It’s only been a few days since the controversial firing of developer evangelist Adria Richards, who was let go from SendGrid after drawing the Internet’s attention to a bunch of fratty programmers cracking wise about “dongles” and “forking” during a speech about making the tech community more welcome to women. Nobody learns anything! Yay!
Luke Winkie, the author of Complex’s 40 Hottest Women In Technology slideshow, says he didn’t mean, you know, “hot” women. He meant “cool” and “mostly normal looking women” who were doing “really interesting” things in the tech field and going “far beyond” the nature of the list. Unfortunately, he says that a number of Muggle-looking women were cut in editorial. Don’t you hate when that happens? Nobody—least of all some of the “regulation hotties” included in the final actual slideshow—was happy.
“In my world we wouldn’t ever have to create lists of women to make money on the internet,” Winkie explained on Twitter. “Unfortunately we don’t have (sic) live in that world yet.” But the click bait-y name of the list, which he was responsible for writing, he’s since apologized for:
Winkie says that among the women who were cut was a Kenyan woman who ran a government watchdog website and a video game designer. Naturally, the women left on the list are those like Marina Orlova, clad in what appears to be a micro-schoolgirl outfit, with the caption: “The popular Internet sensation is now host of a bi-weekly radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio for Maxim.” Good for her, of course. But ughhhhhhfuuu.
Winkie’s innocuous original copy is still included in the slideshow’s intro:
“Technology has been a boy’s club for most of its existence. Just another unfortunate repercussion of the patriarchy. But that’s been slowly changing, and over the last decade we’ve seen a number of wonderful, intelligent, and cunning women make inspiring strides in the field of technology.”
‘The Guy Who Wrote the Hottest Women in Tech Slideshow Is ‘Bummed’ [The Atlantic Wire]