From Arts to Tech, What Role Does Toxic Masculinity Play in BOCO?

One of the most desirable areas in the US, the Boulder-Denver region is known for pop culture — live music in particular — and its high profile in technology and science. For generations, young adults have migrated toward the Flatirons, with their bandmates or Ivy-League engineering degrees, hoping to become the next hip sound, developer, or tech star.

Opportunities in these fields are highly prized, and the northern Front Range is a favorable place to find out what one is made of. No matter how frustrating the last rehearsal was, or how awkward the design team’s flow is on the new project, the inspiring sight of the Rockies is the first thing one sees heading out in the morning. There’s great food and drink everywhere. Gorgeous hikes and ski trails — and potentially, hikers and skiers — are never more than a short distance away. Understandably, many would like to live, work, and win here — so they can afford to stay. Despite the traditional hippie culture of kindness and having a good time, Northern Colorado is ultra-competitive.

From behind the scenes in recording studios and research labs, designing the latest app, to headlining at a festival, prestige means rivalry — often on an uneven playing field. Yet generation upon generation has pressed for change, and today in popular music, the tech industry, science, and every high-stakes profession, there are more women, LGBTQIA+ people, BIPOC, people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, and people with disabilities. The straight white alpha male no longer automatically reigns supreme. Plus, the whole idea of an “alpha,” — someone who is intensely focused on their own personal gain, physical dominance, and lack of compromise — has been pretty much debunked, even by the very scientist who coined the term to describe wolf pack behavior.

For those who believe in fairness, then, it’s important to ask: How are we doing locally in terms of equality in the fields BOCO is known for? Speaking broadly of US American society and globally, full equality has not yet been reached. What do these ongoing struggles look like in Boulder and the North Metro and how do toxic masculinity and traditional gender roles come into play?

The “Tech Bro”

There is no better personification of the ubiquitous problem of toxic masculinity’s “alpha male” than the much-discussed “tech bro”. According to the Cambridge Dictionary online, a tech bro is “someone, usually a man, who works in the digital technology industry, especially in the United States, and is sometimes thought to not have good social skills and to be too confident about their own ability.”

These “bros” often represent an “alpha male” style of toxic masculinity at work with immature or inappropriate behavior, the belief that class and gender have nothing to do with success or failure, and a worldview formed by valuing dollars over morals — like Elon Musk. Unfortunately, this reinforces the false idea that hyper-masculine wealthy white men are the model for success in society rather than examining structural reasons as to why so few minorities are represented.

These two factors — not understanding where others are coming from and overestimating one’s own capacities — can render any workplace a minefield for those less privileged. The most recent report released by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index showed that between 2020 and 2021, progress toward overall gender parity declined significantly, projecting that it would take more than 135 years to close the gap in professional equality between women and men. In the subcategory of “Economic Participation and Opportunity,” the projected number of years toward equality is 267.6. Crucially, WEF argued, the problem can only be addressed by (1) the presence of more women in professions, particularly at upper management levels, and by paying them (2) appropriately high salaries.

The gender gap is notably worse in tech sectors, WEF went on to demonstrate, with women making up only 14% of the workforce in cloud computing, 20% in engineering, and 32% in data and AI fields. As the research of UCLA professor Safiya Noble famously has proven in her book “Algorithms of Oppression,” without proper representation of nonmale, nonwhite people in AI research and development, algorithms like those deployed in search engines are programmed by default to reinforce cultural bias. According to Google’s webpage titled “Our Workforce Representation Data,” despite modest yearly progress in hiring women and some minorities, underrepresentation remains a serious issue at Google for Black and Latinx people, Native Americans, and women. White men employed by Google outnumber white women by more than 200%, with the gap widening in leadership roles.

“Resetting Tech Culture,” a 2020 research report from Accenture and the groundbreaking nonprofit Girls Who Code, made the argument that improving the culture of tech companies is the key to transforming this issue into lasting, substantive inclusion. According to the data in the report, the largest reason women leave IT is due to bias and exclusion once employed. If this problem were corrected, the report stated, attrition could fall by as much as 70%.

The data in “Resetting Tech Culture” shows very clearly that the problem is many times worse for women of color than for white women. This is only the beginning, however, of seeing the problem from a truly intersectional point of view. For one thing, when discussing male privilege, it’s important to recognizing that men who are perceived as less masculine for any reason, as many LGBTQIA+ men are, may automatically be marginalized as well. What’s more, men identified as nonwhite — or, in cases of antisemitism, not white enough or in the “right” way, are faced with even more opposition to navigate, no matter how conventionally masculine they present. Disability also complicates gender, which the great philosopher Judith Butler famously described as a “performance” — something we do, not what we are — because in many cultural contexts performing male belonging involves demonstrating physical and mental prowess that is often unrelated to the task at hand.

Accenture and Girls Who Code recommends several concrete approaches that management can undertake to start making a change:

“Make it a metric,” establishing measurable goals on diversity, with consequences for falling short.
“Promote equal parenting” parents of all genders are encouraged to take family leave, not only women.
“Send reinforcements,” appropriate mentorship and other forms of workplace support is abundantly provided.
“Encode creativity,” commit to understanding the reasons, such as enjoying creative work, why women enter tech fields, and rewarding them for it.
“Provide inclusive network” to prevent the personal and professional consequences of isolation.

A Colorado organization called Built In Colorado offered additional recommendations. First, each company should begin by figuring out systematically what its culture’s diversity challenges are by asking women about their experiences and listening closely to their responses. Based on this data, companies can develop tailored approaches bolstered by incentives and accountability.

Built In Colorado also recommended extensive allyship training so that everyone in a company knows specific techniques for amplifying the voices of people from marginalized groups, becoming better listeners, and sidestepping the prevalent problem of unconscious bias.

“When a work environment is more inclusive,” Build In Colorado argued, “the likelihood of women advancing into leadership roles by age 30 increases by 61% and by 77% for women of color.” When a workplace is less inclusive, the overall chances of women entering management fall by 28%.

We don’t have to look far to see these dynamics playing out. For decades, high-tech companies like IBM have gravitated to the area. Although now its presence here is small, in the 1980s, “Big Blue” employed 5,000 people at its campus near Gunbarrel, catalyzing growth throughout Boulder County, especially in Longmont. When Google built its new engineering campus and tripled its Boulder workforce in 2017, NOCO’s ongoing reputation as a major tech hub was secured.

CU Boulder is only one of several institutions in the area training specialists to work in the most well-paying IT fields. Most recently, CU was awarded $20 million by the National Science Foundation to build a quantum engineering facility, while the school’s engineering undergraduate class of 2023 was only 41% women, 18% underrepresented minorities, and 14% first-generation college students.

The “Front Man”

From our spectacular Red Rocks outdoor amphitheater to The Crypt to Swallow Hill Music, no matter what genre of music—whether mainstream, independent, or underground— can be found along the northern Front Range. Nearly every major act makes a stop in Colorado, and Boulder has always been known as a creative and artistic hub.

Particularly among the vocalists fronting local groups across genres, women, LGBTQIA+, and people of color are not at all uncommon. Among the most well-known are Denver folksinger Deva Yoder, jazz/blues/R&B/pop vocalist Hazel Miller, Latinx hip-hop and pop artist Lolita, and hip-hop artist, disability justice activist, and former mayoral candidate Kalyn Heffernan.

Traditional gender roles break down especially when talking about the music scene, further demonstrating the idea of binary roles is outdated. It’s critically important to look beyond the gender binary of male/female when considering gender equality, especially with large numbers of gender-nonconforming people moving to Colorado to escape attacks on their human rights. Onstage at the 2024 annual Boulder Pridefest organized by Rocky Mountain Equality — formerly Out Boulder County — LGBTQIA+ creatives offered an entire day of entertainment by and for queer folks, with most performers expressing allyship for other marginalized groups as well, including by wearing keffiyehs in support of the Palestinian people facing genocide in the Gaza.

The TransRomantics, a Boulder-based three-piece alternative/indie rock group featuring two gender nonconforming people and a cis man, filled Boulder’s Central Park with smart, heart-bending lyrics on trans experience supported by world-class instrumental work, exemplifying how representation and allyship can reach great heights in a collaboration. A crowd of several hundred LGBTQIA+ folks and allies surrounded the band shell, transfixed if you will. The TransRomantics leveraged their platform on behalf of others by inviting a small group of activists affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace to join them onstage and address the audience on the issue of Palestinian liberation.

Another group performing that day was the nationally touring alternative rock/pop group Betty, perhaps most famous for creating the theme song to The L Word, an era-defining lesbian-focused drama that ran from 2004 to 2009 and is currently in its second generation as The L Word: Generation Q. Betty also has a strong record of combining their music with social justice efforts, having performed at demonstrations for decades.

Research on popular culture fields like Colorado’s specialty, music, echoes the cross-sector similarities shown by the World Economic Forum’s study. There is a lot of overlap between research on diversity, equality, and inclusion in tech industries and in popular music.

The ratio of women to men in the music industry is 1 to 3, according to research carried out from 2012–2023 by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which focuses on artists, songwriters, producers, and Grammy award-winners working in recording studios to create the songs that end up on Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Charts. This means that, while women are “gaining ground” across the board, especially as solo artists and songwriters, their presence in popular music is overall still vastly out of proportion to their portion of the population. Women are outnumbered 30 to 1 among producers, with women of color described in the report as “invisible”: from 2012 to 2023, women of color have won only 19 out of 1,972 producing credits. One major difference between tech and popular music is that in the latter, people of color have long dominated the charts.

In terms of the nonprofit and commercial sectors supporting the performing arts like the live music Colorado is famous for, there are many paid roles, in workplaces that might well benefit from a closer self-examination of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Struggle Continues

The hyper-masculine model that followers of the likes of Andrew Tate lean into is a growing threat to our youth. Many polls have shown that the divide between ideas on gender roles is growing among young people. A romanticization of so-called “traditional” housewives and “manly” men from the past purposely gloss over the reality of the time. Black people were lynched, women could not own a credit card, and non-consensual marital relations were accepted as normal.

via Twitter

The rise of the tech bro — despite Elon Musk’s many hubristic foibles — shows that toxic masculinity is still going strong, even in liberal places like Boulder. The idealization of white male billionaires, social media algorithms pushing toxic masculinity onto impressionable young men, and a plethora of unqualified yet popular influencers and quasi-academics have given voice and space to false ideas of traditional masculinity and gender roles that simply do not reflect reality.