For example, does anyone know of a framework author/architect
that is female? The people that come up with Jini, or Ruby on
Rails, or Hibernate, or the like. I canât recall a single
female author of groundbreaking ideas, either theoretical or
practical.
There are profound differences between men and women in world view and mode of thought. These are evident from the literature they create, the literature they consume and the way they comport themselves over the spans of their careers.
The archetypal chick flick â Gone with the Wind â is described in its own advertising as a searing tale of passion in a world gone mad. Essentially, itâs about the feelings of the protagonist in a world that is utterly beyond the protagonistâs control. If a Mills and Boon novel has a happy ending, itâs provided by the intervention of a man. At no point does a woman attempt to change her world. She adapts to it, cries about it, or waits for a man to change it for her.
Men, by contrast, write about almost nothing but taking control of their world, and the mechanics by which this is attempted.
Another fundamental difference is the list thing. Men teach one another the mechanism, the distilled principle, because there is less to remember and it has to be taken in context anyway. Women want a fixed context and rote instructions. If you try to teach them the principles instead, they donât listen and they get angry, saying âI donât care why, I just asked you to tell me what to do.â If you give them a list of steps it must be exhaustive like a computer program because (also like a computer program) if context changes breaking the procedure or if anything has been omitted, blame is ascribed to the writer of the procedure.
A direct consequence of this intellectual inflexibility is that women do not create tools. They can be taught to use them, often very well, provided that the use of the tool can be described as lists of steps - programs!
Visit a craft shop like Spotlight. It will be crawling with women who think they are creative. In fact all they ever do is stick glitter to boxes, or cut cloth according to a plan that was almost certainly created by a man, before stitching it together using a sewing machine definitely both invented and made for them by men.
Some of them will vary the patterns, but creation ex nihilo is a behaviour exhibited almost exclusively by men.
I suppose you could say that women play god using the thing between their legs, whereas men use the thing between their ears. Probably this is enculturated behaviour. Possibly it is an artefact, in men, of the inability to play god the easy way; certainly many of us see our creations as children of sorts.