France Winddance Twine is a Professor of Sociology and documentary filmmaker at the University of California- Santa Barbara. Twine is a Black and Native American critical race theorist and feminist ethnographer who has conducted research on racial and gender inequality on both sides of the Atlantic including Brazil, Ecuador, UK and the United States.  Twine is a 2020 recipient of the Distinguished Career Award from the Gender, Race & Class section of the American Sociological Association. Her recent publications include Geographies of Privilege (2013, w/ Bradley Gardener) and Outsourcing the Womb: race, class and gestational surrogacy in a global context (2015, second edition). Her forthcoming book is titled Geek Girls: caste, class and gender inequality in Silicon Valley. 

This talk draws upon interviews with Black and South Asian women engineers employed at top technology firms in Silicon Valley to challenge the “pipeline theory”, which has been used to explain the underrepresentation of Black workers.  Twine provides a comparative analysis of the ways that caste background, class inequality, social segregation and structural racism intersect to shape the career trajectories of Black and Asian women in the  technology industry. Twine introduces the concept of ‘glass walls’ and first generation technology workers.