Geek Stereotypes: Misogyny, Mental Illness and Company Dysfunction in Tech
Geek culture, while not our unique domain, pervades the technology community.
From it, we get the stereotype of male geeks as socially inept, fumbling and awkward — challenged by companionship and romance alike, by tact and conversation, by the norms and expectations of broader civil society.
This social deficiency, it is posited by pop culture, is the inevitable result of an extraordinary or unique intelligence, and the expected cost of mediating the world through computers, gadgets, games, technologies and other machines and fantasies.
This stereotype is also a cover-up and a red herring for deep dysfunctions in our community.
The belief that male geeks are incapable of romantic interaction with women that isn’t fumbling, awkward, transparent, and ultimately doomed — the cheap laughs of blockbuster movies — covers up endemic sexual harassment, abuse and assault by male technologists against women in the field.
It also simultaneously forgives, mitigates and erases the rampant and entrenched misogyny at male-dominated technology events, which have long employed booth babes, adult entertainment and casual objectification as marketing and bonding strategies.
Tellingly, this stereotype is one of the only lenses through which we as a community engage with mental illness — particularly social anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, sometimes even depression. You can also frequently find a subtle (or even overt) appeal to autism spectrum somewhere in the apologia that occurs around the invocation of the male geek stereotype to explain or justify damaging behavior.
Importantly, these appeals do not represent any actual engagement with mental illness — something that is sorely needed in the technology and startup industry, where many of us suffer in shame and silence with undiagnosed or untreated conditions, where mental illness is incredibly stigmatized, and where very little community support is available.
Rather, it represents a dangerous armchair psychology — expressing no actual knowledge of, nor empathy towards, mental illness, just co-opting the ill-informed and stigmatizing representations of mass media to avoid actual engagement with behaviors and trends in the community.
Within the workplace, the geek stereotype is frequently invoked, implicitly or explicitly, to keep engineers away, or justify their absence from, customer engagement, participation in business decisions, and cross-functional teamwork.
This appeal is used by engineers to protect their own time and focus, and by other departments to protect their political turf and sense of importance in companies that value engineering above other competencies — a profound and often devastating dysfunction.
In companies where the technical staff is the most privileged group, the geek stereotype is omnipresent in the paternalism of perk culture, where all needs and desires — including a built-in and corporate-endorsed *social life* — are catered to by groups of underrepresented and marginalized people in tech.
The manner in which our community uncritically co-opts, performs, and reproduces the stereotype of male geeks as inevitably, as acceptably socially inept, is a major challenge to social justice in the field.
We need to move towards a culture that actively deconstructs the use and performance of stereotypes, rather than using them as a way to elude responsibility for our behavior as individuals and as a community.
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