Visibility Is Not Neutral

Amplifying Women Rising and the Architecture of Erasure

There is a lie baked so deeply into our digital culture that it often goes unchallenged: that good work naturally rises.

It doesn’t.

What rises is what systems are designed to surface. And what disappears is not usually what lacks rigor, insight, or value—but what threatens the existing distribution of power.

A recent piece by Dinah Davis, published through Code Like a Girl, documents this reality with clarity and restraint. Women Rising: Why Women in Tech Writers Are Invisible on Substack—and Why We Built a Tool to Prove It does not argue from grievance. It counts. It measures. It names mechanisms. And in doing so, it corroborates what women across journalism, technology, and truth-telling spaces have been living inside for years.

This article amplifies that work—not as commentary from the sidelines, but as part of a growing body of evidence that visibility is not neutral, meritocratic, or accidental. It is engineered. And it is currently engineered to exclude.

The Work Exists. The Visibility Does Not.

Women are writing about technology on Substack. A lot of them.

They are publishing deeply researched essays on AI, data science, cybersecurity, engineering culture, leadership, and systems design. Many have decades of professional experience. Many are doing original analysis in public.

Yet when Davis and her team examined Substack’s Technology Rising and Bestseller lists—two of the platform’s primary discovery mechanisms—they found something stark:

• Out of 100 publications per list, only 13 women appeared on the Rising list
• Only 10 women appeared on the Bestseller list
• This is worse than women’s already-low representation in the tech workforce (roughly 22%)

This is not a coincidence. And it is not a reflection of quality.

Lists are not decorative. They are signals. They tell readers who matters, who is credible, and who is worth subscribing to. They determine whose work compounds and whose stalls.

Visibility changes outcomes.

And once visibility concentrates, it compounds.

Discovery Systems Do Not Correct Imbalance—They Reinforce It

The most important contribution of Women Rising is not simply the data. It is the explanation of how the system works.

Substack’s discovery mechanisms—Rising lists, Bestseller badges, recommendations—are all downstream of existing visibility. Early exposure leads to more subscribers. More subscribers lead to badges. Badges lead to trust, conversion, and further amplification.

When women start with less exposure, the system does not correct for that imbalance. It multiplies it.

This is not unique to Substack. Every major publishing platform has its own version of this architecture:

• Algorithms that reward engagement already happening
• Badges that signal authority only after authority has been granted
• Recommendation systems that mirror existing networks rather than expand them

The result is predictable: absence is mistaken for lack. Silence is misread as disinterest. And exclusion is reframed as personal failure.

The system is not broken.

It is working exactly as designed.

Why Counting Matters

For years, women have named this dynamic and been dismissed as emotional, biased, or unprofessional. What Code Like a Girl did instead was simple and devastating: they stopped guessing and started counting.

They manually reviewed the lists. They documented representation. And when manual counting became unsustainable, they built a tool to track it over time.

This matters because structural imbalance thrives on invisibility.

Once you name it—once you show the numbers—it becomes harder to deny. Harder to gaslight. Harder to pretend that outcomes are neutral.

This leaderboard is not about calling anyone out. It is about refusing to let systemic exclusion remain unseen.

Watching is an act of resistance.

The Myth of Merit and the Punishment of Truth

There is a broader pattern here—one that extends far beyond tech writing.

Women who tell the truth clearly, rigorously, and without deference are not usually debated on the merits. They are ignored. Deprioritized. Quietly removed from circulation.

Not because they are wrong.

But because their clarity destabilizes narratives that institutions rely on to maintain authority.

The lie that “the best work rises” is essential to these systems. It allows gatekeepers to avoid accountability while blaming individuals for structural outcomes.

If you are unseen, the implication goes, you must not be good enough.

Women Rising exposes that lie.

Visibility Is Power, Not Vanity

One of the most important insights in Davis’s piece is the insistence that visibility is not about ego. It is about infrastructure.

Appearing on a Rising or Bestseller list increases exposure. Badges act as social proof. Research suggests that a Bestseller badge can temporarily increase paid conversion by roughly 25%.

This is not symbolic.

Visibility determines who gets paid. Who gets cited. Who gets invited. Who gets believed.

And who is left to disappear without explanation.

When women are systematically denied visibility, they are not just denied attention. They are denied protection, income, and institutional legitimacy.

Refusing to Disappear

Code Like a Girl is not stopping at documentation. They are intervening.

They are amplifying women’s work through bylines, recommendations, and notes. They are normalizing the act of intentionally recommending women in tech. They are teaching their community how discovery systems actually function—and how to use them deliberately rather than passively.

This is what resistance looks like inside platforms that were not built for us.

Not silence. Not withdrawal.

But collective visibility.

The Pattern Is the Point

What Women Rising makes undeniable is that this is not about individual women failing to break through. It is about systems designed to reward conformity, familiarity, and existing power.

Across journalism, technology, academia, and media, women are asking the same question:

Where did the intelligent people go?

The answer is not that they vanished.

It is that they were filtered out.

Quietly. Systematically. Predictably.

Economic Extraction by Erasure

This is where the pattern widens—and hardens.

The United States is not merely a country where women are under-credited. It is a country whose economic model depends on extracting value from women while denying that value exists.

This is not new. It has a history.

Under coverture, women were legally invisible. They could not own property, sign contracts, or claim wages. Their labor, ideas, and bodies were legally absorbed into male identity.

As formal coverture eroded, it was replaced—not eliminated—by unpaid and underpaid labor: domestic work, care work, emotional labor, and intellectual contribution framed as “natural,” “supportive,” or “voluntary.” The economy expanded on the assumption that women would subsidize it without recognition. "Unpaid labor" is a not subtle narrative erasure of the fact that "unpaid labor"..is slavery.

Today, this logic reappears as platform neutrality.

Algorithms claim objectivity. Markets claim merit. Platforms deny responsibility. And women’s labor—now digital, intellectual, and cultural—is once again extracted while the system insists nothing has been taken.

Women create enormous economic, intellectual, and cultural value every day. They research. They write. They build systems. They generate insight. They stabilize institutions. They tell the truth.

And then that value is erased—or stolen.

This is one of the cleanest forms of economic extraction: deny authorship, deny legitimacy, deny visibility.

But erasure is only one layer.

Women’s value is also taken through specific, repeatable forms of theft:

• Idea laundering: insights offered in good faith are repackaged by others, stripped of origin, and reissued as institutional or male-authored expertise.
• Unpaid consulting: women are asked to advise, review, correct, or emotionally labor under the guise of “input,” “feedback,” or “community,” with no compensation and no credit.
• Citation stripping: women’s research and analysis are used without attribution, footnotes quietly removed, sources generalized, names omitted.
• Editorial capture: women’s reporting or framing is absorbed by outlets or platforms that deny them bylines, compensation, or decision-making power while monetizing the work.
• Hidden labor and hidden slavery: from unpaid domestic and care labor that underwrites the economy, to coerced labor, trafficking, and sex slavery that remain structurally obscured, criminalized at the margins, and profitable at the center.

Sometimes the value is erased.

Sometimes it is stolen outright.

Often it is both.

This is how extraction operates in polite systems.

Not through overt exclusion, but through quiet omission.

Refusing the Lie

This record now reads less like an opinion and more like an indictment.

The evidence shows a consistent pattern: women generate value; institutions absorb it; systems deny visibility; enforcement fails to intervene.

The mechanisms are identifiable. The beneficiaries are consistent. The harms are cumulative.

Denying women visibility is denying women economic reality.

And this persists not by accident, but through legal non-enforcement and institutional impunity: when theft, exploitation, trafficking, and fraud are selectively ignored, under-prosecuted, or reframed as administrative or cultural issues, extraction becomes policy by omission.

The work exists.

What’s missing is permission to be seen.

And that absence is not accidental, apolitical, or benign.

It is structural.

It is profitable.

And it is enforced.