Girls Don't Play With Trucks Yup, looks like we haven't yet broken through the gender profiling wall. I mean, we'd like to think we have - female empowerment agendas are everywhere in the business space. Yet here we are, still having to argue that women are just as capable and equipped as men. In 2025. Viva bro culture! I read yesterday that women in tech podcasting struggle with credibility, representation, funding, and visibility. Shocked? I'm not. Turns out women's voices are literally perceived as less authoritative - cultural conditioning doing its thing. Female experts get questioned more, interrupted more, doubted more. And then we have my personal fav "aggressive/bossy vs. confident/assertive" double standard whenever women dare speak with authority. Still. In 2025. Many listeners unconsciously default to thinking male hosts know more about tech. So women get patronised. They get comments on their appearance, their voice, their personality - because god forbid we focus on content. And data supports this: identical podcast content is rated as more credible when it's served by men. Same words. Different gender. That makes total sense. Let me share how deeply this bias runs with some fun facts. Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received the patent for their frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology in 1942. This became the foundation for modern wireless communication technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS decades later. But what do we remember her for? Her breathtaking beauty and acting prowess. Then we have Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) - often called the first computer programmer. Yes, you read that right. She worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine (a mechanical computer that was never built) and wrote what's recognised today as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. This was in the 1840s. But let's celebrate Alan Turing as the father of computer science and forget she existed. Can we please collectively get over ourselves? Because this unconscious bias doesn't just discourage brilliant women from entering tech podcasting, it diminishes their contributions when they show up anyway. Supporting pic for attention: Hedy Lamarr
What she said! ☝️
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1moI don't think it's a coincidence that Siri, Alexa, et al are female voices. We're conditioned to have females pleasant, placid, and helpful. It would be weird for a male voice to be telling us our next appointment or the weather or a short summary of something. After all, females take instructions right, and do as they're told?