Kenya’s technology sector is one of the largest national tech sectors on the African continent and the premier tech sector in eastern Africa. As such, there is significant interest in those who work in Kenya’s tech sector, especially with regard to the sector’s reputation as being dominated by men. In eastern Africa, understanding the historical construction of either ethnicity or gender requires treating them as intertwined and overlapping, such that no single identity can be completely understood without its relation to the other. Far from essentialized categories of behavior and practices among distinct groups of people, gender and ethnicity represent meaningful identities individuals hold that have been made and remade through social and cultural processes over time. Prior to colonization, most communities adhered to and reinforced a gendered division of labor, which British authorities then exploited in their colonial conquests to justify dividing communities into distinct tribes (ethnicities) to facilitate their “indirect rule” over the region. At the endpoint of British occupation in December of 1963, there remained a significant gender disparity in Kenya with respect to ownership, agency, and economic activities available to men compared to women. During the post-colonization period, from 1964 to today, Kenyan conceptualizations regarding gender norms have in many ways remained stubbornly resistant to change, though in recent years have seen some movement. Within the context of Kenya’s technology sector, the concept of gender and its shifting conceptualizations are impacted by tech development projects of governmental and nongovernmental international development projects, for-profit technology innovation initiatives, and online collectives of Kenyan women. In this dissertation I seek to contribute meaningfully to our understanding of identities held by members of Kenya’s tech sector, their impact on the gender disparity in the sector how gender norms and attitudes may be shifting in recent years, and draw from the manuscripts presented here the methodological lesson about the building of communities of practice. I further argue for the importance of intersectionality and its applications to future research. I discuss how broadening gender-based research in the tech sector to include an intersectional approach to individuals’ identities will produce a deeper understanding of how different aspects of one’s identity affect that individual’s attitudes and beliefs about gender norms. Crucial to intersectional feminism is in seriously pursuing all facets of oppression, rather than paying some attention to non-gendered oppressions only when doing so serves to benefit partial progress in reducing oppression of women. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to argue for incorporating intersectionality into the design, data collection methods, and analyses of research projects undertaken within the sector, in service of an intersectional feminist approach to development of the sector.
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