The Dev Girls: gender constructions and competing identities through self-representation on Instagram
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Date
2021Author
Mangan, Joanne
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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
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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.