The Lack of Accountability on Campaigns

This chapter reveals that women have few ways of holding people accountable for inappropriate behavior, arbitrary exercises of power, and retaliation for reporting incidents on campaigns. In this context, women often avoid or ignore issues in the workplace. Women argued that campaign human resources departments often lack the time, staff, and resources to provide policies, structure, and aid to staff. As a result, women who find themselves on the receiving end of a toxic work environment due to a colleague’s harassment or misconduct—implicit or explicit—frequently fail to report these incidents. If they consider reporting, they fear potential repercussions and retaliation. Without accountability in the campaign workplace, women tend to avoid and ignore the issues facing them in order to keep the mission of the campaign on track, which often outweighs the desire to shake the system up and create more equity in the workplace.

The Problem of Inclusivity

This chapter outlines how men in leadership positions and male-dominated office cultures often shaped women's roles and work in campaign tech departments. Women often felt at a disadvantage when it came to taking credit for their work and found that their age, gender, and experience interacted to limit their opportunities. Women encountered differing expectations for their leadership compared with their male counterparts. The “bro cultures” on campaigns created environments that were challenging for women to navigate. Women felt excluded, both socially and professionally, from parts of campaign culture and organization in ways that limited their work roles. Women, especially leaders, were also expected to perform emotional labor on campaigns, regardless of their roles—even as they contended with “imposter syndrome” and the devaluing of their voices by men. In this context, women drew on strong mentoring and network relationships to navigate campaign dynamics and further their careers.

Political Technology as a Field

This chapter discusses how political technology grew into the field it is today. Political technology lies at the intersection of two male-dominated fields, and it also has a number of unique features for politics. The ever-shifting nature of technology requires campaigns and political parties to garner significant amounts of knowledge and expertise from the technology and commercial sectors. This means fluid careers as staffers move into and out of commercial, technology, and political jobs, seeding campaigns with new skills, knowledge, and ways of seeing the world. There are also rapid and continual changes in the technologies that are at the center of how contemporary politicians connect with the public, from social media platforms to political databases. For political tech staffers, this means continual learning and adapting to changes in how the electorate receives political information and communicates about politics. And it means many new opportunities for entrepreneurial ventures to bring talent, tools, and practices down-ballot and across election cycles.

How Political Tech Can Become More Equitable

The conclusion turns the book’s findings into a set of recommendations for how campaigns can create the more equitable political technology field of the future. The conclusion argues that candidates and their campaigns must create more deliberate hiring processes designed to achieve gender equity, inclusion, and diversity more broadly, especially in leadership. Creating real institutions to ensure accountability would result in clear consequences for misconduct. Investing in positions such as chief diversity officers would provide for more sustained efforts to recruit, retain, and develop staffers from underrepresented groups. Campaigns can create more workplace flexibility to support all their employees. Women in leadership positions can promote women’s voices in office culture. Male allies must use their already recognized voices to promote those of women and work to ensure representation through hiring and promotion. Media outlets need to be more deliberate about their coverage of campaigns.

The Underrepresentation of Women in Political Technology

This chapter demonstrates how women are deeply underrepresented in the field of political technology, especially in leadership roles. Women also do not have the same entrepreneurship opportunities in the field that men have. The barriers to the equal representation of women in the field of political tech are multifaceted and systemic. Women are underrepresented on campaigns because of the time constraints and network relationships that shape the hiring process, in addition to gendered assumptions about their qualifications. Women routinely cited that the goal of electing candidates outweighed any other considerations both in hiring and when women are in the room. While the lack of work–life balance on campaigns affects both men and women, it likely affects women disproportionately more given that they are often primary caregivers and have familial obligations that men do not have. Campaign hierarchies and bureaucracies often promote men as decision-makers and leaders, resulting in women’s voices often being absent from the corridors of power.

The Political Tech Glass Ceiling

The introduction conveys how political technology lies at the intersection of two male-dominated fields—politics and technology—and has grown significantly in electoral importance in the 21st century. It relates how campaigns have increasingly organized dedicated divisions for technology, digital media, data, and analytics operations and have turned to a growing field of specialized political practitioners and the tech industry itself to staff them. The introduction previews the key findings and details the plan of the book. It also makes three primary arguments about the importance of gender diversity for campaigns in terms of messaging, technological design, and the functioning of campaign organizations. The introduction further argues that gender diversity matters for equity and fairness in the workforce and political culture more broadly.