The hacker community excludes women from the space, deeming their work as “too feminine” to be “real hacking”.

Leonie Maria Tanczer, a postdoctoral researcher of cybersecurity, collective action, and gender studies, draws on the research of Jordan and Taylor to further study the “male-only” stereotype of hacktivism. In a 2015 article with a sample of five women and five men, Tanczer conducted a discourse analysis of hacktivist communities, believing that a gendered analysis was particularly necessary for a community focused on creating social and political change. Language reflects and perpetuates cultural stereotypes, so it was an appropriate venue to study the gender biases of hacktivists. Though Tanczer’s sample size is small, she is the first to venture into studying the direct link between gender and hacktivism. In interviews with her subjects, she recognized four patterns of discourse. Most prominently, she identified Male Oblivious Discourse among the men she surveyed, wherein they overlooked gender entirely. Not acknowledging sexism is in itself a form of sexism, and a male identity in the predominantly male hacktivist community affords the privilege of seeing gender as a non-issue. Female hackers push back on this attitude through Female Discourses of Resistance. This is either an Emphasis Discourse, where they actively emphasize their identities as women and hackers and combat the sexism in the community, or Negation Discourse, where women struggle with feelings of exclusion and with justifying a hacktivist identity. When confronted with their sexism or erasure of women, men retaliate with a Male Justification Discourse, where they try to defend themselves and explain away their Oblivious Discourse.41 A specific experience that Tanczer cites as Negation Discourse is particularly interesting in the context of my work. One woman who did not participate in the study explained to Tanczer that she identified as an activist and a hacker but not a hacktivist because her hacking work was not recognized as “real hacking” by other hackers: teaching everyone at occupy how to use wordpress, or teaching sewing classes at a makerspace in a poor neighbourhood…Skills that are categorized as ‘feminine’ are not thought of as real work in our society, so because of systemic social prejudices both within the hacker culture and society at large, by definition women are often not hacktivists.42 Comparing this with the experiences of the other women in her survey, Tanczer concludes that when faced with the struggle to reconcile their female and hacktivist identities, some will altogether drop the label hacktivist. Men, who dominate hacking communities, set definitions and decide what is considered hacktivism. Because of men’s built-in gender biases, these definitions often exclude work perceived as more feminine.43