"Digital Sanctums of Empowerment": Exploring Community and Everyday Resilience-Building Tactics in Online Professional Communities for Women

Subhasree Sengupta, Zhasmina Tacheva

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

Abstract

Work and learning are essential facets of human life and legacy, yet sociocultural barriers may limit access to them. Historically, women have faced multiple restrictions that have hindered their entry into professional ventures. These constraints are even more palpable in technical domains, due to the added sociocultural barriers in these fields which have relegated women's voices to the margins. Through a mixed-methods comparative investigation of three professional development communities on Reddit - two focused on women, and one general professional online community serving as the baseline, we report and discuss the resilience-building, empowerment, and knowledge-development tactics that drive collective identity formation in these subreddits. The long-term goal of this work is to address the way in which such channels can be designed, maintained, and curated to offer spaces for enrichment, empowerment, and advocacy with a focus on professional development for women in technical domains.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2022 - Conference Companion Publication of the 2022 Computer Supported Cooperative Workand Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages89-93
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450391900
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 8 2022
Event25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2022 - Virtual, Online, Taiwan, Province of China
Duration: Nov 8 2022Nov 22 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Conference

Conference25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2022
Country/TerritoryTaiwan, Province of China
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/8/2211/22/22

Keywords

  • Content analysis
  • Gender in the workplace
  • Network analysis
  • Online community norms and practice
  • Reddit
  • Resilience building and support

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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