IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 16

Book Reviews

Hacking Diversity: The Politics of
Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
By Christina Dunbar-Hester,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2020, 271 pp.
Reviewed by Jenna P. Carpenter, Campbell University, Buies Creek, NC 27506 USA
 " Hacking Diversity : The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures " is a study of the
efforts of open technology communities to " hack "
the issues around the lack of diversity that pervades
not only their volunteer communities, but also
their related disciplines at large. Open technology
communities are loosely organized, volunteer,
online groups, focused on development and distribution of open or free software and hardware.
Examples include The Document Foundation
(home of LibreOffice), Drupal Association, Linux
Foundation, and Mozilla Foundation. The author of
this book is Christina Dunbar-Hester, a sociologist
by training, who peers into this world not only as a
female, but also as a nontech professional and thus
is an outsider in this field. Her conclusion is that
the hacking approaches that these communities
have tried to adapt, in an effort to address the problems around diversity, are not really effective. Why?
Because diversity issues stem from cultural issues.
The underlying unequal distribution of social
power that accompanies those allowed to " play "
in these open technology spaces cannot be fixed
by adding more individuals from diverse groups.
The lack of diversity is a consequence of the unequal cultural distribution of social power. Focusing
on representation-making these open technology

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3056277
Date of current version: 16 March 2021.

spaces more diverse-is not a mechanism that can
be used to fix these pervasive and entrenched cultural issues. It is the root problems themselves that
need to be hacked, not the lack of representation.
So what does Dunbar-Hester study to reach this
conclusion? She starts by reviewing the history of
both hacking and women in computing. Hacking
has its roots in the 1950s. Led by young, adventurous, white, middle-class males with a reputation for
thinking of themselves as mentally superior, these
early hackers derived both social power and status
from their activities (which were generally viewed
as mischievous, but not harmful). Of course, hacking has evolved in the decades since then, taking on sometimes political overtones for hacking
activism, or " hacktivism, " as it is called, as well as
negative overtones from criminal efforts by hackers around the world. Diversity efforts in hacking
spaces also has a history, most notably advanced
by FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software) communities, although their efforts on gender and diversity issues in technology lagged industry efforts by
about a decade.
With this background, the author notes that most
of these hacked diversity efforts have taken one of
the two paths: creating separate open technology
spaces devoted to (largely feminist) hacking efforts
versus attempting to achieve change from within
existing technology communities. Since diversity
efforts seek to focus on reforming the social rules
around how technical communities organize and

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021

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