Quick hit: when non-macho guys are on top of the heap

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

There’s a discussion around the journalism startups that well-known journalists are involved in, and the extent to which they are yet another set of startups full of white men. (Basically, yes.) Emily Bell wrote Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men.

I thought readers here would especially enjoy Zeynep Tufekci’s contribution, No, Nate, brogrammers may not be macho, but that’s not all there is to it. An excerpt:

Many tech guys, many young and recently ascendant, think something along these lines: “Wait, we’re not the jocks. We aren’t the people who were jerks. We never pushed anyone into a locker and smashed their face. We’re the people who got teased for being brainy, for not being macho, the ones who never got a look from the popular girls (or boys), the ones who were bullied for our interests in science and math, and… what’s wrong with Dungeons & Dragons, anyway?”

In other words, as Silver puts it, “We’re outsiders, basically.”[…]

[L]ife’s not just high school, and there is not one kind of hierarchy. What happens when formerly excluded groups gain more power, like techies? They don’t just let go of their old forms of cultural capital. Yet they may be blind to how their old ways of identifying and accepting each other are exclusionary to others. They still interpret the world through their sense of status when they were “basically, outsiders.”

Most tech people don’t think of it this way, but the fact that most of them wear jeans all the time is just another example of cultural capital, an arbitrary marker that’s valued in their habitus, both to delineate it and to preserve it. Jeans are arbitrary, as arbitrary as ties[…]

How does that relate to the Silver’s charged defense that his team could not be “bro-y” people? Simple: among the mostly male, smart, geeky groups that most programmers and technical people come from, there is a way of existing that is, yes, often fairly exclusionary to women but not in ways that Silver and his friends recognize as male privilege.

Tufekci’s whole piece is at Medium, come for the Bourdieu, stay for the Dr Seuss!