Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Drawing on interviews with 45 tech workers and analysis of US workforce data from the 2007-2016 American Community Survey, this presentation offers a new, intersectionally grounded and organizationally aware understanding of why federal and corporate efforts to improve women’s representation in computing work have met with limited success. Despite government and tech companies investing substantially to increase gender diversity in tech work, women’s representation has decreased from a peak reached around 1990. Most initiatives to increase women’s representation target a lack of family friendly work practices, a hostile environment where women find their competence in and commitment to their work questioned, and a lack of senior women to serve as mentors. While such initiatives are beneficial they do not address the root of why women’s representation has decreased. There is little reason to think that climate for women in tech was markedly better in the 1990s before these initiatives began. The tech industry grew dramatically after 1990 but the number of women remained relatively stable. Stagnant numbers in a growing field mean that the field became more gender segregated over this period. The number of US-born tech workers, men or women, changed relatively little. Instead, the workers who fueled growth were immigrant workers who have considerably less power to negotiate for benefits and working conditions.

The tech field is moving towards more globally distributed and team-based work processes and a growing reliance on “flexible” workers, many of whom are immigrant men on H-1B visas. These structural shifts have at least two sets of consequences for women’s representation that current gender-based interventions do not address. First, the increase in distributed and team-based work has meant increasing needs for managers to communicate with teams of workers, vendors, and customers who may be spread across continents. Women with technical skills are often channeled into these expanding “translational” positions. These positions offer a reprieve from the hostile environments of engineering teams, and supervisors often identify women as having “people skills” in addition to the technical skills necessary for these jobs. Transitioning to these jobs moves women out of technical teams and relieves the pressure for these teams to build more gender inclusive environments. Second, the growth of flexible work has created a subset of tech jobs where the gender inclusive initiatives simply do not apply. Migrant workers are subject to a different set of working conditions from their citizen counterparts. Moreover, if their spouses are in the US, they are most likely on dependent visas which prevent them from working and ensure that they are available for childcare and household responsibilities. Current gender inclusion initiatives do little to address the changing workforce practices that have reinforced women’s low representation. Policies that would extend family friendly work benefits to all workers regardless of their temporary or permanent status would be a useful step toward improving hostile work environments that women face.