Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper offers a critical examination of the ways in which female IT professionals take up a geek identity. Since the postwar period, computing has been associated with masculinity. During the ‘dotcom’ boom of the late 1990s, the label of ‘geek’ shed some of its negative connotations, and by extension became more amenable to being taken up by women who are passionate about technology. In 2007, I attended the first She’s Geeky ‘unconference’ in the heart of the Silicon Valley for the purpose of recruiting participants for a small qualitative case study. Six female IT professionals in ‘mixed-skill’ or ‘hybrid’ positions completed the study. Drawing on poststructuralist gender theory, I argue that the female geek needs to be understood an hybridized alternative feminine identity. My analysis of the data demonstrates that identifying as a female geek is connected to childhood tomboyism and involves a complex negotiation of normative masculine and feminine identities, a process that both challenges and reinforces gender norms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".