FactsForLife is included, doesn't that count as a public health tool? Not sure what you mean specifically, but this appears to at least educate around a lot of health topics. http://www.factsforlifeglobal.org/
I can see the value of data collection too though, but I think for a person accessing the internet for the first time, they would be more interested in gaining information than sending data about themselves into the void.
Right? This is the one I switched to after getting fed up with FormMail. It was self-hosted and runs on PHP instead of CGI, whohoo! Pratically magic for 2001. http://regretless.com/scripts/scripts.php#dodosmail
This list is amazing. On a related note, I only found out last year that the ever-mysterious "CGI Scripting" I remembered doing in my youth was actually just Perl the whole time.
I had guestbooks in CGI, tagboards in CGI. And you guys remember Greymatter, right?
How about b2?
I still hold a grudge against Wordpress for over-complicating what was a simple, bare-bones blogging software.
Ahhh, the 90s and early 2000s was a great time for the web.
One can try to visit tech websites, or even tech offices. I am a woman, and I'm often left with a feeling of being 'the other', sometimes unfavourably so. The most obvious cause is that it is often a community of mostly men discussing both male and female characteristics. A more subtle clue is that it seems that they refer to women as "females", but men as simply "men". Some communities are even hostile to the idea of feminists - in turn some feminists forego speaking up about their feelings, and pretending to be "just another bro".
One crucial difference is, of course, that feminists only talk about gender and things that are related to that. Tech-communities might sometimes talk about gender, but most might only talk about it when it is somewhat relevant to their tech-interests. Feminists, on the other hand, have a practical monopoly on gender-opinions as far as mainstream opinion is concerned. And they're mostly women, and might even reject men into their circles. Programmers being mostly men might bias things like technological choices, but the bias towards women in gender-theory (might as well say feminist-theory) doesn't change a niche thing such as what programming language powers the client-side web, it heavily influences popular opinion on what men are and what they should be like, even though they are not really a represented group. That might not be a problem if some vocal feminists didn't try to work against alternative paradigms of gender theory, but in my experience, they do.
Your last point would be more analogous to my own if you said that some communities are even hostile to the idea of women programmers (if that is indeed true).
Another crucial difference is that you can easily choose to not read and participate in feminist blogs and communities, whereas I have to interact with tech communities every single day. Reading tech websites is crucial to my career, and well, I gotta go to the office every day too.
I work at a top tech company in Silicon Valley, in a team of 200 men and 10 women. The men aren't intentionally hostile towards me at all, but they are blissfully ignorant of how their comments and behavior genuinely makes it hard for the few women around them to succeed and be considered equals.
This is exactly what is wrong with society. You're actively looking for reasons to discredit Sandberg, attributing her success to her parents', to her education, and to her finances. So because she is successful, women won't be able to relate to her, and thus should not take her advice, is that correct?
Does anyone know what Jack Welsh's parents did? Does it matter? Do any articles about Larry Page emphasize his parents' support as the reason for his success? I didn't think so. So how come people are actively looking to credit Sandberg's success to anything but her actual work? Because she's a woman.
Sincerely,
A female tech worker with divorced, middle-class parents.
People actively look to credit other people's success to anything but their work all of the time. Just this week, such a webpage was heavily discussed on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6546325
The submission attributes Bill Gates's success first and foremost to his grandparents and parents. This is part of a very common pattern of attributing success to everything but work.
Sorry if this came out wrong. I never mentioned that Sheryl does not deserve it. Nor did I say that she did not work hard. Folks who discredit Sheryl's success are dumbasses. She worked hard for it and completely deserves her success. I love the fact that women like you are working in the ruthless tech industry.
What I simply implied was that having institutional advantages makes the whole effort much easier, as compared to another woman who did not grow up with such support.
This is not very hard to see. For every woman like Sheryl Sandberg, there are tons of other women who worked as hard as her. There are tons of women who are as smart as her. But they could not make it as big as Sheryl, simply because of institutional disadvantages.
I could give the example of my mom. Her dad was a railway repairman. The family was not well-educated/privileged as a whole. So, she received little/no guidance on her future. But she studied her socks off when she was a kid. As a result, she started her career as a receptionist in a bank. Steadily, she grew on to become a Foreign Exchange manager.
If she would've had some advantage, say ability to afford Harvard instead of no-name-state-school, she could've started at a higher position rather than a receptionist.
In addition, she also took amazing care of my little brother and me. She couldn't afford to hire a personal babysitter, so she sacrificed her career to raise us. I would argue that my birth was the single biggest reason she couldn't achieve more.
Her work ethic was tremendous. Her ability to pick up concepts beyond her expertise was excellent. But institutional disadvantages ensured that she couldn't start well.
I could give my own example. I am now doing stuff of an engineer's dreams. I had the advantage of great parents who gave me things like a computer at a very young age. This single event is the biggest leg up in my career. Now, I am a happy programmer making shit-load of money. But my friend whose parents bought him a computer 7 years after me, languishes behind.
Why should he be languishing behind when we went to the same school with same classes? We did our homework together too. He got the same grades as me in high school. We were equal by all measure.
All he couldn't decide was where to take his career, whereas, my computer advantage made sure I knew what I loved.
Sorry for the long post. All I want to say is that while I do not discredit Sheryl for her success, I have to say that institutional advantages gave her a leg up. And when she wrote this book, she wrote it without having experienced a big disadvantage.
I can see the value of data collection too though, but I think for a person accessing the internet for the first time, they would be more interested in gaining information than sending data about themselves into the void.