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Comment by rs_rs_rs_rs_rs | Hacker News Reader

>A slightly orthogonal thought: because every word, every image of Apple Events is carefully vetted, one had to notice all six developers brought up to discuss the Mac Studio and Mac Ultra benefits inter work were women.

Well yes, the event was on March 8, International Women's Day.

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That was a truly bizarre segue. I wonder what emotions or thoughts he was hoping to inspire with that sentence.

I'll give Gassée the benefit of the doubt. If you were ignorant of the fact that it was Women's Day (guilty here!) he might have thought it disingenuous to not mention it? At least in passing as he did.

I'm glad Apple are showcasing the diversity of their workforce (I raised three daughters of my own, wish they would have shown an interest in programming, not really) but I worry that there is a danger of backlash for going too far.

The author detected an "anomaly" (see proof below) and pointed it out. I think it's pretty hostile to call such comments as bizarre, or question the author's intentions.

It seems that around 90% of developers are men[1]. Therefore, using a binomial distribution, if 6 developers were picked at random, the chance that all of them would be women (or other non men gender) is 0.0001%. (Interestingly, there is a 53% chance that all 6 of would be men).

The reason for such unlikely occurrence is that most likely, as the parent mentioned, Apple wanted to feature women developers for International Women's Day.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-develo...

Also, the style of that segment was a continuous monologue but changing speakers on each sentence. The speakers all had very similar voices, so it sounded very much like a single speaker. It was an interesting effect, though we lost the message because we started discussing whether they were processing the voices to be more similar or if Apple is just big enough to say to their customers “We need a female developer, camera ready, and her voice needs to sound like this.” and get 6 hits.

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