On Feb 11, 2013 11:16 AM, "Louis" <louis.gorenfeld@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> It's entirely possible that we'll see attitudes change in upcoming generations as more people are addicted to computers and catch the bug to want to create software.
Unfortunately, the trend in the industry is toward mobile devices without built-in developer toolkits. Maybe that will change eventually, but for now, you need a computer to write for iOS or Android, and computers will, sooner or later, become specialist tools. This makes it less likely that people will discover the fun of tinkering with software, rather than more. Apple seems to be steering in this direction, by locking iOS and charging for the developer tools. A concrete impact in SuperCollider-land is that now, only a small handful of developers are building and testing in OSX. At present, SuperCollider is better supported in Linux than on the Mac in some ways. But Apple seems not to feel it's a problem that it's becoming harder to do creative things with the platform. A captive audience of content consumers serves business interests better. (Android is not significantly better, though at least the tool set is free afaik.)
> Btw, there's a similar gender discrepancy in electronic music (as far as I've noticed), and that requires no math... There's more going on here than sexism, afaik.
You might not need to work directly with complex math formulas, but audio engineering is highly technical. If someone feels discouraged to pursue technical skills (because of social bias, say), then audio engineering won't be a friendly place as soon as we start talking about filters' frequency responses etc.
My gut feeling is that it's probably too simple to say that the gender disproportion comes entirely from sexism (nurture) or innate differences (nature). There could still end up being a larger number of men in technical fields, even of we could remove all trace of gender bias from parenting and education. If so, I'm at pains to think how human action could change that.
But, if a woman might have become a top studio recordist and producer, or techno producer, or whatever, and she ends up NOT being that because she got the wrong messages from early childhood (and then further unwelcoming messages from music-tech communities), that's a cryin' shame. We all win if we find ways to eliminate social biases that can cause that to happen.
hjh
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