Misogyny and the Making of the Tech Fratriarchy

In 1983, the women in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s computer science and artificial intelligence labs published a scathing critique of their hostile work environment. The report, Barriers to Equality in Academia: Women in Computer Science at MIT, was the product of collective knowledge and experience. Nineteen women who were graduate students or research staff prepared the report. Barriers to Equality in Academia was, by its authors' reckoning, seven years in the making and outlined "the difficulties encountered by women at MIT and the prevailing attitudes that make it hard for women to succeed."¹ They noted, "Efforts to address the special problems of women in EECS [the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science] can be traced back to at least 1976."²

The women who wrote Barriers to Equality in Academia documented, analyzed, and theorized the misogyny they experienced at MIT during the 1970s and early 1980s. They observed threads of misogyny interwoven through computing programs and networks and through their computing workplaces. Their analysis enables us to reenvision personal computing and social networking through the lens of misogyny, even before personal computers such as the Apple Macintosh appeared on the American digital scene.

Other scholars have traced how computing became masculine, but no one has yet analyzed how computing became misogynist, yet this is crucially important to understanding how computer science and the tech industry became hostile and harmful to women, including trans women and nonbinary femmes.³ Historians of computing have written either about men and masculinity in computing or about women in computing. I am interested in the relationships, interactions, dynamics, and power structures among them. Reading the Barriers to Equality in Academia report through the lens of misogyny demonstrates how computer science—still a young discipline in the 1970s—became not just masculine but also hostile to women. I suggest that misogyny is a key component of what I identify as the tech fratriarchy.⁴

The Barriers to Equality in Academia authors draw from their personal experiences to analyze the harms of misogynistic behavior within academic computing; the section headings comprise a list of misogynist principles and offenses: "first a woman, then a professional; invisibility; patronizing behavior; misplaced expectations; unwanted attention; obscenity; the fishbowl syndrome."⁵ The authors observe that "the day-to-day experiences of many women in Computer Science are characterized by a greater emphasis on their gender than on their identity as serious professionals," such as being described as only at MIT to get a husband or being told they were flirting to get ahead.⁶ Such behavior accords with what the feminist philosopher Kate Manne identifies as an under-recognized aspect of misogyny.⁷ Women are consistently pushed into the roles of humans caring or humans giving, roles in which their primary social identity is not individuated but understood only in relationship to and especially as caring for others. The authors also identify the harms of invisibility and exclusion; they report, for example, "Only one person could use the machine at a time. Often, while I was working on a task, a male graduate student would physically push me away from the machine and interrupt my work so that he could get at the machine. This didn't happen to the men in the group."⁸

In recounting their and their women colleagues' experiences, the Barriers to Equality in Academia authors are not witnessing masculinity in action, nor even toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is typically understood through individuals, and these authors are addressing the practice, policing, and enforcing of gender norms within a patriarchal, racist, classist, heteronormative system. Rereading the myriad examples of harms documented in Barriers to Equality in Academia through this lens demonstrates that MIT's computing center was not just a masculine space but a misogynist one. The examples delineate the duality of misogyny in its norms of what "she is obligated to give" and what she is "prohibiting from having or taking … away from dominant men."⁹ According to their men colleagues, the women in computer science at MIT are obligated to provide dates, their telephone...