Re:Are We An Unjust People?
by mxfh on Thursday March 21, 2013 @09:17PM
(#5420715)
I'm afraid this is a pattern in the history of technology, we as a society, have yet to overcome:
As along as it's experimental women are welcome (or at worst ignored) by the early adopter community. When it's proven to be economically lucrative, new players enter the field, turf war behavior kicks and - consciously or not - nothing seems easier than driving out a good part of potential rivals by resorting to means like sexism.
This happened in early film [1], early computing (ENIAC) [2] and now in seemingly every small programming sub-community on it's own. I'm just tired of waiting for this to end. We loose so much as a whole, by letting a small subset of people with the most reckless of tactics win again and again.
As along as it's experimental women are welcome (or at worst ignored) by the early adopter community. When it's proven to be economically lucrative, new players enter the field, turf war behavior kicks and - consciously or not - nothing seems easier than driving out a good part of potential rivals by resorting to means like sexism.
This happened in early film [1], early computing (ENIAC) [2] and now in seemingly every small programming sub-community on it's own. I'm just tired of waiting for this to end. We loose so much as a whole, by letting a small subset of people with the most reckless of tactics win again and again.
[1] http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781421402093
[2] http://xplqa30.ieee.org/xpl/bkabstractplus.jsp?bkn=6451065