Your "serious" post does raise some issues worth thinking about. While the educational gender gap in math and science has much to do with WWDC's gender gap (Google "math boys girls"), the environment we, the guys, create, doesn't help.
As Mac people, we're supposed to value good design and more human-centric computing. But we developers also have a tendency to dehumanize what we do - for example, every time somebody introduces a new and unnessary acronym (usually overloaded with previous meanings). Is the focus on great design and quality, or on pointless out-geeking the next guy?
Plus, we need to clean up our act socially. For one thing, there's hostility towards female authority figures. During pre-keynote irc chat, I saw two occasions of outright bashing by multiple participants of a female executive who has appeared in previous keynotes. Sure, irc chat is frequently moronic, but I didn't see any male keynote participants of similar stature being bashed. There are biases here (some subtle, some not), and it would help to be more aware of them in ourselves.
by Paul Collins — Aug 11
As Mac people, we're supposed to value good design and more human-centric computing. But we developers also have a tendency to dehumanize what we do - for example, every time somebody introduces a new and unnessary acronym (usually overloaded with previous meanings). Is the focus on great design and quality, or on pointless out-geeking the next guy?
Plus, we need to clean up our act socially. For one thing, there's hostility towards female authority figures. During pre-keynote irc chat, I saw two occasions of outright bashing by multiple participants of a female executive who has appeared in previous keynotes. Sure, irc chat is frequently moronic, but I didn't see any male keynote participants of similar stature being bashed. There are biases here (some subtle, some not), and it would help to be more aware of them in ourselves.