Questões de Concurso

     Tracy Chou is a 31-year-old programmer — and “an absolute rock star,” as her former boss Ben Silbermann, the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, once said. Yet for all her street cred, Chou still finds herself grappling with one of the biggest problems in the industry: Female programmers are regarded skeptically, and sometimes even treated with flat-out hostility. She’s seen the same pattern of behavior personally during her decade in coding: colleagues who muse openly about whether women are biologically less wired to be great programmers.

       There’s a deep irony here — because women were in computing from its earliest days. Indeed, they were considered essential back when “computers” were not even yet machines. Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans. And for a time, a large portion of them were women.

      Soon, the human computers faced an even more existential threat: digital computers, which promised to work with far greater speed and to handle complex math.

         Women, though, were among the original coders of these strange new digital brains, because in the early days programming was seen as dull work. The earliest programmers for the Eniac — the military-funded first programmable general-purpose computer — were entirely women. And though they wound up inventing brilliant coding techniques, they received none of the glory: When the Army showed off the Eniac to the press, it did not introduce the women who had written the code.

Internet: <smithsonianmag.com>(adapted).

          As new technologies take on increasingly humanlike qualities, there’s been a push to make them genderless. Apple’s Siri digital assistant unveiled a gender-neutral option last year, and when asked about their gender identities, the AI chatbots ChatGPT and Google Bard each reply, “I do not have a gender.”

     There have been concerns over gendering technology, since doing so reinforces societal stereotypes. That happens because the stereotypes commonly associated with men, such as competitiveness and dominance, are more valued than those associated with women. That is likely true, says Ashley Martin, a professor at Stanford University. “People are stereotyping their gendered objects in very traditional ways,” she says.

          Removing gender from the picture altogether seems like a simple way to fix this. Yet, as Martin has found in her latest research, conducted with Malia Mason, of Columbia Universty, gender is one of the fundamental ways people form connections with objects, particularly those designed to evoke human characteristics.

          Throughout the experiments, Martin and Mason found that gender increased users’ feelings of attachment to devices such as digital voice assistants –– and their interest in purchasing them. For example, participants said they would be less likely to buy a genderless voice assistant than versions with male or female voices.

Hope Reese. Is That Self-Driving Car a Boy or a Girl? In: Insights by Stanford Business. Internet:<http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/>  (adapted)