The Dev Girls: gender constructions and competing identities through self-representation on Instagram

Mangan, Joanne. (2021). The Dev Girls: gender constructions and competing identities through self-representation on Instagram. Dearcadh: Graduate Journal of Gender, Globalisation and Rights, 2. doi:https://doi.org/10.13025/H0P8-7J45

Abstract

Advances in software development are increasingly shaping the world around us with new software technologies giving global technology corporations the power to predict our behaviour and influence our decisions. The world of software development remains a male-dominated space and despite efforts to address the gender imbalance in this field, women’s participation has been on the decline. This paper examines the potential of social media as a space where gender/technology norms and relations can potentially be challenged, by analysing the Instagram self-representations of a cohort of women studying and working in the software field, the Instagram community Dev_Girls. The research is guided by three central research objectives. The first two objectives are to examine how the users of the Dev_Girls site construct gender through their self-representations and how they negotiate between potentially competing subjectivities as both women and ‘women in technology’, and how they negotiate between their feminine identity and their (traditionally masculine) identity as software coders. The third and final research objective examines how these self-representations interact with norms and relations within gender and technology. This paper finds that the Dev_Girls site has given its users a level of empowerment in the form of new visibility as young women in the maledominated technology industry, but this empowerment is limited by the constraints of social media, which prizes representations of heteronormative femininity over other forms of visual representations (Duffy, 2017, pp. 103; Carah and Dobson, 2016). This paper finds that the Dev_Girls community represents an expression of the values of neoliberalism and post-feminism which young women in contemporary society are expected to embody, values which restrict any real potential to offer a more diverse, challenging, or transformative narrative of what it means to be a woman in today’s software industry.

Publisher

School of Political Science and Sociology, University of Galway

Rights

CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IE

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Collections

School of Political Science & Sociology (Scholarly Articles)