And that, right there, is why I'm such a hellcat about getting more women in stem. Tech is our communications platform, it's the way we interact, it's vital in shaping the modern world. Yet once again, we are building a platform by white men, biased toward white men. I want to shorten the cycle. Let's not do another hundred years of this.
And hey - as a general rule of thumb, women have better attention to detail. My wife graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Math. She was a software architect for a major multinational insurance firm. But she bailed on that and went into medicine 'cuz she wanted to, you know, help people. Are you saying the platform itself is inherently biased toward white men? Or are you saying that the presence of entitled white men creates a bias?
I don't think it's biased toward men inherintly. It's what I love about programming, the absolute simplicity of binary, the beauty of the baud. Ones and zeros can't be evil :) But I think people are much better at thinking of scenarios relevant to them, so the products tech companies make tend to have a bias toward men. It wasn't built to be that way, we used to have 30% women, hell the first programmer was a woman. But today those numbers are a lot worse, and I don't want that bias to cement. If we get enough representation for women and minorities soon we can avoid creating a more permanent heirarchy. It's interesting you mention why your wife left. Tech has a bit of an image problem in that regard. I've done lots of work with young girls and the idea that tech is a selfish profession is probably one of the top reasons they avoid it. Of course that becomes circular, the more people who see tech as selfish, the more it attracts money grubbing brogrammers, who then perpetuate that idea. It's one of the many things we need to change if we want to close the gender gap.
I don't know if it's even as complicated as a race/gender difference. It's really just a "tech-oriented" vs "non-tech-oriented" problem. I'm on computers 80% of my day, and I have been and will continue to be; I grew up on them and my job revolves around them. My girlfriend is an art major, she only uses computers when she has to. We can look at the same piece of software and I intuitively have ideas about how to use it and how to access the settings and features I need. This "makes sense" to me and seems like the only "right way" to organize information. She disagrees and explains why and that makes sense too. But that software was designed by people like me without a thought to people not like them because it's hard to comprehend how someone wouldn't just get it, why it wouldn't just be intuitive to them.But I think people are much better at thinking of scenarios relevant to them
When you have an industry with as little diversity as tech, it decidedly is a race / gender difference.
I completely agree that techies have trouble understanding scenarios for non techies, but the discussion was about the lack of women in tech and contributing factors (unless you think women are non-tech-oriented, but I don't think that's what you meant).I don't know if it's even as complicated as a race/gender difference. It's really just a "tech-oriented" vs "non-tech-oriented" problem.
And not just better attention to detail, but a wholly different perspective. I'm working on forming a company right now, and we needed some help with a particular aspect. One of the guys suggested a woman he knows who had expertise in the particular area (nothing related to any gender specific knowledge), so we consulted her. She was into our idea, so we brought her in as a partner. I never considered her "a woman", but rather "an expert" (which I still figure is a decent default in business). But then we were having dinner the other day, and discussing marketing strategies. We were discussing potential customers, and our limited capacity to imagine things beyond our experience was laser focusing the few of us dudes on guys just like us. She spoke up and said, "Wow, I have a totally different idea of who would be interested," and proceeded to expand our potential customer base by an order of magnitude, specifically because she was thinking from a woman's perspective. Big lesson on my end.
http://obdc.com/diverse-companies-make-more-money/ In my experience, companies with a diverse workforce tend to be the best places to work. Gender is an easy metric to measure, as is race. But there are others too. My favorite teams have been ones that don't expect men to all behave the same. They allow room for something other then the hyper-aggressive self promoting type, and as a result people are happier and more confident in their work. I really believe there is financial value in creating that type of place.
I sometimes forget these things, because I'm a scientist, which is one of the few fields that really doesn't seem to care about race and gender (yes I'm aware of the gender disparities in the highest levels of leadership). My wife, on the other hand, is reminded all too often that she's "a girl" in a man's world, as she works in the car business. It's messed up. You know how many women design cars for GM (exteriors, that is)? One. (There were two but one just got bumped to management). And GM is the progressive one of the Big Three. As far as I'm aware the number is zero at the other two. Women are close to half their market, and they include functionally no women in design, which is one of the most important aspects for selling cars. (It made the news this year at the Detroit auto show that Nissan was showing a car for which the lead designer was a woman--that's how backward the industry is.) If any of the companies could get past the idea that cars are for boys and minivans are for girls (although they're still designed by men), they could make a fuckload of cash. But that's not how it works. I don't know how she does it.
What was the car? cuz all the ones on this list are reasonably cool.
I think that these types of cars are not much more than showpieces for the companies. Is anyone in their right mind going to buy the new Ford GT? I've seen exactly one on the road and I live in the area of the world where there are more expensive American cars than anywhere. I think the company thinks there's some cache in showing that they can put something on the race track and compete. I don't know if they're money makers even at that price, but even if they are building one has to be about more than per car profit like the average car is.
Well, they do a few things. Brand recognition and cache for one. They're also a great way of showing off developmental technologies that eventually trickle down to luxury and then every day cars. If you're going to spend years and millions of dollars in R&D, you gotta show it off from time to time. Right?
I've seen three, and a friend of a friend had one. They exist, they're just tricky to find. Shit, I've seen Lexus LF-A's in traffic 'round here. Fiskers in the parking lot. F'n Audi R8s parked on the street. But then, I live in a stupid place. The original NSX wasn't a crazy thing. I'd see them semi-regularly. Of course, for the money you could buy two of them for the price of the new one, even accounting for inflation. That said, it's definitely a halo car.
Yes you do. I used to think that an M6 was a rare beauty to ogle over until the first time I visited LA. They're like cockroaches there. I had the pleasure of riding around the English Midlands in a DB9 a few weeks ago. That was fuckin' fun. I can't see the pleasure in driving a car like that in LA. I think it would piss me off more than anything, knowing that I get to use like 100 of the 600 hp the car offers. Just makes you look lie a douche....I live in a stupid place.
True story. Was over at CBS Studio Center to do some filling-in on X Factor. And we all pile into a 15 passenger van ("pass van" in the lingo) and we're waiting to leave, and there's a guy in a Ferrari California pulling in. And he's not holding us up, and he's not making us wait, and he's abiding by all the rules, and he's just fucking parking, fer chrissake, and the camera guy next to me says "douche." And we all thought it. All 10 of us. We didn't know this guy and for all we know he got the Ferrari as an award for everything he'd done for Habitat for Humanity. But the fact of the matter was, he was a middle-aged dude, in a Ferrari, and he was a douche. An irredeemable douche. He had spent upwards of $200k in order to create a visceral negative reaction from total strangers. And I think that's not the way it's supposed to work. Hollywood has cured me of my love of exotics. The fact that I can hop on my bicycle and go rent a Gallardo for $150/hr (from three different shops!) isn't liberating, it's discouraging. 'cuz what the fuck are you going to do with a Lamborghini for four hours in Los Angeles other than front?