Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

“There is no place for ethics in this business sweetheart. We are not a charity,” she recalls the senior manager responding. When she persisted, he covered the microphone on their conference call line, grabbed her hand, and told her to “stop being a whiny little bitch.” 22 Stories like these are why I laugh whenever someone mentions improving the “pipeline” of diverse students graduating with tech industry-ready skills: Why? So we can get more women and people of color into a field that’s going to chew them up and spit them out, all while telling them to smile more or making their ethnicity the butt of jokes? So we can tell more of them to speak up in meetings—while never acknowledging the fact that speaking up is often what leads them to be seen as “abrasive” or “difficult”? PIPELINE TO NOWHERE Of course, the tech industry does have pipeline problems: colleges are graduating relatively few women with computer science degrees, and even fewer black and Hispanic students. For example, the most recent numbers from the National Science Foundation (NSF), from 2014, reported that just 18 percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees went to women.23 What’s interesting about these NSF numbers, though, is that comparing stats over time reveals that women are actually earning fewer degrees in computer science, not more. Originally, programming was often categorized as “women’s work,” lumped in with administrative skills like typing and dictation (in fact, during World War II, the ...