In one tweet, Elon Musk captures the everyday sexism faced by women in STEM
The world’s richest man’s poor sense of humor is exposing how much of a boys’ club tech still is.
In an Oct. 29 tweet, Musk proposed opening a school called the Texas Institute of Technology and Science. In a thread, he added, “it will have epic merch, universally admired.” When someone earnestly suggested swapping “technology” and “science” so the latter came first (on the premise that “technological breakthroughs almost always follow scientific breakthroughs”), Musk shot back, “Nope, T is def first.”
Why? Because if you swapped the letters, the acronym would no longer be TITS.
No, the Tesla and SpaceX founder wasn’t sincerely talking about setting up a university (despite what entrepreneurs, political scientists, US senators and politicians, and professional athletes thought). Yes, he was making a boob joke. Coming from anybody, this sort of a distasteful joke makes for an eye-roll moment. It’s childish and immature. But coming from Musk, who has almost 62 million followers on Twitter and is the face of two important tech companies, it is potentially damaging to the entire sector.
(snip)
Tesla, where just one in five of the 70,000-plus employees are women, has been criticized for being a hostile workplace in the past. Women there are subject to “inappropriate language, whistling, and catcalls,” a 2017 lawsuit by engineer AJ Vandermeyden alleged, and other female employees concurred.
At SpaceX—where the representation of women is even slimmer than it is at Tesla—the president and chief operating officer is a woman, Gwynne Shotwell, who in the past has called Musk “a great boss” who is “funny” and “incredibly fair, almost to a fault.” Musk’s latest messaging might not change that, but it arguably makes the characterization harder to believe.
https://qz.com/work/2082746/elon-musks-tweet-captures-everyday-sexism-faced-by-women-in-stem
= new reply since forum marked as read
