Cracking the Bro Code

Labor and Technology

Winifred Poster, series editor

Madison Van Oort, Worn Out: How Retailers Surveil and Exploit Workers in the Digital Age and How Workers Are Fighting Back

Sofya Aptekar, The Green Card Soldier: Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat

Margaret Jack, Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology

Coleen Carrigan, Cracking the Bro Code

CRACKING THE BRO CODE

COLEEN CARRIGAN

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This work is subject to a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carrigan, Coleen, author.

Title: Cracking the bro code / Coleen Carrigan.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2024] | Series: Labor and technology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023028854 (print) | LCCN 2023028855 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262547055 (paperback) | ISBN 9780262377164 (epub) | ISBN 9780262377157 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Women computer industry employees—United States. | Sexual harassment of women—United States. | Sex discrimination against women—United States. | Male domination (Social structure)—United States.

Classification: LCC HD6073.C65222 U533 2023 (print) | LCC HD6073.C65222 (ebook) | DDC 331.4/80040973—dc23/eng/20230817

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023028854

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023028855

d_r0

For my grandparents Dorothea and John Moran

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: A VISIT TO THE VERSAILLES OF SILICON VALLEY

INTRODUCTION

1 GENDERED LABOR IN COMPUTING

2 WHY CARE ABOUT SEXISM IN STEM?

3 CONTRADICTIONS OF CARE: ALTRUISTIC ASPIRATIONS AND REPRODUCTIVE POLITICS IN COMPUTING

4 TECHNICALLY, YOU’RE DIFFERENT, AND DIFFERENT ISN’T FREE

5 WOMEN MAKING CULTURE: PROFILES OF PERSISTENCE IN COMPUTING

6 TRANSFORMING THE COMPUTING WORKFORCE AND THE SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE OF ITS LABOR VALUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

APPENDIX: ORGANIZATIONS COLLECTIVIZING FOR EQUITY AND JUSTICE IN COMPUTING

REFERENCES

INDEX

PROLOGUE: A VISIT TO THE VERSAILLES OF SILICON VALLEY

The shuttle drops me off in a large courtyard. Dotting the walkways are nine sculptures; three are busts of women, including oceanographer Sylvia Earle. I take a moment to walk through a beautiful garden with flowers and edible plants. Next to the garden is a brightly lit cafeteria offering a smorgasbord of fruits, vegetables, and grains. I stop in my tracks at the sight of a life-sized skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex that is being set upon by flamingos. Dozens of bikes painted in primary colors are lined up outside the building. Much like polytechnic universities such as MIT, buildings are assigned numbers instead of names. Upon entering No. 43, I am greeted by a troupe of corporate representatives in bright blue golf shirts. They check my identification, direct me to wear a badge, and head upstairs. Looming above the stairs hangs a huge replica of a space shuttle with Paul Allen’s name inscribed on it. Colorful, comfortable couches are around every corner. I pass by outdoor patios adorned with plants and more sculptures and kitchens stocked with espresso machines, fruit, and candy. Individuals are hard at work on their laptops.

Everywhere I turn there is a No Visitors sign in bright red. Security guards in the same bright blue shirts stand closely together in a wide-legged stance, forming a perimeter around the conference room. Their presence restricts my movement so that I cannot walk more than 10 feet without being asked: Can I help you find something? At first, I feel conspicuous as an outsider and disconcerted at being so closely watched and surveilled. But then I remember I am here to do the same. I ask one of the guards, Terrance, what he and the other guards are doing. He says their job is to help to guide visitors and treat medical accidents. Apparently, lots of people fall off the communal bikes that the employer provides to help expedite trips across the large headquarters. I smile and say Okay. Why security guards and not medics? He shrugs and says, I’m just doing this gig until I graduate from school and enter law enforcement.

Men roam the halls in packs, wearing jeans, hooded sweatshirts, and t-shirts and carrying MacBooks. During this long first day of the conference, I see more male security guards than women employees. I speak with two of the women I see working here, both from human resources. Through closed glass doors, I see three meetings with over 15 people in each one and not a single woman!

At the end of the day, on a different floor, I search for a bathroom and observe a fourth meeting. One woman is present among nine men.

I see a woman running frantically through a hallway. She looks at me anxiously. Here is another woman … I smile. She replies by shaking her head and mumbling: Meetings, meetings, meetings. Then I find myself lost. The air has shifted, buzzing with energy. People are working closely in groups and individually. Whiteboards are covered in a programming language foreign to me. A poster of Napoleon Dynamite is trimmed in red tinsel. Cubicles are packed, and the conference rooms and offices are small and transparent. The space is dense with people and offers little privacy. I am out of my element and getting more lost, so I retrace my steps. Once more on secure footing, I realize I have accidentally wandered past a No Visitors sign.

I discover a few private phone rooms within the visitors area, and I use one of them for some moments unobserved (or so I hoped) to check in with colleagues at my university. In the bathroom, the toilet seats are heated and the tampons are free. In every stall, there is a laminated poster with tips on how to code more efficiently. Each stall proffers different coding tips. Apparently, this place wants every moment of your free time.

Later, as I wait outside for my hotel shuttle to take me back to my accommodations, I peer inside building No. 34. An entire wall of the first floor, at least 2,000 square feet, is a large screen, lit up by the corporation’s name bouncing across the room—a screensaver to fill a room. With my nose pressed up against the glass, I see in the middle of the room a stairwell that is also lit with screens. There are also screens on each stair’s riser, illuminated with the names of cities where the corporation’s offices are located. I am incredulous at the sight—the screens have taken over the room. My shuttle arrives to take me back to my hotel, and I climb onboard in a daze, overwhelmed by the culture at the Versailles of Silicon Valley.

This book is an ethnography of women knowledge workers in sites of computer science and engineering, fields that focus on the design and building of computer systems. In these pages, I share the stories of technologists in US computing workspaces that confer preferential treatment to men from dominant racial groups. Such favor in these lucrative, prestigious jobs has societal impacts that need further investigation. These technologists and their stories help us to understand how this occupational injustice is a danger not only to disenfranchised workers but to broader society as well. I examine the intellectual challenge that women face navigating and persisting in computing culture, despite the contradictions between their lived experiences and the performative philanthropic heroism performed by their bosses, who are prominent computing figures. I argue that technologists have the potential to provide leadership critical to ameliorating these harms.

Sexism stubbornly persists in computing culture, as does technocracy, a dogmatic belief that computer technology is always needed and always munificent. The cultural means by which these problems entwine and fortify one another in computing is the crux of this book’s inquiry. I am especially curious because other scientific fields have been yielding to broader social movements for justice and public criticisms of computational machinery are proliferating these days. What is special about computing culture that makes it seemingly impervious to desegregation? By spotlighting this potent combination of sexism and technocracy, we can learn how digital bosses have come to operate in our society imperiously, dodging taxes and oversight with impunity, and how some programmers who look like them, serving at their right hands, are enchanted with a sense of divine right. In the context of the powerful influence of computers, we may also do some divination of our own and speculate on how the cultural mechanisms sustaining sexism and technocracy in computing workspaces affect society.

Technological acumen in this cyber era is a form of social power, and yet access to acquiring such acumen is reserved for a select few. My field memo in the beginning of this Prologue describes the context in which computing labor takes place, exhibiting themes significant to this book, including gender, surveillance, privacy, labor practices, and wealth. The rest of this book will explore relations of power inside these citadels. A highly segregated workforce produces computing knowledge and products. How and why this segregation happens in computing workplaces is important to understanding regressive politics in the context of computing labor, artifacts, and the digital economy. High technology’s dependence on sexist culture calls into question the socially revolutionary narrative promoted by the computing industry. Further, it also challenges us to think about the costs of society’s growing dependence on computers and the consequences of trusting those who own the means of their production and their vision for the future of humanity.

In this book, I bring together feminist anthropology, feminist science and technology studies (STS), and Marxist feminism to frame how a fusion of reproductive, economic, and knowledge politics shape and are shaped by computer technology. I draw on two years of ethnographic research with cisgender and transgender women who persist in computer science organizations at all stages of a technical career. Cracking the Bro Code is in chorus with other scholars who are working to foment the social and intellectual movement to transform barriers to women’s opportunities in computing—which, I hope, may also have a salubrious effect on the kinds of technology that are developed and adopted.

INTRODUCTION

I dropped out of Big Tech. It was more than I could bear—a potent mix of sexism and harassment that corroded my health. Now, I work to understand how women and nonbinary people persist in computing to contribute their labor and hard-won expertise to one of the most influential fields on the planet. While I am concerned with justice in all science and technology fields, sexism in computing workspaces has proved most difficult to ameliorate, even though successful efforts for transformational change in this occupation would have wide impacts. One of my inspirations for leadership in this regard is Dr. Maria Klawe, former president of Harvey Mudd College. Klawe gave a distinguished lecture at the University of Washington in which she shared how she participated in a 2012 White House Forum on Women in the Economy. She was discussing gender politics in science with Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, and believed a finer point needed to be made about calls to action. As Klawe tells it (Klawe 2012; Obama 2012), she said, ‘Valerie, you’ve got it wrong. We need more women in engineering and computer science, not in STEM fields. That’s just the wrong message.’ And she argued with me and I argued back. And then President Obama came in to address us, and I was so happy because he said, ‘We need more women in STEM fields. Especially in engineering and computer science where they’re really needed.’ And I’m going, ‘Yay!’

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is too broad an aggregate these days, since many other STEM fields are having some success with representational parity. Big Tech companies now admit they need to hire and welcome more technologists of color and women. Feminist activism like the #MeToo movement has galvanized public support for combating gender violence, and predators in computer science and engineering are under more scrutiny. Similar to President Obama, who welcomed senior women’s expertise on complex scientific problems, some men in leadership positions are helping to advance the cause of justice in the computing labor force.

Has, however, #MeToo ended sexism and harassment in computing education and workplaces or, at least, significantly curbed it? My students’ experiences and my own in recent years leave me doubtful. Every year, I teach an introductory course in cultural anthropology in which I assign mini-ethnographic projects on culture at our university. The good news is that white students and male students care about acts of racism and sexism and their systemic outcomes. The bad news is that, year after year, this assignment yields much evidence that opportunities are being denied to people who have faced steep barriers to technical education. Worse, while navigating these institutions, scholars of color, queer scholars, and women scholars are being harmed by bias, discrimination, and harassment.

The people you will meet in this ethnography also confirm that computer science and engineering has a serious cultural problem. From senior leaders in the field to undergraduates navigating their first year of college, the participants in this book’s study will tell you how sexism and harassment manifest in computing through values, norms, behaviors, evaluations, and policies. While other STEM fields are making strides in recruiting, retaining, and respecting women workers, computing fails, year after year, to do so.

Just before the COVID pandemic and many years after leaving high-tech to pursue anthropology, I attended a professional dinner in honor of a renowned scholar who is doing cutting-edge work on ethics in computational machinery. The rock star guest and I were the only people at the table who were neither cisgender men nor in the fields of computing or philosophy. A sixth man joined late and sat next to me. I knew he was in computing but we had not yet met. Hi, I’m Dick, he said, introducing himself. You must be Jason’s wife. Hi, I’m Coleen, I responded. I am a faculty member. An awkward silence descended on the table. Dick stammered an apology as I rearranged my silverware. You were sitting next to Jason, so I assumed you were his wife. Yes, because I am married to everyone I sit next to, I responded with a smile. Nervous laughter broke the tension.

Early in my career in Big Tech, at a company I will heretofore refer to as Colossus, I would not have had the experience or confidence to respond to a peer’s sexism like this. Now that I have benefited from hearing similar stories from hundreds of other women and nonbinary technologists, this incident did not affect my confidence or my sense of belonging. It confirmed however, that there is still a pressing need to transform a culture that keeps technologists from imagining their women peers in roles other than those traditionally associated with providing goods and caring labor, like secretary, sex object, or wife.

Dick is not a bad apple. He is an adherent of the Bro Code, a cultural problem (not an individual one) in a field that flounders in efforts to welcome a critical mass of women (as opposed to mere tokenism) to ameliorate sexist divisions of labor in traditionally male-dominated fields (Carrigan, Quinn, and Riskin 2011). Anthropologists study the powerful process of enculturation, and here, I hold up to scrutiny a particular culture with much power to justify and enforce its values and worldview. The reach of computing science and engineering is vast and its coffers deep, which affords the field significant means by which to succeed in its bid for self-regulation and claim to know what is best for all of humanity, both present and future. I want to inoculate my students from the harms of the Bro Code. I want to repay my research participants’ generosity by amplifying efforts to hold technological organizations accountable for fair and just workplaces. First, I must convince you, esteemed reader, to see the Bro Code as your problem, too. It everyone’s problem—together, let’s crack it.

1 GENDERED LABOR IN COMPUTING

The #MeToo movement, feminist activism with strong public support to end gender violence, has positioned us at a critical juncture in research on broadening participation in computing. We must better understand why, when it comes to access, some science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (e.g., biology) are examples of gender parity while other disciplines—computer science and engineering, for example—remain stubbornly segregated (Cheryan et al. 2017; Gibbons 2009; Wajcman 2009). While others argue that the answer lies in women’s lack of experience, self-efficacy, and comfort with computing culture, I contend that computing culture reinforces gender violence. Not only are individual women harmed in computing workplaces through a combination of bias, discrimination, and harassment but the failure to rectify the occupational segregation in the field undermines feminists’ efforts to increase women’s earning capacities, access to power, and our political and bodily sovereignty in broader culture. Further, due to a combination of massive wealth accumulation and masterful branding that suggests a cosmological power to which it is in our best interests to submit, computing workplaces are bathed in a halo of exceptionalism and thus shielded from regulation and inoculated from ill-repute more than other fields.

Gender in the world of computing is an advantageous standpoint from which to demystify the power of this technology and its owners and outputs. My feminist ethnography unearthed several core values driving culture in computing production, including precision, abstraction, aggression, a love of machines, and a disdain for behaviors or ideas that may threaten the marriage between masculinity and technical competency. I call these values and the ways they are policed in technological work the Bro Code, and I use the term to refer to the performance and norms of gender enacted by straight cisgender men from dominant racial groups in computing organizations and values that privilege masculinist identities, instrumental rationality, and binary thinking. It is influenced by norms in broader society governing technology, race, and gender and also exports its values to help shape society. It’s the secret to why computing remains stubbornly sexist and uneven in its distribution of opportunity, resources, and regard.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BRO CODE

Why is bro culture in the computing industry particularly important to study? I am often asked, What about white men’s shitty behavior in finance, for example? My answer is threefold. First, every company wants to be a tech company (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 8). JPMorgan employs more software engineers than most Big Tech corporations, blurring the boundaries between the finance sector of the economy and computing domains (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020). Given how the solvency of many industries now rely on algorithmic infrastructure, the Bro Code permeates many other influential fields beyond the major Big Tech corporations, and thus cracking it will have wide impact.

Second, computer technology companies tolerate discrimination and harassment more than non-tech companies (Scott, Klein, and Onovakpuri 2017). Women of color in technical fields experience the greatest amount of mistreatment, including being blocked from advancing into leadership and targeted by sexual harassment and stereotyping (National Academies 2022). In this way, the Bro Code impedes racial justice and the accumulation of generational wealth in communities of color.

Finally, since technical skills are in demand in many arenas in the US economy, denying women the opportunity to develop and perfect the skills required for leadership in the twenty-first century stands to roll back decades of progress toward a more just, egalitarian society.

Computing is a field that floods the market with unregulated commodities with seismic social impacts. This is why, in addition to studying technological things and their social impact, the conditions under which computing artifacts are made are important to examine, too. Who produces computing knowledge affects what is made and toward what ends it is used. Workplace values become encoded in computing commodities. Given the vast domains on which computers have influence, their reach makes the Bro Code a problem of global proportions. Along with digital artifacts and infrastructures, the Bro Code may be considered another significant output of computing, one of the factors contributing to extreme disparities of wealth and opportunities in the US, especially along vectors of gender and race.

In the 1940s and 1950s, women made up the ranks of computer programmers, a fact that has been erased or downplayed in computing lore (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020; Abbate 2012; Hicks 2017; Ensmenger 2010b). Once the level of intellectual demand and skill required for this labor were recognized, software programming, like other scientific fields, followed a pattern that devalued women’s contributions as the discipline