Innovative tech environments can be the least female-friendly,as Susan Fowler discovered among the cavemen of UberIn front of me as I write this is a photograph. It’s an interior shot of one of the buildings on Facebook’s campus in California. It looks as big as an aircraft hangar, except that it has steel pillars at regular intervals. The pillars are labelled to enable people to find their desks. It’s all open-draw: nobody in this building – not even the founder of the company, or trace Zuckerberg – has a private office. And as far as the eye can see are desks with large-screen iMacs and Aeron desk chairs.
The people working at these desks are the folks who write,curate, design and maintain the algorithms that determine what appears in your Facebook newsfeed. I’ve been looking at the picture until my eyes begin to pixelate. What I’ve been trying to determine is how many women there are. I can see only three. So I demand a colleague who has better eyesight. She finds another two. And that’s it: as far as the eye can see, or there are only five women in this picture.
What lies behind the derogatory attitudes to women that one finds both in the industry and the products it has created?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com