How do Gender Minorities Navigate the IS Workplace? Voices of Lesbian and Bisexual Women

In recent years, research on human capital in the information systems (IS) field that focuses on the gender imbalance has begun to move beyond group level analyses that tend to focus on all women as a single category. Attention has turned to within-gender variation by investigating the intersectionality of identity characteristics such as gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic class in explaining factors that both facilitate and inhibit participation in the IS field. One under researched aspect of gender intersectionality is the experiences of lesbian and bisexual women: non-normative gender minorities in the IS field. The voices of nine women in the USA who were willing to discuss their identities as gender minorities are used to examine within-gender variation in women’s exposure to, experience of and response to gender norms about the IS field.