[dmkirwan]

If you were shocked that this is only happening now, I'd highly recommend reading or listening to the book "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado-Perez. She highlights instances of this across many industries. I think that it's particularly relevant to software engineers, or anybody else who has a chance of unintentionally introducing bias into a system.

[chroma]

I disagree. If you get to a part of the book where you have some knowledge of the industry she's criticizing, it's clear how mistaken is. For example, her bit about phone sizes was glaringly bad. She thinks that every phone manufacturer is sexist and builds large phones which don't work as well with women's smaller hands. While the hand size thing is obviously true, women prefer larger phones because larger phones have better battery life, better hardware specs, and better cameras. And since most women carry purses, their phone choice isn't constrained by pocket sizes.

If women really did want smaller phones, then the iPhone Mini would have sold far more than it did. But phone size is a tradeoff, and smaller phones are a niche product due to their worse specs. It's as simple as that. No industry-wide sexism is involved.

[prydwen]

+1, this book was an eye opener and a bit of a slap in the face