Why Tech Needs Feminism

[ashfurrow]

Talked to someone during WWDC who asked – earnestly – why it's important to increase the number of women in tech. Big question! I explained the two points that sprang to mind:

• The moral imperative (it's the right thing to do).
• The business case (it's good for business, for a number of reasons).

I promised myself that I'd follow-up by finding an article to share but I haven't yet. Need to do that.

Additionally, this thread is a really good and germane read. Explains the history of the programming industry; that women were the first programmers and/because the job seemed easy, then it became profitable, and society reframed the job to be difficult, so it must be for men, and subsequently is paid more. We're still seeing the same stereotypes play out today.

This is mind-boggling.

We're hurting ourselves a number of ways:

• Implying that backend devs shouldn't have empathy or concern for UX is a really terrible idea.
• We're telling men that empathy is weak and not as valuable as "hardcore fullstack ninja coding", which means that men who would otherwise have meaningful contributions to front end are pigeonholed.
• We're telling women that they're not capable of the "real work", that the frontend that they do is less important, less valuable, and we're pigeonholing capable women who would otherwise have a lot to contribute to backend systems.

Just generally a terrible system. And what's so frustrating is, as alicemazzy pointed out, it wasn't always this way. This isn't a hunter/gatherer dichotomy – this is something that society and the tech industry did in the eighties. It's a conscious decision to discriminate. It hurts women, it hurts society, and it hurts business.

Clean this up, expand some points, trim others, and link to alicemazzy's tweets. Find more supporting evidence and resources for further reading, then publish.

[ashfurrow]

I don't think I add much value to this conversation.