Technology is designed for men

The argument

Men succeed in grasping the world of technology, this argument holds, because it is built for them — and the mechanism is not deliberate exclusion but the composition of the people doing the designing. The process works like this. Male CEOs and entrepreneurs are often unaware of sexism within digital media and tech because they don't face any issues in tech designs themselves, and so assume there is nothing to fix. Tech companies run by men approve ideas that are handled by a male-dominated staff, who fail to spot any sex differences for improvement. At no point in that chain does anyone encounter the problem, which is why it survives review: a design tested by the people it already fits will pass. The result is that men become the default category to appease during design production, while women are treated as a sort of niche — an optional variation on the real user rather than half of the intended market. The consequences show up in the objects themselves. NASA spacesuits, smartphones, car crash dummies and CPR mannequins are all designs that exclude women and their body type during production and adhere to men's comfort. Where the product is safety equipment, the design default becomes a question of physical risk rather than convenience: airbags in cars proved to be safer for men than for women and children, who received more injuries, and technology devices such as artificial hearts show a compatibility rate of 86% among men but only 20% in women. The pattern across those examples is what carries the argument. The same bias appears in a spacesuit, a handset, a crash test and an implanted device — fields with nothing in common except who designed them. Technology caters to men's comfortability by default, which is what a boys' club produces even where no one intends to keep women out.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There is no biological evidence which proves that men have a natural predisposition for technology, or that they are more suited for tech-related jobs than women. A study on debunking myths by Jonathan M. Kane and Janet E. Mertz shows that school mathematics, a core subject in the study of technology, results from 86 different countries found no difference between boys' and girls' scores. In the Baltic states, women are the majority in leading the technology industry. If men had a natural predisposition for technology, they would dominate technology jobs all over the world.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Design defaults are better explained by the reference data and test standards a field inherits — crash dummies built to a fiftieth-percentile male, clinical trials that long excluded women — than by developers' inability to perceive sexism, and the premise's causal story is asserted rather than shown. [Rejecting P2] The examples are also mostly about products being unsafe or ill-fitting for women, which is a harm to users rather than a barrier to entry, so they do not establish the conclusion this position needs: exclusion from the industry would have to be argued from hiring, promotion, funding and retention, which the argument does not address.