Debugging the Industry: An Ethnography of Exclusion in the Technology Workplace
Social Sciences
Anthropology Senior Thesis
This thesis project examines the unique culture of masculinity in today’s technology workplace in order to understand the discrimination and violence against women and people of color that has been repeatedly documented in the video game industry. Based on ten ethnographic interviews with employees or former employees of major technology companies, computer science and video game development professors and college students, as well as library- and web-based research, I show that software engineers and video game developers begin to pursue the interests that lead to their future career at a very young age. Due in part to stigmatized cultural labels, such as “nerd” or “gamer” which are adopted in childhood, people who enter the field (almost exclusively white, upper class males) worry that that their new acceptance into American hegemonic masculinity via tech employment is not secure. In order to compensate for their personal fears, such employees create a workplace that is hypercompetitive, masculine, and riddled with sexism, racism, and ageism through microdiscrimination. Using several public controversies about such discrimination, particularly the “#Gamergate” debacle of 2014, I argue that we must understand this workplace culture and the role of masculinity within it to explain the well-documented attrition of women and people of color from the field.
