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Silicon Valley has a Brogrammer Problem. ~ @motherjones


Stashed in: Women, Siri, Sexism, inequality

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I discovered the @motherjones article from a tweet from @triketora :

A bros-only atmosphere will hurt no one more than the startups that foster it.

This manifests itself in the products Silicon Valley companies create.

Consider Siri, the voice-activated "secretary" built into all new iPhones. She's great at helping locate nearby prostitutes and drugstores stocking Viagra, but when blogger Amanda Marcotte tried to get her to find abortion providers and birth control, Siri came up empty. "Siri's programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal," Marcotte wrote, "and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female."

The article concludes with a storify of brogrammer lowlights.

I, for one, am ashamed of Silicon Valley for not denouncing this bad behavior more.

It's up to us to police ourselves.

Is there a single human being on this planet stupid enough to think that any woman wants to be referred to PROUDLY as a "hogrammer"?!?!?!

Brogrammers think saying something like that is funny.

And that's why the brogrammer culture has to end.

Brogrammers are way too tolerant of obnoxious sexism disguised as humor.

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