Feminized bodies and gendered minority hackers have hackerspaces that filter unethical exclusivity and foster healthy concerns for safety.

Since their inception in 2012, women-oriented hackerspaces have offered local residents a place to gather, share ideas, learn creative techniques, and grow professional partnerships in what some term an “emerging DIY culture” [30]. According to our interviewees, the Berkeley-based Mothership Hackermoms — a community workshop dedicated to the needs of “mothers of all genders” [30] — were first to introduce such projects to the ‘hacker’ scene. Their funding campaign on kickstarter.com and a panel at the San Jose DIY festival Maker Faire sparked a flurry of interest, particularly among participants at women-oriented IT conferences like AdaCamp and women-in-tech mailing lists. Soon after Hackermoms opened its doors, organizers of the Seattle Attic launched what they called a “feminist hackerspace,” a material response to the male-dominated technology community of which many of the members were professionally affiliated. Inspired by subsequent conversations at the 2013 AdaCamp in San Francisco, participants began feminist hackerspaces later that year in Portland (Flux) and San Francisco (Double Union). Organizers of the sites remain connected through what a Seattle Attic member called an “informal network.” They maintain a Google Group featuring continued threads of conversation about their respective hackerspaces and shared resources like example planning documents. They are also connected to other non-feminist spaces by personal relationships like roommates (in the case of Double Union and Noisebridge), or marital partners (who were members of Mothership Hackermoms and Ace Monster Toys respectively). From their inception, the Seattle Attic and Portland Flux have allowed members of any gender (roughly 12 of 18 identify as female at the Attic; 2 of 13 in Flux) while San Francisco Double Union has not allowed members who identify as male. Upstart costs for each of the sites was provided largely by one or at most core set of a few organizing members. Continued funding was collected from membership fees and, in the cases of Seattle Attic and Double Union, successful crowdfunding campaigns. In our conversations with leaders of these spaces, we learned that their original motivations focused on concerns for safety and shared values, often materialized in the physical design of the space. One organizer explained: As a woman in technology, it's like, I'm already part of a like a 10, 20 percent group so it doesn't really take a lot to turn me off. So I think like I'm just more sensitive to like things like the space sucking and being dark and gloomy. Becoming “more sensitive” to the design of the space seemed to come, in part, from feeling marginal to technology cultures. Other members noted discomfort and even vulnerability in their interactions within existing hackerspaces, often declining to share personal experiences in favor of recounting the experiences of others: I would almost rather share the experiences that I've heard from other women in town [… A woman] was working on something and this kid next to her was like bragging to her about how he had gotten a woman online to show him her breasts by threatening to hurt a kid. And she was like "What is going on here? Why are you telling me this?" And she looked at the guy who runs the space and pays the rent here and was like "Are you going to do anything about this?" And then, like, he didn't. Accounts like this one point to the moral character of such retellings, asking us to consider how third-person reports implicate others (a “kid,” a “guy") in the accomplishment of value-laden practices such as sexual harassment. By describing the lone woman in the space and the man’s detached disposition (in a place of authority but doing nothing to resolve the matter), this member suggests a kind of moral imperative to reveal rather than conceal unethical practices. Similar stories of harassment circulated widely in the spaces we visited, reinforcing members’ desire for both awareness and acknowledgement of oppression. They became implicative of the kinds of reflexive practices not normally considered integral to high-tech environments within large corporations or academic institutions. Yet not all members made investments in learning and practicing technology development. While most Seattle Attic members worked within information technology (IT) industries, several of these professions fell under customer service. In Portland’s Flux, seven of twelve members identified as professional programmers. As our work unfolded, we found these affiliations with IT industry shaped how members participated in (and pushed back on) hacking and engineering.