"Digital Sanctums of Empowerment": Exploring Community and Everyday Resilience-Building Tactics in Online Professional Communities for Women.

Work and learning are essential facets of human life and legacy, yet sociocultural barriers may limit access to them. Historically, women have faced multiple restrictions that have hindered their entry into professional ventures. These constraints are even more palpable in technical domains, due to the added sociocultural barriers in these fields which have relegated women’s voices to the margins. Through a mixed-methods comparative investigation of three professional development communities on Reddit - two focused on women, and one general professional online community serving as the baseline, we report and discuss the resilience-building, empowerment, and knowledge-development tactics that drive collective identity formation in these subreddits. The long-term goal of this work is to address the way in which such channels can be designed, maintained, and curated to offer spaces for enrichment, empowerment, and advocacy with a focus on professional development for women in technical domains.