ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the ways in which race privilege operates in the tech industry by focusing on the experiences of technically-skilled women in Silicon Valley. Drawing upon critical race theory combined with an intersection perspective bringing attention to caste, class, gender, race and ethnicity, she shows how white women who are from middle-class backgrounds are perceived as more desirable workers as members of the dominant groups in Silicon Valley’s occupational caste system. Thus, whiteness serves as a form of geek capital that gives white university-educated white women a structural advantage. Differently, university-educated and technically-skilled Black and Black Latinx women first-generation technology workers, who are not from middle-class families, face ‘glass walls’ and struggled to convert their educational credentials and technical skills into full-time jobs. This means that a degree in computer science or engineering did not protect them from patterns of employment discrimination and rejection. As such, the women’s experiences testify to how a meritocracy is not operating in the case of qualified Black women. Rather, Twine argues, the persistence of the myth of meritocracy serves to rationalise and normalise the exclusion of Blacks, Latinx and Native American women in technically-skilled positions. Twine’s results also point to an obstacle to organising technology workers in struggles of intersectional justice, namely that the technology workers are socially segregated by race, caste, class status, national origin, religious faith and/or occupational role.
