How Women in Tech Talk About Themselves on Twitter

Katie Jolly

Women in tech often don’t talk about their own achievements due to fear of being labeled “bossy” or “vain.” In fact, they are far more likely than men to credit mentors rather than themselves with their success. But, how do women talk about themselves when asked by other influential women? We can start to answer this question using tweets from a trending hashtag the week after the release of the “anti-diversity” Google memo that encouraged women in tech to “brag.” Using topic modeling and word associations, we can see that women are actually great at bragging about themselves. I will talk through some of the different ways that women talked about success and what that means for how we think about women in tech.