ABSTRACT
Increasing participation of women in the field of Information Technology (IT) is an ongoing priority and a political issue in most of the Western world. Yet, studies continue to identify gender discrimination in the industry across different geopolitical contexts. In this chapter, I examine the linguistics of globalisation, geopolitics and gender in IT workplaces through a focus on agile ways of working, which facilitate, for example, open and frequent communication in non-hierarchical, highly collaborative teams. I thereby draw on semi-structured interviews conducted with female IT professionals about their experiences of working in such teams, data collected as part of a larger study on professional communication in agile IT teams. Using interactional sociolinguistics and social constructionism as a framework, I identify and critically discuss some of the discursive strategies through which participants construct and orient to gender issues in their respective professional contexts. This, in turn, provides insight into how agile IT workplaces are (re-)gendering the very notion of work in new and intricate ways.
