How Women Work: Gender, digital labor, and (not) getting paid to do what you love

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Brooke Duffy about the structure of digital labor. We talk about Instagram influencers and the people who love to hate them, the double bind that women online face in presenting themselves as both "authentic" and  "relatable," and the problem with the advice we so often get, to "do what we love."

Dr. Brooke Erin Duffy is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the Department of Communication and the Program in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her work spans the topics of social media, gender, identity and inequality, digital labor, and promotional culture.

She's the author of two monographs on gender and cultural production, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, in 2017), which draws upon research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagram influencers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor. Wired named it one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017." Dr. Duffy's first monograph, Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013), examined the rapidly changing technologies and political economies of media production through an analysis of the magazine industry. Duffy’s third book, Platforms and Cultural Production with Thomas Poell and David Nieborg, is forthcoming with Polity in 2021. She is also the co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts with Joseph Turow (Routledge press, in 2009). 

Dr. Duffy’s research has been published in a wide variety of academic journals, and she is also a public scholar, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Vox, Times Higher Education, Wired, and Quartz. Her commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Vox, The Washington Post, The USA Today, and Vice, among others.

This episode was produced by Matt Perry.

Art by Desi Aleman.