Women Had Nothing to Do with the Founding of the Web, Says Mashable

http://www.audreywatters.com/2010/07/04/women-had-nothing-to-do-with-the-founding-of-the-web-says-mashable/

by kinlane • 16 years ago

10 13 16 years ago

benwr• 16 years ago

Someone kick me if this isn't progressive enough, but I don't think any of the women listed really should have been on the list. The others are figureheads for web-focused projects. None of the women listed (with the exception of Sally Floyd, whom I've never heard of. I might just be ignorant) were really at all involved directly with the web. Even Java isn't primarily a web platform.

I'm more disturbed that those are the best examples the poster can come up with. Are there other women who really should have been listed in the article? If so, terrific. If not, why not? Is there an underlying problem with the hacker image that should be fixed?

ojbyrne• 16 years ago

It's a pathetic list, and proves the opposite of what it intended to. Basically women aren't generally willing to devote their lives to the kind of intellectual pursuits that 90% of the time end up with you being poor, downtrodden, old and alone. They just play the odds better. They give up the top 10% to avoid the bottom 10%. And then they write articles about how they're excluded from the top 10% because of their gender.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

It's not like it's the first time humans have begrudged another's success and completely ignored the risks that person took, and the sheer number of fellows who fell along the way.

Perhaps the best example will be war heros; one of these days, someone is going to complain about how there aren't enough female war heroes. Hopefully then, even the hero himself will be pointing out how many of his comrades didn't make it that far, and it will be clear to all that it's a question of risk/reward, not sexism.

fleitz• 16 years ago

Lets not bring reason into a tautology.

The purpose of the post was to take a feeling and find facts that are tangentially related to the issue at hand.

M_Sanger• 16 years ago

"Basically women aren't generally willing to devote their lives to the kind of intellectual pursuits that 90% of the time poor, downtrodden, old and alone."

But women are totally willing to devote their lives to the kind of pursuits like caring for the children, sick, and elderly in their family that 90% of the time result in them being poor, downtrodden, old, and alone. They just play the odds better by doing work and not getting paid for it. And then on top of that, they write articles about how it sucks. These women are getting out of control!

I think the list was right to include only men. But your idea that women aren't willing to devote their lives to intellectual pursuits 90% of the time is disgusting. Most people only paid for their sons to be educated. What kind of intellectual pursuits from 90% of women would you expect to magically appear from that scenario? Now that it's acceptable for women to be educated. They make up 55% of college students, so we can probably expect more contributions in the future. Sure computer science and engineering are severely lagging, and it will take some time and effort to introduce that field to more women, but it's not because "women aren't willing to devote their lives to those kinds of intellectual pursuits"

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

It suffers from the same problems as trying to represent the 'myriad' of women in hard sciences, particularly physics.

The simple fact that you know every single time Marie Curie will top the list, followed by 2-4 names, says something about the abundance of ground-breaking female physicists. If there were enough of them, there would be debates as to who was most awesome, and Curie would not make the list every time.

(In biology on the other hand, I'm pretty sure women have made a much larger contribution!)

tzs• 16 years ago

That was pretty dumb. She finds most troubling the omission of the woman who was project manager for Java. If Java were to be represented on the list, in what universe would the project manager be the person to represent it, as opposed to say someone like Gosling?

jgrahamc• 16 years ago

Strange article. She appears to argue for her own title and against the notion that women were involved in founding the web by presenting a lame and irrelevant list of geek ladies.

Given that the mashable list included the LiveJournal founder she'd have been safer suggesting Caterina Fake than Kim Polese.

chc• 16 years ago

This article is what they used to call "putting the cart before the horse." She starts out with the assumption that women must have been just as influential in creating the modern Web, based on that assumption condemns this other woman (!) for her patriarchal views, and then — still working from her original assumption — offers a list of women who should have been included. The fact that none of these women had much to do with creating the Web is irrelevant, because it's an a priori fact that women deserve to be on the list.

It's basically an unintentional reductio ad absurdum.

I'm all for giving credit where credit is due. I think Ada Lovelace should be an inspiration to all hackers. But she had nothing to do with the Web. Trying to shoehorn women into a list that no woman rightfully belongs on is desperate at best and patronizing at worst.

gxti• 16 years ago

Every time someone brings up "exclusionary language" or calls a word sexist, I roll my eyes and long for feminists to collectively declare victory and leave the field so humanity as a whole can move on.

Young women aren't put off by the phrase "founding fathers", not even the tiniest bit. Maybe the root cause of the gender imbalance is biological or maybe it's political, but the one thing I'm certain of is that pieces like this only serve to reinforce perceptions of inequality. Do something positive instead -- get kids involved in engineering and computer science.

grasshoper• 16 years ago

Her list is ridiculous. The male equivalent would be Alan Turing, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, a guy who worked on TCP, and, I dunno, Guido Van Rossum's boss or something. The true founders of the internet.

The original list is kinda silly too. Three spots for PHP? Really? PHP is important, but not that important and shouldn't even be above JavaScript anyways.

jkmcf• 16 years ago

Ironically, the Mashable article is written by a woman, though who knows how much control she had over the list and title.

lleger• 16 years ago

This article is indicative of a culture that has become far too focused on being "politically correct" and less focused on everything else. Seriously? This is ridiculous. "Founding fathers" is neither elitist nor sexist. It's a phrase that doesn't evoke any sex at all — it simply means a person who helped start something. Please, just grow up.

Women Had Nothing to Do with the Founding of the Web, Says Mashable

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