The Moral Bankruptcy of “Tech Feminism”

Tech feminism has been a destructive force for a long time now, both in our industry and outside of it, yet another formation of feminism that has been turned into a tool and shield for power. As we head into the web3 bubble, it’s time to contend with the influence of women in tech over the past 10 years, the phenomenon of “tech feminism” and where it has gotten us, and where we stand today.

We can start by looking at the fundamental mission behind the “tech feminism” movement, which has always been, very simply, and no more, than to get more women into the technology industry (mainly white women, of course). This is “feminism”, so it goes, because it represents economic justice, because it extends to women the financial benefits of technology; it gives them more say and input “from the inside” that would lead to better and less harmful technologies. That was the theory.

The assumption I, and a number of other people, made when the last bubble started, was that we would get enough women with a leftist/radical praxis into the industry, and we would gain enough power over the technology industry to address the rest of its fallout and to fundamentally transform it. I envisioned the establishment of industry ethics courts, I envisioned programs of banishment of sexual abusers, I envisioned most of the leaders of venture capitalist getting removed, the bad actors rounded up and kicked out; I envisioned general strikes (at one point there was an effort to gather a general strike, but that was met with zero enthusiasm); I envisioned us interrupting the gentrification of the cities and distributing tech wealth back to users; imagined setting up a technology ecosystem that wasn’t supported by venture capitalists… 

What in the fuck was I thinking lmfao.  

Not only — ten years later —, has the number of women in tech not changed at all, but we haven’t seen any significant and consistent gains for the users of our technologies, or for the communities that tech impacts so negatively, the promised result of the movement. Social media platforms are more harmful to girls and women than ever before, gentrification of cities is ramping up at record speed globally, surveillance gets worse and worse by the day, the fusion of tech and military/weapons accelerates constantly. So the net result, after 10+ years of nonstop pushing the women in tech agenda, is that we have made zero progress. 

We can look to women in tech in history and contemporaneously to get some sense of where the construct of a “tech feminism” has come from and its context. In contemporary tech culture, we have Sheryl Sandberg — an integral part of creating Meta, by far the biggest surveillance system in history, whose platforms depends precisely on damage to users, especially teen girls, and whose presence in the Bay Area has been totally toxic as tens of thousands of rich techies have been pumped out of it and into the surrounding areas. So in Sheryl, who codified her “feminism” as Lean In, we see a white woman for whom the metrics for success lie entirely in success within a male-controlled environment; she has the system’s goals and ends, she would just like to, personally, become rich in it. 

Another significant woman in tech who has become a widely celebrated symbol, is of course Grace Hopper. Now what is rarely looked at about Grace Hopper is that she was a die-hard military personnel, and tied to multiple mass death events — she is personally credited with providing essential computation to… 

the atomic bomb, the most shameful legacy of our field. 

The fact that two of the very few icons of women in technology have both perpetuated incalculable evil, isn’t a coincidence. Hopper killed people, and Sheryl has too, committing MANY grievous human rights abuses, including collaboration with genocide, mass colonial surveillance, causing suicide in youth, and inflicting mental illnesses like eating disorders on girls all over the world. Instagram and Facebook are digital weapons companies, and the seat Sheryl took on the rocket ship was “war criminal”.

With these two animals as the face of the movement, we can see that what produces women like them is a hollow movement whose only benchmarks lay in the career trajectories of individual women and transformation of women into tools of technology power. Women in tech is a moral vacuum of a movement, where the only measure of impact is on the % presence of women in corporations. In the language of tech feminism, even if you work at one of the worst companies on the planet, you’re doing the right thing, because you are a woman in tech and you are “changing the face of the industry”. In the focus on women in leadership roles, on women as venture capitalists, on salary and stock packages, the idea of tech feminism has been purely limited to individual advantage and ascension to the most dangerous and culpable heights of our industry. This was a criticism leveraged early and often, but it wasn’t enough to penetrate the tidal wave of careerism and individualism backed by the full power of the industry’s propaganda machine. 

See, tech learned pretty early that this was something they could control and manage, unlike competing agendas such as wealth redistribution from venture capitalists, the return of gentrified land to residents, and stopping tech from arming cops and the military. Women in tech is THE focus of “justice” in tech for a reason: it absorbs all other conceptions of tech resistance like gentrification, anti-surveillance, teen health, ableism, anti-war. Though there was momentum in some of these areas, women in tech took 1000x the time, energy and money that went into these other platforms, which, it was implied, were going to just materialize once we got more girls into Javascript gigs.  

 Women in tech became the solution for every criticism of tech — we’ll just get more women into tech and they will solve it. Depoliticized, immaterial to justice, “women in tech” has given these companies excellent hedge against more radical conceptions of resistance. 

Women in tech quickly become a way to launder the reputations of tech companies after sustaining any of a number of PR issues arriving from very serious infractions. When a whistleblower came out about sexual abuse and harassment, Github’s image rehabilitation involved the creation of some kind of DEI department, and began hiring up ALL KINDS of activists in the community. There were, and have always been, very few people, actually doing committed, intersectional, confrontational work in tech at that time, who were willing to stand up publicly to tech, and to take a material position that was at least on the path to a conclusion that tech was systemically broken to the point that all significant parts of it would have to be reclaimed by the people in order to get anywhere. Sure, there’s plenty of people who level a criticism at the tech industry now and then, but I’m talking about people taking a consistent position of resistance and attempting to organize in opposition or outside of the power, money and control of the industry.

 I would say that pool was TOPS 150 people in around 2014, which was a year of extremely high activity around tech justice. Github alone hired up at least 15 solid activists from that pool. That ALONE was a giant hit to the movement; removing a full 10% of them and placing all of their activism in a corporate environment. Every other major company in the Valley followed suit, started hiring up anyone critiquing tech the second those individuals got any kind of momentum. To a person. 

Today, almost zero of the people I knew are doing ANY kind of work that could be described as material, important or even relevant to tech — but a lot of them sure do have fancy jobs! No alternate movement has risen; everything is folded back into the women in tech umbrella. 

No one stopped to think that maybe “changing it from the inside” was THEIR agenda, not ours; it is outside provocation that could swell to a broad based movement that would threaten them. Not an internal movement, that would naturally follow the needs of the company and the venture capitalist structure.

The thing is, it wasn’t *US* who was coming up with the “change things from the inside” agenda, it was *companies* who were dictating that agenda. Of COURSE they wanted all of this energy to be contained in one of their hell-pods of a company. They were proactively reaching out to activist upon activist and offered them lavish job offers and highly visible roles, often in newly created teams and departments like diversity and inclusion. Dozens of political leaders in women in tech, who at least appeared to have a strong ethics, were soon funneling into FAANG companies —  where of course their jobs were to do the bare minimum needed to rehab the image of the company. This quickly sowed division in the community because activists could not be trusted after they took these jobs, and in many instances, even betrayed other women who were victims of those companies by then signing on to help launder their reputations. These jobs were often created by a high-profile company needing to save face, and also resulted in us losing tons and tons of our activist energy right into the machine. It additionally created a dynamic wherein people on the “outside” of big tech were agitating, and that created jobs for OTHER PEOPLE, moderate activists, ones with employable opinions, who then did not turn around and pass any of their gains back. 

We ended up in the preposterous situation where women in tech, who had BUILT THEIR PLATFORM on the concept of gender justice in technology, would go totally bananas if you suggested to them that they shouldn’t work at x, y, z evil company, which was a known and proven bad actor, guilty of the most serious crimes of our industry. Suddenly it’s “oh, you don’t you want women to build generational wealth, that’s misogyny too” and “you can’t change the system if you don’t participate in it” and “this is about pay equality, too” — scornfully, always. After all, they had ascended from such petty squabbles and onto the lower rungs of tech elite. It was anathema to say that women in tech should have a SINGULAR moral scruple about what they are making their money on. Again, being there was the activism in itself; being part of the beast was the mission itself. 

That was the exact moment that even beyond representation, MONEY became the base and measure of ethics for women in tech, and was proposed to be SOLVING a wage gap when in reality, it just contributed to the huge, artificial and exploited wage gap that was playing out more broadly in tech centers. Having more women getting paid 10x+ what other women are, working FOR THE SAME COMPANIES, but in different and often contracted positions such as security, culinary, building management, transportation, etc.; some women making 10x-100x+ than other women , shouldn’t be “feminism.” Women in tech as a category are distinguished by the fact that its immediate and first result is simply creating more economic disparity— between WOMEN. And it has been mainly white women who have benefitted.

Amist a backdrop of increasing local and global backlash to technology and its increasingly catastrophic effects, companies have been able to do all kinds of PR games with women in tech to make it look like they are doing something about the inequality. Actually shifting the industry to be gender-equitable would require a massive redistribution of tech wealth and involve trillions of dollars; but creating a whole public relationships song and dance is cheap. It was trivial for them to sponsor some conferences, to host women in tech meetings at the offices, to donate money to the rapidly growing number of women-in-tech non profits. The circus of non-profits and conferences and coding schools never ended. All on the tech-industry teat — we never got anywhere near a movement that was actually financially self-sustainable. Early efforts to fund work through early Patreon-like companies, were successful at first, but still were generating very small amounts of money compared to what we were facing, and certainly not enough to create any kind of meaningful, community-funded ecosystem except on the smallest and most temporary scale. There is no reason that this had to be the case — tech workers make plenty of money to support a thriving, independent ecosystem that can be funded outside of the corporate system — but that’s not what they want. 

And of course, the tidal wave of media coverage by VC-owned publications; while “women in tech” dominated the headlines, all kinds of other stories about what tech was up to flew under the radar. By now, I guarantee you almost everyone in the fucking world is aware that women are under-represented in tech; and certainly people know within our industry, to a detail, and yet, the awareness campaigns are never ending. They get to just do the same thing, over and over, in perpetuity. To claim again and again the awareness is the key issue, even once it is clear that awareness has been achieved. This is just another part of the industry’s fake progress, where an elaborate smoke show conceals the operator.  

Because “changing things from the inside” was pioneered and executed on corporate terms, getting women in tech was not a coordinated and deliberant attempt by the community to, for example, get strongholds in certain companies for the purposes of sabotage or sea change in the power centers, to gain information about what was really happening in these companies, to stop key initiatives in specific sectors, or because the movement needed money, badly, and these women were going to be contributing significant amounts of money back into the community, whose hard work and activism had GIVEN them that job opening. But no, there was no goal at all in this “changing things from the inside”, no democratic or material goal, just the abstract notion that women would make things better. Perhaps the only plausible agenda was to get women into hiring positions so they could get even more women into the company. Of course, even the promised increase of women in tech, the entire premise of the movement, failed utterly: the amount of women in tech has remained unchanged since pre-2012. Yet you don’t see any mass outpouring or dramatic escalation or change of efforts in response to this; none of the “women in tech” even care about “women in tech”. 

Even when it was clear they would do absolutely nothing more with their positions than guzzle money and sit for awareness campaigns, we did not put outside pressure on tech feminists, once they got in, to secure the results that we were hoping for. What we needed was a sea change created by women all over the industry working together to disrupt the status quo at companies and directly taking on power there; what we got is women who just kept ladder-climbing, barely giving anything back to the movement and in fact spitting on the women whose resistance had helped get them in. These women had signed up to be shields for these companies, billboards of progress and a new era, while doing absolutely nothing to further the cause. With their tech-granted new platforms, these sell-outs became dominant figures in the movement and shut down everyone else and any other conception of tech feminism. It’s actually been very sad, very ugly. 

With the way the “women in tech” ecosystem was all set up, the agendas that came up “on top” were all the tamest, watered-down, uncritical versions of tech feminism; after all, its not like tech companies would sponsor and give money to things that were a threat to them. And it wasn’t just tech — from the inception of a tech feminism, the weapons industry, the federal government and the intelligence apparatus have all been massively involved as well. Again: Women in tech is THE moral good, superseding in importance *checks notes* companies that kill children in genocidal and colonial wars. The Grace Hopper Conference is the largest event for women in tech, and each and every year it takes sponsorship from the absolute worst companies on the fucking planet. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Palantir, all of FAANG, the US Govt’s CTO office, Wall Street, venture capital offices, the motherfucking CIA — a more disgusting, despicable gathering of mass death and mass human rights abusers can hardly be imagined, and that is what has now descended on every single thing in women in tech that moves. 

Because women in tech is their cover for war crimes. 

That means little girls, too: Girls Who Code, who works with girls as young as middle school, recently took on Raytheon as a sponsor. Which is child abuse.  These are mass death companies and they are being given total control over the pipeline into the industry; small attempts to extricate these companies from computer science schools have popped up now and again, but compared to the ongoing level of escalation of war in tech, it doesn’t even make a scratch. 

Indeed, flattening everything into “women in tech” has been a pretty big godsend for venture capitalists, who are currently 10x-ing their investments in weapons companies and actually building out an entire, functional, autonomous military. This, because of its capacity for mass death, should be prioritized over getting white girls six figure jobs + stock writing Javascript at Amazon. But no one even cares or says anything about the extreme escalation in militarization. There has been no backlash from “women in tech” about it, and no formation of a woman-led anti-war movement in tech. No matter what happens, everyone still thinks that the #1 problem in tech is that there aren’t enough women in it, when really, we are long past the point where the focus on tech workers makes any sense, except so far as standing in resistance to them as a class, as they are materially, by their own choice, in exchange for large sums of money, helping the largest and most dangerous companies in the world function with their own direct labor. 

Women in tech is now the most advanced corporate-maintained artificial “feminist” ecosystem in the world, that is kept alive exclusively by streams of tech money, that relies solely on the industry’s power, and whose messages and goals are dictated by the industry. Now, “women in tech” and “tech feminism” are just people’s jobs, how they get funding for their products, it’s how they get famous in our industry, or start a non-profit, or get into a VC round. It’s not resistance. It’s the opposite. It has been used specifically, strategically as a cover-up for war crimes and human rights abuses time and time again, to launder the reputations of perpetrators and their workers. And women in tech has meant women war criminals, women human rights abusers, women surveillance criminals, women financial criminals… 

Great. 

 What has happened to “women in tech” is part of the process of movement crushing that has been used broadly elsewhere by tech; it was their testing ground for how to absorb, with minimal interruption, any possible threats to the tech super structure. Tech feminists are now actively movement wreckers themselves. Their white, de-politicized, corporate-approved agenda is driving the current discourse in the industry. Alternative frameworks are shot down immediately, and tech feminists can wield a lot of control of things like the reputation of others they are sparring with online over ethics. In many ways, they are the new model of what a feminist is — some kind of weapons-grade, Lean-In, corporate drone, who works at a weapons company killing just as many people as the white men at the top while defending it from crazy bitches who would take it all. They exist in large masses, they work for terrible companies, they have a shared interest in careerism, they also hold more political and financial sway than any other bloc of feminists in America due to their access to financial privilege and how close they are to tech, one of the largest global power centers. They are able to operate in sophisticated ways with other parts of the feminist movement, I.e., issues about abortion rights, #MeToo, etc. Their platform, given to them by tech, and the wealth gap they’ve achieved, also from tech, makes it possible for them to have a disproportionate impact in these areas. Which is a problem, when women in tech (again, primarily white) are now consistently just sell-outs, cowards, money-hungry, sociopaths, and greedy narcissists just as lacking in ethics as the white men next to them. 

Tech feminism, women in tech, has been a morally bankrupt movement, and it is also the model on which tech developed its movement crushing strategies. There WAS another vision of what tech feminism could look like.The women in tech movement should have produced an extremely diverse, divergent, spectacular realm of new possibility and interesting new formations and forms of resistance. 

Instead what it has produced is legions of non-profits whose sole focus is the same strategies that we know don’t work. Even though we’ve know for years that the problem with representation in the industry was NOT the pipeline, this continues to be a huge theme of the movement. Diversity training of one form or another, despite being proven to actually make white men MORE hostile to women in the office, is a dominant component of the work. Something that had the potential to be a really broad tech feminist movement, was flattened into two or three agenda items.. We have conferences and articles and books and panels and pipeline programming, but we don’t have strikes, there is no union activity in the technology worker class that has any teeth in it, we don’t have massive wealth redistribution back to poor women and communities impacted by tech, we don’t have a significantly organized movement body that is working to drive shared agendas, we don’t have an anti-hate group response team that is working non-stop to identify threats to women online and neutralize them. We don’t have an independent press, we have no independent fundings for any kind of free ecosystem. We have nothing. We worse than lost; we got turned into the enemy we wished to defeat. We haven’t produced even a minor improvement in the actual representation of women in the technology field. In fact, we’ve trended just very slightly down. 

But that was never the point of women in tech, was it? No. It was just to become another tool, another formation, another fake politic that the industry uses to continually get away with the grossest of war crimes and human rights abuses. And its still going on today. The noise about women in tech is revving up again at the exact moment a16z is dramatically rolling out its new hyper nationalist military and political platform, American Dynamism, creating an extreme escalation in gentrification, in surveillance, in weapons production, in war-mongering, in extremist right-wing politics… 

But what do you still hear the most about? 

Women in tech. 

It’s almost like -they- came up with this.