If something is said to be gendered it is said to express stereotypical traits of one gender or to be biased towards preferring one single gender. In June, the Charlatan received a letter saying the Internet, or specifically tech fields, were gendered and favour men over all other genders.
The author of this letter stated tech fields are male-dominated and, because of that, male preferences are translated into their work in the field. Apparently, this means it should come as no surprise that the Internet is apparently sexist, racist, etc., since men code it and those men would inevitably put their ideas into their work and finished projects.
If you’re a male with any sense of dignity, I hope you got angry at that implication.
If having a discrepancy in gender makes something sexist or racist (which, in my opinion, it does not) then feminism is sexist. After all, most people who are active in the feminist movement are women. Is nursing sexist and racist? What about teaching?
By this logic, every field is discriminatory. This is because you will never have a 50/50 gender split for many reasons. The primary reason of course is that men and women are sexually dimorphic beings—we’re different in our desires and interests.
Equality is not having equal outcome, it is having equal opportunity. Women can become anything they like as the law says they can. The problem however, if one can call it that, is that women just don’t seem interested in certain fields as a whole. The same goes for men.
The Internet is not gendered by population. Time after time studies show men and women use the Internet equally or damned near close to equally. The tech field on the other hand, those who write the code and make the products, are mostly male.
So while men and women are using the Internet equally, the Internet provides more for men than women, you may argue.
Well, no. Surely there are sites for males that don’t have female equivalents, and I can tell you why: money.
Websites aren’t free, you need to pay server costs and dedicate time and resources to debugging, maintaining stability, and adding new features. If no one is using the service, your site doesn’t generate revenue and can’t thrive. If it does somehow thrive, you only have so much time and power to work with; you can’t solve every issue right away. You need to prioritize and take things one at a time.
What’s more important: information security and user interfaces, or trying to pander to a small minority who don’t like being described on a binary? If a site does have the money and time, like for instance Facebook, why don’t they do everything for everyone? Why not add all these features? The sad reality is that you can’t please everyone, nor can you be sure the usage of the service will pay the cost.
A business model based on throwing away money to pander to one per cent of the population will not thrive. Will the daily cost of adding X or Y add revenue to over it? Often times it does not.There are sites a small number of men want, but can’t get because the market just isn’t big enough to support it. The same applies for women. We can’t all get what we want. It’s supply and demand. Gender or race or whatever plays no or little role here, it’s all about what sells. The Internet and all of technology are tools and services without preference and without bias.
You can point to any single example or any number of tweets or posts devoid of context and try to use it as proof of a bias, but when you take every example you’ll find that both men and women are treated equally in this regard. The issue is not sex, nor race, nor any other identifier that you want; it is all about market influence.
And like the infrastructure, the people who use it, as kind or as cruel as they sometimes are, is not proof of gendering or racism or whatever. Individual examples may be, but the whole is not.
Technology is not a gender issue nor is it gendered. It is, like all services, an issue of supply and demand—of money. Calling it gendered is a misrepresentation of the issue at best and deception at worst.
— Brian Youden
Third-year biochemistry and biotechnology
