Technical women and women-in-tech
After my last post and the reaction to it, I got to thinking about tech's misogyny problem, and it's a strange kind of thing. The tech industry is and will likely remain misogynistic: women are comprehensively excluded from senior or technical roles, relentlessly abused and have serious trouble making headway in tech careers. However, there's also a massive amount of writing and literature that gets put out about how the same companies are doing wonderful things with women in tech, and we regularly see profiles of women tech leaders be given pride of place in industry literature and suchlike. I've been trying to resolve this contradiction in my head for a while, and I think I've finally reached a conclusion: the way that much misogyny in tech operates is by creating a category of women-in-tech that's distinct from technical women or women who have technical skills in the wider sense, and in fact has very little overlap with it.
Women-in-tech as a phenomenon exist primarily to be a target for abuse in half-a-hundred little ways. Whether we're drawn in to make a fundamentally sexist environment look accepting to gain clout for companies that don't deserve it, to take responsibility for the faults of men that can't possibly be held accountable for anything, or simply to be used as a combination punching bag/sex object by men in the workplace, we exist to suffer in place of those (largely white, overwhelmingly male) whom the tech industry is actually built for.
