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> One downside I see is the lack of a "woman's perspective," which, while admittedly important in many fields, seems mostly irrelevant in a field where stuff ei
by pgbovine 17y ago
> One downside I see is the lack of a "woman's perspective," which, while admittedly important in many fields, seems mostly irrelevant in a field where stuff either works or it doesn't.
a particularly keen insight i got from talking to a female college friend (who was a CS major) is that the "women's perspective" might be more relevant than people think even in a supposedly objective field where things either work or don't ... because men and women see the world differently, women might be able to come up with different high-level design, low-level debugging, or software team management strategies that an all-male team might not think of ... of course, i don't have any concrete examples to back up this vague hand-wavy statement, but i think there's something there
- anamax 17y ago> of course, i don't have any concrete examples to back up this vague hand-wavy statement [that "men and women see the world differently, women might be able to come up with different"], but i think there's something there Lots of people believe that, but I've yet to see an example. Since we make a lot of decisions based on it being true, I'm troubled that we don't know if it actually is. However, let's assume that it's true. It doesn't follow that said different is always valuable. It might be good in some fields, irrelevant in others, and bad in some. In other words, even if "think different" is true, it's not an argument for universal inclusion. Yes, I know that said "male think" may not be possessed by all males and lacking in all females.
- wmf 17y agoI've heard one classic example. When PDAs came out they could manage one calendar for one person. A woman looked at it and noted that it must have been designed by men who manage only their own schedule while many women manage schedules for multiple family members.