The Problem with the Lack of Women in Tech Is Men
Something seems a bit off about the geek-cred timeline flashed at the beginning:<p><i>I had my first email address in 1989. It was via Prodigy.<p>Then, a year or two later, we got AOL. My email was kelly at aol dot com.<p>(Yes, for those wondering, I kick my ass nearly every day for deleting that account for something cute and trendy, as a 10 year old would.)<p>Also, when I was 10, I designed my first website. One of many I would learn to code the hard way, via raw HTML and CSS.</i><p>According to Wikipedia, CSS first came out around &#x27;96. HTML around &#x27;93.<p>So, if the author was at the forefront of technology, and made her first web page with CSS, she would&#x27;ve been born around &#x27;86. Or, more generously, maybe she just used tables and had been born in &#x27;83. Either way, she would&#x27;ve had an email address in when was 3 or 6 years old, depending on which of the above is true.<p>Or, you know, she&#x27;s just recounting this all wrong.<p>There is very little programming involved in CSS&#x2F;HTML. I respect design work, but conflating that with development is not helping her case.<p>~<p>At no point in this article did the author bother to make a clear distinction between the &quot;tech industry&quot; made up of hardworking developers and engineers and sysadmins and managers and the &quot;tech industry&quot; made up of spammy blog writers and advertising folks and feel-good event coordinators and media strategists.<p>I don&#x27;t mind having a frank discussion about the shortcomings--of which there are many!--in how engineering cultures handle diversity. I do, however, greatly dislike being tarred with the same brush as the dudebros who infest more business-oriented cultures by a writer too lazy or complacent to articulate her biased perspective and who has as much to do with technology as Medium does with RFCs.