A 60 Minutes Story on Gender Equality Accidentally Proved the Persistence of Patriarchy

Over at Quartz, Ephrat Livni reports that a 60 Minutes story about gender equality accidentally proved the persistence of patriarchy. Reader theodp shares the report: Good intentions are nice, but they aren't enough, the TV news show 60 Minutes recently proved. The show's producers apparently meant well when they decided to do a segment on women in technology and the gender gap, which aired on March 4. But they ended up punching women in the gut, as the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, puts it in her response to the segment. Ultimately, 60 Minutes featured a man, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. His [tech-backed] organization's mission is to expand access to computer science education in schools.

Women technologists like Saujani who were tapped to appear on the show about a year ago and worked with producers to provide research and interviews, ended up on the cutting room floor while Partovi spoke on their behalf. Here is the cruel irony: As a result, 60 Minutes' segment was accidentally exceptionally effective-it proved that women in tech really can't catch a break. Ayah Bdeir, the founder of STEM learning toy company littleBits, also responded to the episode in a Medium post. She noted that she worked with 60 Minutes for a year, planning interviews, providing research, talking to the producers and reporters, telling her story and that of her organization, which is focused on closing the gender gap in technology. Yet producers wrote to her last August to say that the focus of the segment had shifted and that littleBits would no longer be central in the story. In an email, a producer explained to her, 'It's not that the important points you made in your interview are ignored in the story, or that you didn't make them very effectively, they're just made by others'.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.