In 2002, a European Commission-funded survey by R.A. Ghosh revealed that only 1.5% of F/LOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source Software) community members were female. This gap between genders was the basis for my MSc thesis with University College London, ‘She-hackers: Millenials and gender in European F/LOSS communities’. 

The research methodology was organized around three interrelated ethnographic lenses in collaboration with more than 35 informants across ‘white’, ‘grey’ and ‘black’-hat hacker cultures in the UK and Germany: User profiles of key contemporary hacker archetypes; virtual interviews on digital platforms including IRC, Twitter and forums like 4chan; participant observation hacker gatherings and spaces. Particular attention was paid to the political dynamics of participants, including hacker ethics, cyberfeminism, hacktivism, open knowledge frameworks and Free Software movement debates. I concluded that Millenial-aged female hacker subjectivities were in the process of being critically and socially reworked in tandem with the particular cyber-spatial politics they had been exposed to since ‘logging on’, inviting the construction of post-gendered and gender-fluid identities that offered new freedoms for both physical bodies and virtual selfhoods.