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It's kind of counter intuitive, but writing about women's role in computing directly sheds light on men's role in the same. It is one of those sentences, where
by screye 6y ago
It's kind of counter intuitive, but writing about women's role in computing directly sheds light on men's role in the same. It is one of those sentences, where what is not said is just as important.
> We believe women's unique role in founding and shaping computing and technology deserves its own section.
> <Hidden> And men's role doesn't deserve a section, because literally everything else you read about was done by them. <\Hidden>
I too think, the on-the-nose-ness of communicating women's roles here, is annoying to both men and women of 2020. However, this document is written with societal-recovery in mind. In that case, I would rather it be explicitly mentioned that women deserve just as relevant a role in tech development, lest some post-apocalyptic male-supremacist historian notice that almost everything important in tech was invented by men and postulate that, 'Tech should be the domain of men and only men.'
I do hope they also talk about the internal culture of nerds, societal-outcasts and less-than-macho men, that shaped tech as we know it. I don't think the uniqueness of nerdy tech culture is explored enough.
Better safe than sorry.
- bengale 6y ago> <Hidden> And men's role doesn't deserve a section, because literally everything else you read about was done by them. <\Hidden> I'm not sure why anyone would assume men did all the work, until some patronising head pat of a section is added to show that "women do things too".
- spacephysics 6y agoI think category 13 should be included in their history/culture category, not a category in and of itself. This is because it goes contrary to the goal of the project, to “...describe how the world makes and uses software today, as well as an overview of how computers work and the foundational technologies required to make and use computers.” I don’t see how separating top level categories at first from functional differences makes sense to then, by category 13, distinguishing merit from biology. It seems patronizing, and a politicization of something they’re stated aim is to be unbiased and logical. We should discuss women’s contributions, by all means. But quite frankly I don’t care who makes the contribution, I only care about the impact of the contribution. Therefore, highlighting an aspect of technology, or a recent advancement based purely off of it being from a man/woman or any number of ethnic/cultural backgrounds, is antithetical to the goal of science being unbiased. Literally the point of the scientific method is undoubtedly to remove biases, and find causality. We’re now introducing a new, subjective factor for what’s deemed a reputable contribution not for the contribution itself, but for what political agenda is aimed to be promoted. Sure, highlight women’s achievements in the cultural category, especially cases where they were lost in history until recently (Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper). But don’t pretend to be the pinnacle of objectivity.