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…
