I used to work at Apple back in the 90s, and we did have a diverse development team (software). I thought it was a pretty okay place to work (although a bit chaotic). Less sexist than other companies where I worked after that.
But even a diverse team can make dumb, thoughtless decisions that don’t take into consideration the needs of large segments of society.
Bingo.
Well, yeah. But that doesn’t mean diversity on the team is not important.
Those Apple numbers are distorted by the fact that they also include a lot of non-tech employees. If you restrict to tech (those who would be doing the actual designing) the male:female ratio is 3:1. In 2014 the ratio was 4:1.
To get some insight on a theory of mine, I started a poll and thought I’d share it here with anyone who’s interested:
I believe Claudia Goldin of Harvard economics and Nobel fame agrees with those here supporting childcare and its influence on women’s career choices. It’s a big deal that affects not just career choice but apparently wages/compensation as well.
If I may double back a bit: could people try to define “bro” culture, or perhaps what their child experienced with regards to the negative elements of it? Specifically I wanted to see what the manifestation in tech looks like but it think there is nuance being lost by the broadness of the term “bro”.
My thinking has bro culture grouped into several subtypes (and apologies in advance for my clumsy stereotyping… it’s part of reason I’m asking)
Tech as in tech business nowadays seems to be a lot like standard VC behavior, or at least appear heavily influence by that mindset. The culture seems a maturation of the first dotcom ideals. I can see more of the standard “bro-ness” here.
Tech as in tech engineering… well it feels more akin to the medicine/surgery variety to my eyes. It’s more of what I’ve read as the “hacker” ethic (from an old book fittingly called “Hackers” - no nothing to do with the Angelina Jolie movie - or the classic “The soul of a new machine”). This ends up looking meritocratic but still has cliques and seniority hurdles vs a true meritocracy. The idea here again though is that if you’re really good, you’ll gain credibility easily enough.
Now i left out gender in those descriptions since I’m male and perhaps limited in my perception in this regard. Could someone relate if their or their child’s experience lines up with any of the above or was completely different? For those who encountered bias in tech engineering/design does it seem the same as bias due to other forms of bro-ness?
That’s not how it works at Apple or any large tech firm today. Startups are a different story due to their nature, but large company design teams are diverse in skill set, thought, and role - designers, marketing, finance, and yes, engineers.
There’s also academic bro culture, I saw this a lot in Philosophy departments (the kind of Philosophy departments with a lot of crossover to logic, linguistics, and math) and with my friends who are math professors (male) at elite math schools.
Could you please clarify? The numbers I quoted are Apple’s own (from the same resource you used, just restricted to tech vs non-tech.)
The reason I bring it up is that my spouse works for a large design/engineering firm and although the overall pie-chart numbers look “diverse”, in reality there is much less diversity among the group that are making design decisions. Much of the “diversity” comes from HR, assemblers, and cleaning staff.
And yes, their products reflect the lack of team diversity, from what I have seen (products too big for most female hands, products focusing on male medical concerns instead of female.)
This is a good point. And I will also say that even if you have diversity WITHIN the design team itself, this doesn’t necessarily mean that DECISIONS are being made by women (or other diverse elements of the team). I’ve been on lots of design teams where the only person allowed to make real decisions was some guy or a couple of guys.
In some workplace bathrooms, there are soap dispensers, faucet controls, and paper towel dispensers that operate by waving one’s hand at the sensor. What is odd is how different the reliability is – seems like the soap dispensers have the most reliable sensors, the faucet controls usually but not always work, and the paper towel dispensers seem to have poor reliability, even when trying both sides of my hand (lighter palm and darker back) on them several times. One would think that the producers of all of these would choose the more reliable sensors to reduce complaints.
Better known were the airbags that assumed heavier drivers who were tall enough to sit far back enough to have a reasonable distance from the airbag, but were overpowered for smaller drivers, especially short legged ones who moved the seat closer to reach the pedals (more women fell into the latter category). US regulations that required airbags to be powerful enough to provide some restraint for unbelted drivers also contributed to overpowered airbags.
No one knows the composition of the Apple design team that developed the referenced product, but you can use the link I provided to filter on tech, or even better leadership.
Tech companies that I am familiar with, including Apple, use teams from across the company to design and develop new products. The probability that no women are involved is near zero.
Engineers in large companies typically do not design the product, they implement the design.
Perhaps someone should start a company to develop phones for people (of all genders) with small hands - would make a fortune! 
Just to add to the childcare conversation – way back in the early 1990s in Wichita, Kansas of all places, one of the local hospitals ran a daycare for sick children. It was primarily so that nurses did not have to miss work when their children had mild illnesses, but they also opened it up to school district employees. It was so great when my kids weren’t terribly sick, but were in that first 24 hours of starting antibiotics for strep or had a fever and just needed rest. This was before the Chicken Pox vaccine, and I remember that they had a “Chicken Pox room”. Those kids got to mingle and play together. The other kids were in individual rooms and caregivers came around with carts of toys and videos. My kids were rarely there a full day, but often my job required meetings that were scheduled way in advance with a dozen people, and being able to drop them off for a few hours rather than reschedule was so great. I assumed this kind of childcare would be common by now, but I assumed a lot of progress in the childcare sphere would have happened by now. And it seems worse not better for moms in my daughters’ generation. My girls tell me that people are often horrified when they tell about their mom taking them to sick child daycare, but that they thought it was fine. They did not feel abandoned or unloved and they enjoyed the novelty.
This discussion is starting to make me think about one possible reason that a diverse team might not make decisions that take diverse needs into consideration.
Is it possible that women may feel some pressure to avoid speaking up for “woman-friendly” or even “diverse human-friendly” design decisions, so they don’t get pigeonholed as only thinking or caring about those kind of things?
I am thinking about how when I was a graduate student, I really wanted to do a project involving computer processing of human sign language (I won’t go into detail, but it was a super cool idea 
). I went around to different professors trying to get them to be my advisor on this project, but everyone in the department seemed to think that a project that would “help handicapped people” wasn’t serious science. One professor that I really wanted to work with told me, “Science isn’t about helping people. You just want to help disabled people because of your natural maternal instinct. Have you thought about having a family instead?”
Eventually I gave up, and joined a group working on defense department sponsored robots. But I wonder if I would have been able to get more support for my idea if I had been a man, who wouldn’t have appeared to the professors to be someone with a “maternal instinct” motivated by “helping people” rather than pure science?
Yes, this is what I have already done, as mentioned in my post above. Tech is 3:1 male at Apple.
Lol, I will tell my husband that. Apparently he has been doing it all wrong.
Given the increasing prominence of anti-DEI/woke/CRT/etc. politics, that may be a greater concern now than just a few years ago.
Research Apple’s design methodology. It has been studied in depth. May make good reading for your husband. 
My daughter did a co-op at a tech firm back in 2015. She described it as misogynist. Her examples of the “bro culture” were really simple. She would be at a meeting and her female boss would say something and would be completely ignored. Then a male team player would say something and everybody listened. It was very blatant in her opinion.
At least some people in computing seem to be interested in “helping handicapped people”:
Yeah, I definitely think there has been gradual positive progress over the years. Back then, serious AI was supposed to model or replace human intelligence. Working on “human interface” or other human-centered projects was considered just software engineering, not real science.