Structural Gender Inequality and the Technology Industry: an Approach to the Combined Impact of "Broculture" and "Gendertrolling", in the Videogame Sector

Abstract

The gender digital gap is the result of a process whose factors act first to discourage women's interest in the areas of science, engineering and technology and then their presence in these sectors. The identification of masculinized work cultures (Hewlett et al, 2008), as well as the practices that make up gender online harassment (Jankowicz et al, 2021), are the theoretical support for this work, which has two objectives. The first, to identify the feedback between masculinised cultures and online gendered harassment practices in the technology industry and the second, to explore the influence of such feedback on the contemporary occupational segregation of female professionals in the video game industry.

The qualitative methodology is based on the analysis of the testimonies of professionals in the videogames sector. The empirical material analysed was extracted from the testimonies presented in chapters I, II, IV and IX of the documentary "Nerfeadas". The identification of the informants is included as an appendix at the end of the study. The results show how online harassment, sustained by a sexist culture,first discourages women from accessing and then pressures them to leave the video game sector, limiting their presence in all areas.