Sexism and Other Prejudices in the Technology World
I thought long and hard about whether to respond to Milo Yiannopoulos’s post about women in the technology industry. Mainly because I find his argument repulsive and I don’t want to draw attention to it. On the other hand, I get no traffic anyway, and there is a very clear argument to make in reply.
Here’s a snippet from a transcript of a panel discussion that he seems to have invited himself into:
Milo: Finds this discussion patronising to women. There are reasons which have nothing to do with prejudice why women are not more involved in the tech scene. Do we need to change the game? [...] No! We shouldn’t be apologising for having fewer women in a sector in which men naturally perform better
His argument boils down to “men and women are different, men are better at tech, deal with it”. This is bullshit. Here’s why.
Milo seems to think that technology is a pure meritocracy, and that we can therefore say that because there are fewer women in tech we can draw the conclusion that women are not as good at it as men. But this argument doesn’t fly.
While women are under-represented, there are also comparatively few people from ethnic minorities in programming jobs in the UK. However there are quite a lot of people from ethnic minorities working in more lowly (i.e. less well paid) technology jobs like first line support and so on.
Are we therefore to draw the conclusion that white people are genetically best suited to be programmers? Of course not. Descrimination is there at every level of tech, just as it is with so many other walks of life. Programmers in the UK are overwhelmingly white, male and under forty.
Over the course of my career, I’ve had discussions with colleagues about whether a candidate is “too old”, has “good enough English” (which is code for “white”) and more. I’ve had people ask me “did she have big tits?” after interviewing a woman for a development or project management job. I’ve been told that a candidate is “interesting”, with a coy little wink, which is code for “gay”. I’ve seen pats on the bum, “morning, beautiful” and other clearly sexist acts. These things have come from senior people as often as not. They are normally laughed off as being nothing harmful, just a bit of fun. If women can’t take them then “they don’t fit in”. These prejudices are there and they need to be attacked.
We also need to constantly remind ourselves that technology is, on the whole, quite shit. Large-scale software development is still incredibly hard and huge numbers, perhaps even the majority, of projects fail. We have no laurels to rest on. The technology industry needs to change, and increased diversity can only be a good thing.
Of course this is only my experience – nearly 20 years of it now – but I’ve worked with brilliant female developers as well as crap ones, just as I’ve worked with both brilliant and crap male developers. Brilliant developers are *very* rare, and the difference is not in the chromosomes.
It’s not that long since we debated whether “allowing” women into the Vienna Philharmonic would change the orchestra’s distinctive sound (it didn’t), or whether women were capable of running a marathon (they are). These barriers have been torn down and exposed for the simple sexism they were. The same needs to happen in the tech industry, and the sooner it happens, the better.
An Open Letter to Flavio Briatore and the Board of QPR
Dear Mr Briatore,
I’m not a lifelong QPR fan, but I’ve held a season ticket for several years, and for much of that time, the football has been dreadful. The facilities are no better: my seat has an obstructed view of the goal and the seats in front of me cut into my knees like razors. I’ve been to hundreds of games at Loftus Road, and I’ve travelled to Leeds, Manchester, Barnsley, Sheffield, Brentford, Southend, Gillingham, Swindon, Bristol and plenty of other places to support my team, often standing in the rain, more often than not seeing us get beaten. In the course of all this, I have spent thousands of pounds on tickets, travel, overpriced and low quality pies, access to the QPR World website, replica kit, car stickers, scarves, hats, gloves, mugs and matchday programmes.
Here’s what you might find difficult to understand: I loved it.
When, eighteen months ago, you and Mr Ecclestone announced that you would be buying QPR, I was cautiously optimistic. Here were people who were pragmatists, with a track record of success in sport, and a proven ability to turn also-rans into champions. I thought it was just what QPR needed if we (notice how I say ‘we’ – it’s my club too) were to ever get out of the stagnant position we were in. I could not have been more wrong.
Your decision to dismiss Paolo Sousa is the last straw and, as a result, I have taken the difficult decision to not renew my season ticket and to not attend any games next season. Let me be clear: I am, unlike many QPR fans, in the fortunate position of being easily able afford to buy the season ticket, I’m just choosing not to buy it because of your actions.
I’ve taken this decision because I believe it is the only message you will understand. Appeals to your sense of fairness, to the spirit of the club, to the faith shown by the supporters, all these things have no effect on you. What you will understand is empty seats, unsold tickets and a dodgy-looking P&L.
You’ve already suffered the embarrassment of seeing your new luxury seating area completely empty during recent games – seats you put in at the expense of long-time QPR fans with families. Now, I suspect will suffer the further indignity of seeing large parts of the stadium being empty as well.
In stark contrast to your own behaviour towards the various managers you’ve hired and fired in the last year and a half, I have publicly supported you and tried to make a case for what you say you are trying to achieve. But you have failed, because you have, with incredible arrogance, decided that the way to run a football club is whatever way you think is best, without any regard for the way other successful clubs are run. As a result, you have made the club into a laughing stock.
You act like a dictator, which is fine as far as it goes, but you forget that all dictators stand or fall on one thing: whether they can make the trains run on time. You are running a service that makes the bad old days of British Rail look like a model of efficiency.
None of this is helped by the way you refuse to address the fans directly, or to answer legitimate questions about the way the club is being run. That’s fine if everything is going well – people will put up with it – but not when things are going badly, or when your decisions consistently make things worse.
Let me be absolutely clear: my decision is based not on performances on the pitch. I’ve seen enough diabolical football at Loftus Road to put up with pretty much anything. No, I’ve taken this step entirely because of your highhanded behaviour towards fans, managers and players. I’d prefer it if we were rid of you and your friends, even if it meant us going back to the stone-age.
So: I will not spend one penny on QPR tickets or merchandise for the whole of the 2009-10 season, even if we make it to the playoffs or a cup final, and I will decide in April 2010 whether to extend my boycott for a further year. I urge all QPR fans to do the same.
Yours sincerely,
James Higgs
Shrinker: Simple URL shortening for Mac OS X
After several years, mainly of inactivity, I recently released a beta of Shrinker, my Mac OS X app that makes using services like is.gd, bit.ly, TinyURL and tr.im a whole lot easier.
If you want to try out the beta, head on over to the product page at Puffing Bear and download it today.
I will hopefully be ready to release a version 1.0 of Shrinker fairly shortly. It’ll be free in the sense of “free beer”. Its primary purpose was as a learning project for me, so I’m not interested in opening the source at the moment. That doesn’t mean I won’t be at some point in the future, though.
I’m making it free for a few reasons. First, I don’t think I’d make any meaningful amount of money out of it. Second, it was conceived as a learning project for me, and to scratch my own itch – a lack of a similar tool for the Mac. And, finally, I’ve received so much wonderful help from the Mac developer community, both directly and through searching blogs and mailing list archives, that I felt I should try to contribute something back. I haven’t got around to it yet, but there I’ll put a full list of acknowledgements in the About panel and on the website before I release version 1.0
I hope you like Shrinker, and please let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.
How the Newspaper Industry today is like the Soviet Union, circa 1989
As child growing up in the 70s and 80s, the Soviet Union appeared to be a highly organised and terrifying thing. Its people thought with one mind, and acted with one will. It was indestructible. Today, this idea seems demented.
Looking back at it now, the seeds of its destruction were sown in the early Brezhnev era. It just took a long time for the internal contradictions of their economic and political model to make the whole thing unsustainable.
Leading Soviet thinkers of the time – and it tells its own story that Yuri Andropov, one of the hardest of hardliners, was one of them – thought that the answer was reform. Eventually, after the hiatus of Chernenko’s brief period as General Secretary, Gorbachev emerged as the leader who everyone thought had the vision to bring about the changes that were needed.
Thanks to Gorby, the West’s Russian vocabulary extended from ‘Da’ and ‘Niet’ to include the words ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (restructuring). Whereas Stalin, had he been alive, would almost certainly have thought the solution was an intensification of repression, and a retreat to the core values of the movement, Gorbachev thought that he could prop up the system by making it more like the West.
We know today that the Soviet Union collapsed six years after Gorbachev came to power, mainly as a result of the fact that glasnost could not be reconciled with keeping people like Andrei Sakharov and Nathan Sharansky prisoner, or maintaining the ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’ – what Westerners called ‘the wall’ – and the blatantly obvious fact that Soviet shops were empty and its people starving.
We will never know if it could have survived longer had the hardliners had their way, for example if the 1991 coup had been successful, or if someone other than Gorbachev had come to power in 1985. But what we do know is that genuine hardliners like Andropov – a man who’d been head of the KGB for years before he became General Secretary – thought that modernisation was the only way to survive.
With that lengthy exposition out of the way, let’s consider how this situation is directly analogous to the newspaper business of today.
At the start of this decade, the emerging consensus was that the newspaper industry had to modernise itself to adapt to the emergence of the internet: careful reform was the order of the day. Sales of physical papers were starting to slow, and requiring people to pay to access the content online wasn’t working. Even registration-walls (which should really be called spam-walls) were enough to make people look elsewhere. Fewer and fewer people were coming into contact with newspaper content.
The industry was faced with two options: retrench or modernise. It’s not clear exactly what they could have done to retrench. Probably, it would have involved cutting the number of sections in the paper and saving cost in order to bring the core content to a reduced readership. This wasn’t seen as viable because enough people could see that the internet was going to win eventually anyway. Retrenchment would have meant a very quick decline, and it was becoming obvious that, at some point in the reasonably near future, physical newspapers were going to cease to exist.
Which left just one option: modernise. And modernisation meant the internet.
Just as Gorbachev thought he was being daring by introducing small reforms, so the newspapers trumpeted their new clothes. A comment form here, a web-first story there. And it looked like it was working. As the pay- and registration-walls gradually came down, newspaper websites started to see huge growth in traffic, especially when they learned the dark arts of search engine optimisation (SEO).
But what they didn’t see, or at least ignored at the time, was the inherent lack of logic in this approach. They didn’t appreciate the fundamental differences between their old model, where they had control of every inch of the product, and the new one, where they could only expect to be a small part of a user’s daily experience of the web. Many newspaper websites have terms and conditions that explicitly forbid ‘deep linking’ without written permission, which is the equivalent of asking people round to dinner and then turning all the lights off and hiding in the airing cupboard.
The key word is there in that previous paragraph: users. Newspaper readers are not users. Newspapers had got very good at putting together a package of roughly accurate potted summaries of the previous day’s happenings, information that a single person could not possibly have put together for themselves. Today’s users are completely different. The time when people went to a site to see what was new has surely gone for ever. It is now possible to imagine, in the very near future, a service that can select relevant content as well as, or even better than, a newspaper’s editorial team can now.
Today, we are able to read expert, in-depth and free coverage of events on blogs and other sites that often far surpasses newspaper coverage for detail, quality and accuracy. If you follow a non-Premiership football team, for example, there’s nothing in the mainstream press for you except for the very biggest stories, which you will probably already know more about than the paper does by the time they print it or put it on their website.
If you’re remotely interested in technology, newspapers will have nothing of interest for you at all. These days they’re all abuzz about Twitter, but anyone with an interest in social media has known about it and used it – literally – for years.
Even breaking news – an area that traditional media organisations used to excel in – has gone. Of all the breaking news I heard in the last year, all but one story come to my attention via Twitter. Did you know there was an earthquake in Carlifornia on Monday, at around 6:30 UK time? I did, because I was using Twitter. Follow-up reports kept coming in every few minutes, so there was no need even to look for follow-up stories online. The same is true for the plane crashing in the Hudson, the first picture of which was on Twitpic. News organisations have become the middleman, when there’s no barrier to people getting news direct from the source.
One possibility no one thought of in the Soviet Union of 1985 was a truly radical approach to modernisation. What if they had seen the inevitability of collapse and made policies to accelerate it, even to embrace it? To out-west the west? It was unthinkable then, because the fundamental aim was to preserve Soviet Power (although of course the Soviets, in the word’s literal meaning of “local workers’ committee”, actually had no power at all). But any programme of reform that resulted in the end of Soviet Power was unacceptable to them, which is how they came to think there were only two options. The point of the CPSU was to preserve the CPSU.
Today, you see the equivalent of glasnost on newspaper websites across the world. The LA Times tried a wiki, the Telegraph are using Twitterfall, the Guardian have created an ‘open’ API, and so on. But the internal logic is that the content that people care about is coming from elsewhere, and the newspapers’ opening themselves to it will only hasten their decline. The recent calls for the reintroduction of paywalls are the newspaper equivalent of the 1991 coup, which was the hardliners’ attempt to deny reality.
As with the Soviet Union, it will be economic issues that are blamed for the collapse of the newspaper industry. But the recession, and the attendant collapse of print advertising revenues have only had the effect of speeding up the inevitable.
