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A Requiem for the “Women in Tech” Movement
Do women stay away from tech because it doesn’t enable them to solve real-world problems?
This article was inspired by a conversation with fellow Medium user @hollyjahangiri. Big thanks to her insightful comments on this topic.
The tech industry and the problem of “Tech Waste”
Almost by definition, technology is designed to improve the human condition.
And, for the most part, it does — or at least tries to. We can debate how healthy social media ultimately is, we can talk about how much screen time we should limit our kids to, and we can discuss whether the burgeoning Zoom culture is going to bring us closer together or drive us further into isolation. But at the end of the day, most technologies were built to fill some hole in the spectrum of human needs.
The problem is, a lot — I’m going to say most — of tech addresses needs within the cadre of people who are already rich in tech, money, or privilege.
I’ve started calling this category “tech waste,” of which there are a couple of different kinds. Tech waste includes apps that burn through a huge amount of startup capital making small, incremental progress over a competitor or previous version, and result in tech that is mostly redundant, or that has very little large-scale impact (“redundant” or “incremental” tech).
There’s also “tech for tech” or “tech upon tech,” which is technology designed to make existing technology function in a slightly more efficient way or in concert with other software (think seamless software integrations).
And there’s the kind of tech waste that results from making already-rich or already-privileged people richer and more privileged, such as fintech and “money maximization” tech.
It’s harder to find tech targeted at the gaping needs of the world, such as mass hunger, climate change, and systemic racism — and their presence in capital markets is limited to contexts in which social values double as marketing value.
This problem is not really tech’s fault, and it’s not unique to tech — any profitable industry has its share of excess, like financial waste…
