Glass Walls: Gender and Unequal Trajectories in the San Francisco Bay Area Tech Industry.

In spite of recent efforts to recruit and retain women, gender inequality remains a defining feature of the tech industry. Tech executives often attribute the absence of women in the tech industry to a pipeline problem: specifically, that few women graduate with computer science degrees. While the pipeline is an important part of the problem, I argue that this perspective ignores what takes place within tech companies, including the unequal opportunities that men and women encounter after they are hired. Drawing on interviews with 50 tech workers living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, I unpack the various roles that exist within tech companies and examine the movement that takes place between them. I find that, once hired, White and Asian men are often informally coached to learn technical skills by their coworkers and are sometimes moved from non-technical roles to more lucrative technical roles. Women, on the other hand, often miss these opportunities to learn at work and are sometimes steered out of technical positions altogether. In particular, many women are diverted towards "diversity work" within their companies, which is often uncompensated and detached from their formal job descriptions. This steering that takes place within tech companies exacerbates occupational segregation and reifies ideas about who is appropriate for technical work. Together, these findings move beyond the explanation of the educational pipeline to clarify concrete ways that gender inequalities are produced and maintained within the tech industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]