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(For the avoidance of doubt, I agree with you, I'm just expanding on your thoughts...) You can have effects working both ways at once. A lot of world-class woman scientists seem to wind up working in either brand-new or highly interdisciplinary areas; certainly statistically more than you would expect. I hypothesize that, based off my own (anecdotal) experience, this is (in part) because many of the major departments are eye-wateringly bigoted, sexist environments. Male-dominated environments playing power games are, largely, pretty awful places and one of the power games which gets played a lot is sex discrimination up to sexual harassment. You see the kind of egregious shit you see in Silicon Valley just as frequently in academe. It's pretty awful. I suspect – again, based off what I've seen and what I've heard from people who were there – something similar may have been going on in the early days of programming. When it was a wide-open new field, there was less in the way of straight-up power games because there wasn't wider societal prestige to be won. So it was more hospitable to out-groups than the other professions fishing in the same hiring pool, e.g. wider engineering and science. But then, over timer, perceived prestige came in, and with it came the status games you find everywhere perceived prestige is, and... vicious cycle. Incidentally, for anyone who hasn't observed this kind of phenomenon before, this is pretty much how patriarchy works. Interlocking systems of power create perverse incentives which, in turn, reinforce those same systems. As far as I'm concerned, speaking bluntly, these days there are people who get intersectional feminism and there are people who are just not paying attention to how things work. There's not much middle-ground. I don't expect that to be a hugely popular viewpoint on HN, but, y'know, I'll live. |
These things have their place and if you get lucky (unlucky?) you get a Steve Jobs or perhaps a Travis Kalanik or Jeff Bezos, and you get a predator culture where the company is galvanized to beat the other guys up. Or you get a collective culture where this behavior is all you want and the main thing to reward…
However, looking at it on the larger scale, the more open systems (say, the birth of the personal computer industry that produced a Jobs and Wozniak) could be seen as less competitive, more 'feminine' boom times where cooperation and networking weren't eclipsed by raw power. In those 'less male' times more overall progress was made and the foundations were laid for the big dick-swingin' companies that would come to dominate. Perhaps without times like that, you don't even get the Jobs and Bezos and Kalanik.
Pretty strong argument in favor of open development: though even that will inevitably find ways to turn competitive and be directed by the most dominant. But if the principle is one of extending a common body of understanding, that remains more broadly available.