Doing Gender, Undoing Race: Token Processes For Women With Multiple Subordinate Identities

Abstract

Through interviews with 29 Asian American women tech workers, this article demonstrates how cultural frameworks around race and gender shape identity salience and construct a token process for workers with multiple subordinate identities. This approach to tokenism better accounts for multiple systems of inequality affecting workers and demonstrate how certain identities are prioritized—and others neglected—through institutional interventions and cultural ideologies. It also provides an additional lens through which to interpret the emphasis on gender inequality within the high-tech industry: Whereas gender inequality is generally considered a critical step in achieving an equitable work environment, I consider how it is intentionally leveraged within organizations to divert from interventions toward establishing racial equality. Results suggest serious barriers preventing the high-tech industry from reckoning with racial inequality for Asian American women workers; more broadly, they hint at how other racial groups with white-adjacent privileges are similarly exploited to uphold the high-tech industry’s white racial project.