’s words, your
technical team is “your family, and your extended family is your depart-
ment.” For women in our sample, this close-knit team environment car-
ried particular pressures to conform to a masculine culture or risk not
being seen as a competent equal. It also meant, as seen in Mercedes’s case,
that assessments of whether someone’s code is “good” or “bad” were
interpreted through gender schemas (Valian 1998).
Although they had different ethnic and national origins, Mercedes and
Anastasia both described how educational credentials and technical skills
did not protect them from hostilities in their workplace. In contrast to
male team members, these women were repeatedly asked to defend their
work. Despite a twenty-first-century occupational context, their experi-
ences mirror those of women in corporate and the academic environments
nearly 30 years ago (Reskin 1988; Valian 1998). Unfortunately, there is no
reliable industry-wide data on how many women choose to leave their
teams or leave the industry altogether because of routine microaggres-
sions. However, studies show that women employed in the fields of sci-
ence or engineering leave their jobs in greater numbers (Blickenstaff
2005). The experiences of Anastasia and Mercedes suggest that microag-
gressions may be routine for women working on gender-segregated teams
of the tech industry. Left uncorrected, practices such as explicitly sexual
jokes, comments about women’s body parts, and other fraternity-like haz-
ing practices will drive women out of the profession.
Femininity as a Liability for Bisexual Women on All-Male Teams
Tasha is 28-year-old, white, and bisexual. She is employed as a backend
software engineer for a social networking site.12 She grew up in a small
rural town in Wisconsin and earned her degree in software engineering and
Spanish from a public research university. She later pursued a terminal mas-
ter’s degree in computer science. Upon graduation, she relocated to the San

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 39
Francisco Bay Area and was immediately hired at an enterprise software
company with a starting salary of more than $100,000. As the sole woman
on a team of 12 employees, Tasha adopted a gender-neutral form of dress.
During her interview, she wore her shoulder-length blonde hair loose with
a black T-shirt and jeans, the typical uniform among the engineers we
interviewed. When asked whether she ever felt out of place on an all-male
team, Tasha compared herself to a female friend at work who dresses in
conventionally feminine clothing and has to manage negative interactions
with male coworkers. Describing her treatment by male clients on a busi-
ness trip to China, Tasha recalled the disrespectful treatment she received
from Asian and white male colleagues when she chose to wear a dress:
They took us on a trip to Mainland China to meet the main company . . . I was
wearing dresses every day because it’s hot and dresses are the hot weather
“cheat coat.” . . . . And every single meeting, when I was introduced, as one
of the engineers, there was an, “Oh!” One of their engineers just flat out stared
at me and said, “Really!” . . . I was dressed up femme, and there was a constant
disbelief when I was introduced to new people at the company.
Whether or not these men were responding to her wearing a dress, or to
her simply being a woman engineer, Tasha identified this as a key moment
in her consciousness about gender discrimination. When asked to describe
the personality traits of the men she works with, all of whom are white,
Tasha said,
Strangely enough I feel that the personality trait is being pushy, and not
being unique. You don’t talk about yourself. . . . You’re just supposed to get
the job done. And be efficient. . . . I wonder . . . if diversity calls attention
to something that is not your tech expertise. So you’re distracting.
Like in the military, individuality in the workplace did not appear to be
rewarded or encouraged among the tech workers we interviewed. In this
case, Tasha’s whiteness, combined with her age, dress, and cultural style,
allowed her to assimilate into a racialized and gendered occupational cul-
ture. Whiteness, like heterosexuality, has been described as a standpoint, a
position of invisible power, in which one is marked as “neutral.” It is often
a taken-for-granted position of power for those who possess it (Frankenberg
1993; McIntosh 1998; McKinney 2005; J. Pierce 2003; Twine 2010; Twine
and Gallagher 2008). Tasha went on to recount an incident that shows the
degree to which she culturally resembles her male peers and is thus invisible
as a female team member:

40 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
We had a team-building activity and we had to split up into two teams. We
had just randomly shifted apart based on where we were sitting at the
tables, and I was the only woman on my side. Most of the women in our
company are in marketing, and design, plus our administrative assistant.13
But once we split up, my CEO, who is also a woman . . . she looked over
and said, “Hey, we’re really unbalanced right now!” And one of my co-
workers looks around on our team and says, “Oh yeah! We don’t have any
women.” And then he spotted me and said, “Oh shit, I’m sorry.” . . .
[laughs] . . . I don’t get treated differently because at this point, they’ve
absorbed me as male. . . . I don’t dress particularly feminine, like . . . I’m
wearing a dark T-shirt and jeans right now and that’s kind of my standard
outfit.14 . . . At work, I’m loud, I’m silly, I’m friends with all of these peo-
ple, I have a very dry, blunt sense of humor which . . . is very similar to the
other guys on my team. . . . [I]t isn’t that they think of me “not as a woman”
it’s that they think of me “like them.”
Tasha’s race and gender-neutral style positioned her as an “insider” within
a male-dominated team and company. As a consequence, she was insu-
lated from the microaggressions and gender-based discrimination that
women who were conventionally feminine reported.
Feminist scholars have argued that gender, and specifically femininity,
is a set of practices that function as a performance, distinct from
assigned sex (West and Zimmerman 1987). We argue that femininity, or
adherence to traditional gender roles, may be a liability for women in
male-dominated technology firms. Under an inequality regime in which
competence and cultural fitness is embodied as white, Asian, and male,
women like Tasha negotiated their token presence as engineers by adopt-
ing styles, tastes, and habits identified with a race- and class-specific ver-
sion of masculinity. While Tasha’s whiteness allowed her small victories
with her male coworkers, our data suggests that the same may not be
possible for gender-fluid black women.
Gender Fluidity: An Asset for Racially Privileged Women
The LBGTQ white and Asian workers who identified as gender-fluid
in our sample avoided the routine microaggressions reported by conven-
tionally feminine women like Anastasia and Mercedes. Women who
identified as queer, bisexual, lesbian, or pansexual15 achieved this degree
of acceptance, in part, by cultivating a style of communication and dress
that made them virtually indistinguishable from their male peers. In this
section, we introduce two women who represent this pattern.

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 41
Samantha, a 32-year-old white software engineer and a millennial,
grew up in the Midwest. Classified as female at birth, Samantha (aka
Sam) identifies as nonbinary trans* outside of work, but as female in
her workplace.16 In 2007, Sam earned a combined bachelor’s and mas-
ter’s degree in computer science from one of the nation’s top-ranked
programs. Dressed in a black T-shirt, jeans, and a hoodie sweatshirt
during her interview, Sam conformed to the dominant dress style
found among the engineers we interviewed. She also wore her hair
short, metal-framed glasses, and no makeup. A biological female with
a feminine name, Samantha described her decision to identify as
female at her job as a way to avoid confusion among her coworkers
and supervisors.
In Sam’s analysis, certain positions in the industry are defined or per-
ceived as masculine positions, but not necessarily based on biological sex.
She believed that the meanings attached to femininity are the problem for
women, saying, “It’s femininity that really doesn’t correlate well with
certain professionalized roles.” When asked to clarify, Sam explained, “I
think it would be difficult for a woman . . . to be very feminine because
it’s [engineering] such a non-feminine space, and part of the subculture is
a creation of nerdy masculinity.” When asked why a male-dominated
space feels more comfortable for her, Sam replied,
For me, navigating the male-dominated world is like way more familiar. . . .
I didn’t really know how to have female friendships, or relationships . . .
until five years ago. So to me it [male space] was a more comfortable space.
I didn’t really fit in, but I didn’t fit in anywhere. . . . It’s a funny thing, me
being trans*, in that I’m taking a more masculine expression and . . . I think
that actually helps me . . . it’d be a lot different if I were kind of transgress-
ing gender in a different way. It would probably be a lot worse, actually, the
way these things work.
Here we see the heightened awareness that Sam possesses about how
femininity is a liability in her role as a software engineer. Her statement
that having a more masculine expression “actually helps her” demon-
strates how her gender fluidity is a strategic asset to achieve respect and
secure belonging among her male colleagues.
Cameron is a 30-year-old Korean American technical writer who iden-
tifies as pansexual and gender-fluid. Cameron grew up in New York in
what she described as a middle-class household. She was raised by her
mother, a stay-at-home parent, and her father, a ceramics engineer. In
2007, she graduated with a bachelor’s from a state college in New York.

42 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
Cameron’s first job in the technology retail sector led her to pursue a
career in technical writing. After earning her master’s degree in this field,
she was hired to work at an enterprise software company in Silicon
Valley. She now works at a startup firm in San Francisco. Cameron
entered the industry through her male roommates, all of whom were
employed in technical support and sales positions at a computer retail
store. In her retail position, she learned how to minimize her femininity,
which enabled her to achieve acceptance as a computer technology
expert among her male coworkers. When asked to describe her cowork-
ers, Cameron said: “90 percent of the people who taught me about tech-
nology 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, saying,
I learned to be less outspoken. . . . I learned to be a lot less outspoken about
racist jokes, a lot less outspoken about people’s perception of me—like hate
speech. There was some line where it was crossed, I was like, ok, now I
need to say something. But in general, it was about blending in, to be one
of the guys.
Cameron was convinced that her ability to culturally “pass” as one of the
guys played a major role in being treated as a competent employee by
customers and colleagues. This was in striking contrast to her two femi-
nine coworkers, whom she claimed: “Didn’t last very long. They were
moved into departments for not picking up on technical knowledge.”
When asked for her analysis of this situation, Cameron said:
Their [male coworker’s] ineptitude was more acceptable because they were
still one of the guys. . . . You don’t need to know anything about technology
to sell to that customer; you just have to talk to them. And unfortunately,
there were many times where people would ask me a question only for me
to see them walk to a male associate and ask them the same question or tell
me flat out to my face that men just know more about that kind of stuff.
Some of that was about me trying to figure out the line of being gender
queer . . . where does being masculine and being male, and being feminine
and being female, fit in when you’re both? . . . I did act more to be one of
the guys.
Part of “acting like one of the guys” involved sanctioned activities in
which associates would sexually profile female customers whom they
considered attractive and alert their male coworkers:

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 43
There was a system—I remember this. The guys at the security station
would make a loud, popping noise and it was to let all the guys in the store
know that a hot girl had walked in.
Here we see the value of Cameron’s gender-fluid sexuality. It enabled her,
as a female working on a male team, to be included in activities that rein-
forced the sexual objectification of women and the patriarchal dividend
(Connell [1995] 2005). This was one way Cameron gained insider status
in an all-male culture that otherwise excluded women. She experienced
upward mobility in technical positions, while her femme peers were
moved to nontechnical teams or forced to resign.
The Limits of Gender Fluidity for Black Geek Girls
Jasmine is a 28-year-old black pansexual woman who works as a secu-
rity engineer.17 She grew up in the South and earned a degree in computer
engineering from a private university in the Midwest. During the inter-
view, Jasmine wore her hair tied back in a bun, no makeup, and a black
T-shirt paired with jeans. Jasmine’s first break in the tech industry came
when she secured a competitive internship at one of Silicon Valley’s top
technology firms following her college graduation. While the program
ended with most of her peers being recommended for jobs in the same
organization, Jasmine reported that she and another black woman, the
only women in their cohort of 30 interns, were not hired. From Jasmine’s
perspective, not being hired was based upon professional neglect and not
receiving the training and support that her male peers received. This
resulted in negative performance reviews. She described a pattern of
neglect in which she was denied meaningful mentoring. Despite being an
intern, her performance reviews were not accompanied with mentoring, or
advice on how to improve. When Jasmine began a rotation in a customer
support role, a requirement of her internship, a male peer reported to their
supervisor that Jasmine was not “being customer friendly” and that she
“hadn’t provided accurate information.” She described the consequences
of this action in the following way:
Whenever I went to a performance review, it said I under-performed. And
consistently half of my time during the program was trying to get out from
being under-performed. Like I under-performed in their eyes so much that
I had to be put under a performance review . . . the last shot before they fire
somebody. Throughout this process, as a person who strives on doing well
and doing good work, I consistently asked my manager, “Okay, what am I

44 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
doing wrong? What do I need to do to improve?” . . . I’d get answers like
. . . “Give your manager more ammo so he can tout what you’re doing.”
And so I did. I wrote copious amounts of notes of whatever I was doing
daily, of projects I was working on. But it didn’t seem like that it was enough.
Jasmine was told by her company-appointed mentor to inflate her accom-
plishments, a gendered practice of self-promotion that is commonly
employed by men after a negative performance review. This was not
advice about how to actually improve the quality of her work. Jasmine
also explained how the standards of performance she was evaluated by did
not apply equally to her white male peers:
In the first couple weeks of the program, there was one guy that I remem-
ber, he had basically taken advantage of . . . a loophole, in order to do a
practical joke. But it was basically indirectly breaking into people’s
machines without asking. And he got in trouble . . . he got our whole entire
class in trouble. We got delayed by weeks for that. On top of that, 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.”. . . They were both
white guys. And there was empathy there. But when it came to my little faux
pas . . . I feel like there wasn’t empathy . . . both of those guys who fucked
up in the beginning, they ended up getting full-time jobs at [name of the
company omitted] at the end of the program.
A challenging interaction with a customer, during an internship that was
designed to train recent college graduates, abruptly ended Jasmine’s tran-
sition into a high-paying tech company. Yet the egregious behavior of her
two white male peers—one that posted sexist and pornographic materials
on a company server and another who violated security measures by
breaking into his colleagues’ computers—was not grounds to fire them.
Instead they were offered promotions as full-time employees. Here we see
how an occupational culture that tolerates pornography, and other frat-boy
practices, can powerfully overdetermine assessments of competence and
beliefs about who is a qualified worker. In Jasmine’s case, being the sole
black woman on a white and Asian all-male team became a concrete bar-
rier that could not be overcome by gender fluidity. 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.” In contrast to the
white and Asian women we spoke with, Jasmine was excluded from infor-
mal activities and social gatherings with male coworkers and evaluated as
an underperformer by her manager. She was neither mentored nor given

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 45
an opportunity to achieve success within her company as an intern.
Instead, she was forced to leave the organization. Unlike Cameron and
Samantha, Jasmine is now part of the “leaky pipeline.”
CONCLUSION
In this article, we use an intersectional analysis to demonstrate how gen-
der expression and sexuality, in concert with race, position racially domi-
nant LGBTQ women on male occupational teams. Our case study and
findings contribute important theoretical insights to the literature on women
in the technology industry. In contrast to earlier studies that show how
women achieve acceptance by downplaying their femininity, our research
demonstrates that gender expression is complicated by the intersecting ine-
qualities of race and sexuality. In other words, race and sexual orientation
co-determine whether a woman is allowed to be treated and accepted as
“one of the guys” in occupational environments where white and Asian men
are the dominant group and symbolically represent the ideal employee. We
found that gender-fluid white and Asian women who identified as queer,
bisexual, lesbian, or pansexual achieved the respect and social acceptance
of their male peers. This granted them small victories in gender-segregated
workplaces otherwise hostile toward women. As a strategy, gender fluidity
may provide conditional acceptance for racially dominant women working
on all-male teams, but it does not challenge the underlying idea that the
most competent designers of software solutions are white, Asian, and imag-
ined to be male. Thus, gender-fluid geek girls face a dilemma. In conform-
ing to an industry-specific norm of masculinity, their conditional inclusion
leaves male supremacy intact.
We argue that a gendered spectrum of belonging operates in occupa-
tional cultures where masculinity and heteronormativity are the norm. We
conceptualize this as the ways in which nonnormative gender expressions
allow gender-fluid women to find acceptance in occupational environ-
ments dominated by men. Racially privileged women in our sample, who
did not present as conventionally feminine, were perceived as more com-
petent by their male colleagues. In contrast to their white and Asian coun-
terparts, Black women in our sample did not report receiving the same
benefits from gender fluidity; they were instead evaluated primarily by
their racial status (Valian 1998). Our study expands and complicates earlier
research of gender scholars by showing how cisgender women who deploy
gender flexibility or fluidity experience workplace benefits similar to those
of transgender men (Schilt 2006). By not presenting as “femme,” and thus

46 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2017
not as heterosexually available, gender-fluid women in our sample enjoyed
patriarchal dividends (Connell [1995] 2005) that included greater respect
and acceptance, and positive evaluations of their competence.
Further research is needed on the nuanced ways that sexuality, in con-
cert with race and class, structure the experiences of women in the new
economy. We believe that such studies are particularly important for the
tech industry, where black women and brown-skinned Latinas are rarely
hired and experience higher rates of attrition in the industry. Technology
is the most powerful industry of the early twenty-first century. The occu-
pational environments that produce the software and computing solutions
of our time demand more scholarly attention from race, gender, and sexu-
ality scholars who seek to understand the resilience of inequality regimes.
We hope that our study inspires further critical work on this industry.
NOTES
1. We borrow this term from one of our participants to describe a presentation
of self that is androgynous in style.
2. This remains the case in a range of occupations including medicine, law,
and hard sciences (Schilt 2006; Valian 1998; Williams 1995).
3. In May 2014, Google released the demographics of its employees. Among
technical workers: 83 percent were men, 60 percent were white, and 34 percent
were Asian (Jacobson 2014). Demographic representation of technical workers
was similar at other top tech companies that released their diversity numbers dur-
ing the same period, including Facebook, Twitter, Apple, LinkedIn, and Pandora,
although there were cases of technical teams with greater proportions of Asian
workers (see Conner 2014).
4. In the latter phase of research, we found Skype to be a more effective
means of conducting interviews with tech workers who had demanding work
schedules and were already socialized to conduct professional interactions with
video technologies.
5. These interviews were conducted in a private meeting room with a door to
ensure privacy.
6. We use the term trans* to refer to individuals whose gender identities do
not correspond to their sex assignment at birth.
7. We define computing-related fields as software or electrical engineering,
computer science, or technical writing.
8. Participation in this research was voluntary. All tech workers interviewed
signed informed consent forms and were told that they could withdraw from the
study at any time. All participants have been given pseudonyms. We also use
generic descriptions of employers rather than the name of the company in order
to protect their identity and confidentiality.

Alfrey and Twine / GENDER-FLUID GEEK GIRLS 47
9. This kind of cultural knowledge is what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus. He
describes these “structuring structures” as dispositions and tastes that are cultivated
primarily through one’s class position and interactions with other members of their
class. Even when these dispositions are unconscious, they are practiced in ways that
constructs and reproduces class difference in everyday life (Bourdieu 1984).
10. “Gaming” references the activity of playing video games online or on a
personal gaming device. Anime is a genre of Japanese visual culture that features
hand-drawn or computer-generated animation.
11. Dev-ops is a type of computer engineering. According to a 2015 article in
the industry website, TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/15/what-is-
devops/), Dev-ops engineers perform both coding tasks (referred to as “develop-
ment” tasks) and operational infrastructure tasks such as server provisioning
(activating or making a server system available). Their work involves communi-
cating between software engineers and information technology (IT) professionals
and may include automating the process of software delivery and making infra-
structure changes.
12. Front-end engineers tend to work on a consumer-facing side of a software
product or website, whereas back-end engineers tend to work on the “server-side”
of that product or website. Work functions of back-end engineers can include man-
aging security and ensuring that databases are functioning to properly load content.
13. This administrative assistant was the only black person at Tasha’s com-
pany.
14. All of the women and men engineers we interviewed had an approximation
of this same outfit during their interview. It was nearly always jeans and a black
T-shirt, or, if weather demanded it, a dark-colored hoodie sweatshirt.
15. Pansexual, as defined by Jasmine, was about being attracted to people no
matter their gender identity, sexuality, or sex assigned at birth. She said that
unlike “queer,” a political frame that aims to challenge the homo/hetero binary
with sexual orientation, pansexual was a more inclusive concept that included
people across a spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations. As she said,
“I’ve been attracted to a lot of people, and it’s not just male or female. Some of
them have been trans.”
16. Sam’s preferred pronoun is they/them outside of work. However, since this
article is concerned with experiences in the workplace, we refer to her as she.
17. Security engineering includes a wide variety of roles involving the security
of software or IT systems.
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Lauren Alfrey is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of
Portland. Her research and teaching focuses upon social inequality, racial
and ethnic identity in white collar-work and sociology of the family. Her
dissertation examined how white middle-class professionals negotiated
unemployment, economic uncertainty and status in two suburban neighbor-
hoods. She is the co-author, with France Winddance Twine, of the forth-
coming book Geek girls: Race, gender, and sexuality in the tech industry.
France Winddance Twine is a professor of Sociology and Black Studies at
the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses upon the
intersections of race, class, gender and nationality as well as comparative
racial studies, critical race theory, assisted reproductive technologies,
qualitative research methods, and Black Europe. Her most recent books
include Outsourcing the womb: Race, class and gestational surrogacy in a
global market (2015), Geographies of privilege (2013) and A White side of
Black Britain: Interracial intimacy and racial literacy (2010).