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Journalist and author Caitlin Moran has spoken about why she urges young women to learn how to program.
Speaking to Johnny Hornby, the founder of The & Partnership, during a session at Cannes, Moran said: “Over 90 per cent of programmers are male. If we knew in 20 years’ time that the universal language on this planet would be Chinese and only men were learning it, women would be locked out of the conversation.
“The way that we communicate who we think we are will largely be predicated by the technology that we use and if women aren’t in there inventing it and seeing things from a woman’s point of view, we will again be in an entirely male-dominated world.”
Moran also touched on a number of other subjects, including social media.
“At the beginning everyone thought ‘what a great thing this is, it is just infinite voices and infinite information and infinite opinion’. Then after two years of knowing what everyone is thinking and saying you go ‘you know what, that’s not actually what I wanted’. This is the problem with social media: It is ruled by kids. There aren’t really any tribal elders there,” she said.
“If you could point to one thing that’s wrong with social media and the internet is that when things blow up and people are fighting and screaming at each other, you’re just thinking ‘where are the mummy and daddy of the internet to come and tell everybody to calm down?’.”
Speaking about Twitter in particular, Moran said that the social media is endemic of the previously mention statistic of 90-plus per cent of programmers being men. “We’re only creating a world around men and a male mind-set and things that would be useful to men. If women were inventing a social media platform it would be very different.”
You can watch the full interview with Caitlin Moran across the two videos below:
