Sexism as in discriminatory based on sex in some manner, not necessarily intentionally or maliciously discriminatory. That is defined in the article itself, by the way, so there isn’t really much to add here. Maybe I can help make the point more explicit.
The hypothesis is that VR tech uses depth cues that work better for one sex (seems the more appropriate term than gender in this case) than the other. This would make the tech discriminatory, hence sexist as defined in the article.
The important part is that sexism as defined in the article does not ascribe intent or maliciousness to those who made the tech. It does not accuse those who made the tech of being intentionally or maliciously sexist, it just describes the tech as sexist. The author even makes it explicit that in her opinion there is no intention at all to be sexist by those who made the tech, no intention to make the tech work worse for women.
Now, some people who use the world sexist mean to strongly imply intention and many people who read it understand it as assigning blame. However, that is not necessarily how all people use the word. I certainly don’t use it that way and I know many other people who don’t. These two uses of the word – one ascribing intention, one not – is potentially confusing, so it’s good that she explicitly defined the word in her article and explicitly excludes intent from the definition.
You could argue that this is a very exotic use of the word. I can’t speak to how common the different uses are, but I do know that for many people it has long been important to divorce intent from effect because in many ways the effect is the only thing that matters.
The title is silly - but it means that when testing 3D applications (and even more so VR), it might be dangerous to only test it on males since that can lead to equipment that is not suitable for women. So depending on how much work the Oculus guys are putting into making it "usable for people of both genders" vs. "testing it with male participants only/mostly", the product might be excluding women. And thus be sexist. The title is clearly link bait, the article and its implications pretty interesting though (imo).
>the discrimination that I identified is not intentional by scientists or engineers or simply the product of cultural values. It is a byproduct of a research and innovation cycle that has significant consequences as society deploys the resultant products.
Unless I'm interpreting this wrong, I think what she's getting it is that VR research is inadvertently sexist because it is primarily done by men, for men. If the motion-sickness issue she describes really is prevalent among women, you'd expect it to be addressed by VR technology.
