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.

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.

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.

This book offers the first in-depth look at the employment patterns and work experiences of women working in political technology on presidential campaigns in the United States. The book draws on a unique data set of 1,004 staffers working in political technology on presidential campaigns during the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 election cycles; analysis of hiring patterns during the 2020 presidential primary cycle; and interviews with forty-five women who worked on twelve different presidential campaigns. The book reveals that women are underrepresented in political tech and especially in leadership positions, struggle to make their voices heard on campaigns, and have few means of holding people accountable for inappropriate behavior. This book is animated by the lived experiences of women. It conveys the struggles that many women endured to gain access to campaign workspaces and the battles for inclusion many faced once they got there. It shows how few formal channels women had to hold men accountable for sexist or demeaning behavior that prevented them from being the best they could be at their jobs. All with the aim of helping those who do this work create more gender-equitable and inclusive workplaces—and ones that value the ideas and skills of all those who work to get candidates elected. For those women entering the field or their careers more generally, this book offers an inside look at what those who came before experienced to help them navigate workplaces dominated by men.

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.