‘Positive discrimination’ is discrimination all the same. The algorithm shouldn’t include any reference to race, age, or sex. Medium should base it on non-discriminatory factors: the number of likes, the number of views, the number of recommendations, the number of followers, the number of reads, the number of shares, tags, keywords in the content (maybe with weight given to headings), etc.

If the algorithm is like this, the fact that you don’t see many women on Medium is not Medium’s fault; it’s a social problem. We should encourage women to write and publish on this platform as well as others.

If the algorithm does factor in race, age, and sex in any way; Medium have a lot of explaining to do. It would be objectively wrong for Medium’s algorithm to factor in these variables in a way that favoured women over men or men over women.

For me, I feel that my Medium feed has a good balance of men and women, considering the industry that I mainly follow (web design and development) is notoriously unbalanced. That’s another problem itself, but again, not Medium’s fault!

Update: Tracy Russo, I’ve thoroughly checked my Medium profile settings, and I cannot see a ‘gender’ setting anywhere here. So I’m left wondering, just how do you suppose Medium factors this into their ‘sexist’ recommendations algorithm?