Navigating the brogrammers and the boys’ club: Women’s representation and experiences in political technology

Abstract

This article offers the first systematic study of the hiring patterns and career experiences of women working on U.S. presidential campaigns in the new field of political technology. We paired the quantitative analysis of a dataset of 995 staffers active in technology, digital media, data, and analytics across four presidential election cycles (2004–2016) with data from 45 in-depth interviews with women active on 12 presidential campaigns. We find that women are systematically under-represented, they do not ascend to leadership positions at the same rates as men, and they do not have the same entrepreneurial opportunities. When women do get hired, many find it challenging to be heard, are judged according to different standards than men, and have few ways of holding people accountable for inappropriate behavior or arbitrary exercises of power. The findings likely have implications for other fields that have been reshaped by technology, from journalism to entertainment media.