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Hacking Technology’s Boys’ Club | The New Republic

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Code is not neutral. It can’t be; it’s a creation. “The engineer’s assumptions and presumptions are in the code,” the writer and programmer Ellen Ullman wrote in a 1995 essay published in Harper’s. “The system reproduces and re-enacts life as engineers know it: alone, out of time, disdainful of anyone far from the machine.” The people who build (and fund) technology products in 2016 look largely the same as they did twenty years ago, when Ullman’s essay was published. White men still dominate the industry, as do white interpretations of diversity. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, however, and it would look very different if it contained the “assumptions and presumptions” of multiple demographics. Software products would be more powerful, more accessible, and more democratic—Twitter, for example, would look a lot different today if it had been built by people for whom online harassment is a real-life concern. Lately, this idea has been gaining traction. Leslie Miley, a prominent en

Marion Ettlinger Code is not neutral. It can’t be; it’s a creation. “The engineer’s assumptions and presumptions are in the code,” the writer and programmer Ellen Ullman wrote in a 1995 essay published in Harper’s . “The system reproduces and re-enacts life as engineers know it: alone, out of time, disdainful of anyone far from the machine.” The people who build (and fund) technology products in 2016 look largely the same as they did twenty years ago, when Ullman’s essay was published. White men still dominate the industry, as do white interpretations of diversity. Technology doesn’t exist in

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