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comment by rinx
rinx  ·  3191 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: It's a White Man's Internet

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.





tehstone  ·  3190 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    But I think people are much better at thinking of scenarios relevant to them

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.

rinx  ·  3190 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    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.

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).