Women in Tech are Being Laid Off. There’s No Movement To Save You. You Cannibalized It Years Ago
These layoffs? This is just the START of the backlash to the women in tech movement.
Do you know how many people put their hearts, souls, life’s work, years of free labor, made sacrifices, lost money, burned out, got terrorized by fascists, for a decade, for longer, for longer, to make the dream of having more women in control of our technology destiny, a reality? We had magazines, conferences, tweet-ups, meetups, we had dozens and dozens of grassroots organizations, we were seeing coding schools focusing on underrepresented people spring up left and right. We all believed that if we got more women into tech, they would have power over the industry and would be able to change its future. And that was so, so important because the future of tech was not looking good for us. The present of technology was already very bad for girls and women. We had to do something.
Currently, any of the gains of this movement (peaking in 2012-2015) are being RAPIDLY reversed. A few years ago, companies stopped reporting their diversity data entirely. This was in part because a group of corporate feminists who were doing VERY well off the movement — getting prime career placements and enjoying a massive amount of media attention and fame — decided to put together a vanity project that “personally coached” startups through transforming their company demographics: the project decided to report the diversity data of its companies as an AGGREGATE, meaning those companies actually STOPPED releasing their own data. There was no more individual responsibility. Individually holding companies accountable for this data had been a strategy we had been using and forwarding, and to some degree, effectively, as a basis of organizing.
The project failed to deliver on a single of its programs a single time, outside of blatantly plagiarizing 10 years of work with very little credit for their long, long “manifesto”, which was just regurgitated talking points split across 10 different web pages about what tech companies should be doing about/for women in tech. This project which had gotten more attention (global media attention!!!) than any single other women-in-tech related coverage ever. But it had a lasting legacy: significantly lowering the transparency and accountability bar for tech companies.
Now, huge numbers of lay-offs are beginning across the entire sector, and it is being broadly reported by ex-employees, as well as specifically called out by management, that marginalized people are the first to go, and that DEI departments and DEI hires are being gutted if not completely eliminated. We know that women are often the first to go during lay-offs, and with us seeing pretty consistent levels of 10-20% layoffs, and there being slightly less than 20% women in the industry overall, we could be looking at a very significant decline in the overall number of women in tech within the next year or so. I wouldn’t be surprised if the representation of women drops in the industry by a full ten points.
Mass layoffs provide the perfect cover to get rid of women, especially when the current theme of the layoffs is “we’re getting rid of bad engineers” and we know, very definitively, that these men in general and the men who run the industry in particular, think that women are bad engineers and lesser engineers literally regardless of the actual evidence. Further, one of the justifications for the layoffs is getting rid of non-technical staff, which are thought of as “bloat”, and again, women are best represented in the non-technical roles within a company, due to a large variety of structural factors we won’t go into now.
There will also be the secondary effect which, as the economy gets worse, inflation rises, more layoffs constrain the labor pool, it won’t be financially feasible to have women who are partnered and/or parents, to stay in full time positions. This of course could be catastrophic and will likely not only undo any gains of the previous 10 years of movements, but also carve really deep into the baseline that DID exist.
As this is all perfectly set up to play out, there is barely a whimper of outrage, much less any kind of organized resistance. It is my firm belief that the leaders of the tech industry will never ever again give women the quarter that they had in the early days of the web 2.0 bubble. It was a once in a lifetime chance, we blew it.
Now I want to focus on a specific reasons WHY:
The reason why we were successfully getting women and, POINTEDLY, women who had a social justice politic of some kind, even if just liberals, into jobs in the tech industry, was for a very, very specific reason. And that reason is that people who were NOT working for venture capitalists, who were NOT working for the big tech companies, who WERE working in independent, grassroots or adjacent spaces, or in positions and roles at the very edges of the technology ecosystem (I.e. for small independent shops, as independent consultants/contractors, as community-funded critics and activists, etc.) were building and maintaining a SIGNIFICANT amount of pressure on tech elite, to make that change.
That outside pressure took a lot of effort. It took a lot of money (that tech companies were NOT paying for), it took a lot of energy, and it often involved taking on the position of being, sometimes brutally and frighteningly, harassed, stalked, it involved being paid a lot less, it required operating with a fraction of the resources that other women were, longer hours, and it was extremely thankless. This is particularly true of the efforts from movements who were NOT in tech specifically but who had a stake in what happened within it; and the activists who inevitably intersected with it — I.e. Sex workers who were working on digital payments and online platforming, prison abolitionists working on tech-built police surveillance, mental health activists working on the deleterious effects of social media apps, etc.
But we DID get people hired! We DID get people hired who were socially conscious, who were leaders, who had critical analysis, who even had an activist background, who were bringing new views and perspectives to the table. Thousands of women, many thousands: we thought: DAMN!!! She’s gonna get in there and do the right thing!
But then something went terribly wrong.
The women which the movement had given the jobs… they weren’t doing anything… BACK. It was like they stayed in the game long enough to get jobs, and then they were out. There was no “giving back” or “paying it forward” to the people who were maintaining the outside pressure. In fact, there was an almost total disowning of the people who were engaging in DIRECT confrontations with the systems of power in tech, which is what was needed to, and had, create these openings. Careerist women did not want to be seen agreeing with or talking to the other women. They were suddenly switching up their entire politics and praxis to climb the ladder, and in doing so, often publicly disowned the movement as if was some kind of pledge of fealty to tech companies. Which it was. Because they weren’t just getting hired because of us; they were getting hired as a strategy by tech itself to belittle, humble, minimize, sanitize, launder and crush the movement. And these women were happy to oblige!!
Even as we were getting women into jobs, very lucrative jobs, there wasn’t a significant increase in the flow of cash back into an INDEPENDENT movement. In theory, the women in tech movement - the ACTUAL one, not the non-profit grifters and legions of fake events, the “representation is everything” group, the corporate-bought image parade, the optics - we could have had the MOST well-monied and INDEPENDENT movement. We should have had a SIGNIFICANT ecosystem that was NOT funded by tech — which would inherently compromise its goals — but rather funded by direct transfers of wealth to the women outside of the corporate career path. And that is what we would could have had: an entire ecosystem of tech resistance, funded by us, not reliant in any way on the tech industry for money, able to organize in the most meaningful ways. Able to step in when tech empire decided to flush half of you away, buried in the layoffs.
But that did not happened. People stayed in the movement for exactly as long as it took them to get jobs, and they were out.
And that is how the pressure went away. The only way that this was going to work is if we had a virtuous tension happening between these ecosystems, where we were continuously applying huge pressure on the system, getting women jobs and money and power inside of it as a result, and then using those assets and resources and platforms to pass on to the outside ecosystem of pressure, and then we would have what we needed to keep ramping it up until we got to our goal. (Turns out we all had very different goals, note to self to check that more throughly next time around).
The virtuous cycle was breached, and it was the women who took the jobs that cut it off. And those are the same women are about to get swept away in these, extremely predictable tides. How did you think you were going to keep your jobs when there was no one at the throat of the power structure trying to get you in there? Because YOU kicked those women in the face? You think your bosses WANTED you in there? They HATE women. You thought you were special, didn’t you.
Women in tech, once they got put on by the movement, started looking at *other* women in the movement as free labor, as entitlements, as a 24/7 support hotline, as crisis management, as endless givers that you never had to support in return. I, personally, was called NUMEROUS times to handle emergency situations for women in tech — stalkers, bad press, abuse by management, bullying on the job, manage messaging, give advice on raises and salaries — but never saw any of those women put it forward. They took and when they had finished taking they went into their jobs (that we made for them) as if we didn’t even exist.
My colleague Lauren Chief Elk talks about how careerist, Lean In feminists have actually built their careers on OTHER WOMEN’S labor; they are outsourcing working like childrearing, cooking, cleaning to other women, and do NOT have a problem underpaying those workers, do NOT have a problem demanding over-work and poor working conditions, are TOTAL hypocrites when it comes to how they expect to be treated vs how they treat other women, and financially exploit these women to a significant degree. Here again, this is something that should be a virtuous circle, where women are helping EACH OTHER and MUTUALLY benefiting from their agreements. But, we see that professionalized women in tech underpay these workers, do not provide job security to these workers, do not organize to save those worker’s towns and cities from invasion, do not extend any kind of structural support that they now enjoy as a RESULT of these women’s work.
There isn’t a “Lean In” without MANY other women making it possible to get women into these highly competitive and demanding roles, where management is actively hostile to women, but is convinced to bring these women in by our other forces. And it, in retrospect, is abundantly obvious that the movement was just another thing that careerist feminists could use to forward their own ambitions. And far from just leaving other women alone and going on with their lives, they did a number of things to actually DESTROY the very things that had landed them jobs. (And now that those things aren’t there anymore, guess whose jobs are out the door?)
Women in tech who were put on by the establishment took their new found visibility, now backed by corporations, and outshone actual activists working in the field with significantly watered down “liberal” takes, more satisfactory to their bosses and the establishment. Incontent to merely GET the jobs secured for them by the movement, they also had to continue to use bastardized concepts from the broader movement and use THAT as a platform to climb yet higher on the corporate ladder. Women were getting into high visibility positions and then refusing to acknowledge a single independent activist ever again, even as they sometimes literally travelled the world giving “talks” with the same watered down stolen points, doing massive damage by funneling movement organizing points into palatable corporate packaging. There were cases of women brazenly stealing talking points and frameworks from, again, independent women in order to have something to say at their new speaking gigs, but not giving any credit AND diluting and distorting the work to make it, yes, respectable. Respectability politics played a very heavy role in this. For many women, this was literally a way for them to build a brand, one palatable or useful to the industry as a hedge against “the bad feminists”. They cannibalized the very movement that made them, and even after getting jobs, used it to forward causes like higher salaries for them (surprise!!!), leadership roles for them, etc. They continued to USE the movement for personal gain, in a pattern we actually saw across the movement more broadly in other movements. Everything that we put out could be turned into a tool for individual advancement.
Corporate women sometimes even actively discredited women with more radical stances (the stances that were getting them hired), in public, in order to impress their bosses and play the “I’m one of the good ones” game, for clout and praise and promotions and support. Something I saw often is that I would make a shot at the overall power structure of the industry, and some careerist “woman in tech” would immediately intercept and derail, serving as an actual shield for their bosses. Again, it wasn’t even enough to take the job, give nothing back, and just build your merry way up; nope, you had to CONTINUE to use the movement however you could, profiting at all angles and all opportunities for the (rapidly lingering) tension between the movement and the people writing your check.
And I can’t emphasize enough how these women absolutely refused to meaningfully distribute wealth outside the respectable non-profit industrial complex and how that absolutely destroyed the tech justice movement broadly. We were literally getting people jobs that were paying MINIMUM $125,000-$250,000 base salary, PLUS bonuses and PLUS stock options, which made it possible for these women to potentially make millions of dollars in windfall events. It’s important to remember that these were highly paid positions and women in tech are in fact some of the highest paid women in the country. Getting women into these roles is a really big deal because they are so close to the financial and power core. The women’s movement has always had to get by on very small amounts of money of course, due to the gender wealth disparity, and this could have changed everything for us. It just didn’t happen, and that is, in my mind, literally tantamount to theft. People were making economic sacrifices and actually becoming UNEMPLOYABLE due to this work, not to mention that the toll of diversity in tech activism is incredibly severe . People lost their health for this, people had to leave their homes because of this work, people’s lives were inalterably negatively impacted by this work. People spent their own money on this while women who got jobs off of it never gave back. I speak from personal experience: my tech magazine, Model View Culture, got literally thousands and probably tens of thousands of people jobs. We were the ONLY critical tech publication in the Valley. It was our job to create the pressure. Yet, not a single woman in tech gave a significant financial gifts, and we never received enough community support for it to even justify making additional full-time work, besides myself. This is not an uncommon situation in this movement, or in any of the other movements we saw similarly decimated by corporatism, careerism, Lean-In, ladder climbing, etc.
Absolutely fucking disgusting. So just know: all you girls who are all about to get laid off from your tech jobs just in time for the holidays, there isn’t anyone to defend you, there isn’t anyone to mount a protest, there’s no one to show up for you. There is no community. There is no movement. And there hasn’t been for a long time, because of careerism and individualism and profiteering. This is not just about what THEY, the enemy, the superstructure, did — which is the bulk of the blame, but we can’t control them. We could have organized us, though. There has been no action in the industry for YEARS. #NoTechforICE was the last disruption in 2019 (notable lack of meaningful participation and escalation from women in tech), and even before that things had hugely waned by the end of 2015. In 2016 anything that looked “women in tech” was nothing more than corporate shills, corporate conferences and corporate containment strategies.
In the coming months and in the coming year, you are going to see a sudden renewed interest on the parts of these women, in the women in tech movement they helped killed. You can try, but the window we had in 2012-2015 closed a long time ago. There is no one left to help you. Technology never wanted you. You were kept in place there ONLY because of the women who were working their asses off to keep you there. It has been years without anything that can possibly resemble a sustained and vital movement, and without a larger scaffold, every isolated event and the temporary disruption will be buried.
What you are seeing is the true beginning of the backlash against women in tech. It’s started with laying you off, and that is just going to be the start of a HUGE backlash. The backlash you are starting to see now is the backlash to the tech movements of 2012-2015. Especially with tech’s little personal hate groups coming back (remember how you corporate feminists were crowing about KiwiFarms? Well, now that you got them off Cloudflare you can welcome them to Twitter!!!). It is going to be in-fucking-sane. Get ready to get chased out of your homes by fascists, on a much grander scale than ever before. I’m not kidding. Things are going to go from hostile to outright dangerous extremely quickly.
The venture capitalist and the tech elite have always been absolutely furious about “diversity in tech”; as my magazine was emphasizing holistically in 2014, the goal of the tech system is fundamentally to concentrate wealth and power in a very small group of (fascist) white men. The diversity movement was NEVER parallel to the industry, it was NEVER about simply supplementing the tech workforce with more women. It was about an existential challenge to THE #1 rule of the industry.
Peter Thiel started campaigning openly against “diversity” (because it is a threat to white male hegemony, and because he is a fascist and literally wants huge groups of people dead), in fucking COLLEGE, and his ideas are widely shared throughout the tech elite. Marc Andreessen, the king of the Valley, has LONG despised any disruption by women to his precious companies, in particular when his little monsters have yet again raped someone in the office.
They fucking hate you. We told you to help us fight them, but you wanted to be on their side.
Let’s see if they will have your back. Because there isn’t any movement left for you to run home to.