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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

My wife had a saying that applied to almost all of this kind of thing:

  Designed by a man!

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Hopefully we will eventually arrive at a place where it could have been designed by a woman!

I know people in the Bosch product design team, there are certainly women there.

And yet, I bet women were pretty happy when men created the dishwasher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Cochrane

That's an evolution of what was invented by Joel Houghton.

Not sure if it was directly inspired by Houghton's, but it was the first to be commercially successful.

However it seems those early dishwashers where pretty different to modern ones, least of all not being automatic: https://www.homestratosphere.com/dishwasher-history/

To be clear, your response to someone calling you out was to ... double-down on your sexism by being pedantic?

In case you weren't aware:

> The first mechanical dishwashing device was registered for a patent in 1850 in the United States by Joel Houghton

> The device was both slow and unreliable.

> Another patent was granted to L.A. Alexander in 1865

> Neither device was practical or widely accepted.

And finally

> The most successful of the hand-powered dishwashers was invented in 1886 by Josephine Cochrane together with mechanic George Butters

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher#History)

So yeah, all three invented the dishwasher it seems, but thanks to Josephine Cochrane (and Butters), we actually have a working and reliable dishwasher, something Joel Houghton was unable to build.

You're all right, in your own way.

One can be happy that something exists while at the same time lamenting that the design isn’t ideal

(Edit: though incidentally, it turns out that the inventor of the dishwasher — or at least one of the earliest working designs — was a woman, as the sibling post pointed out; didn’t know that)

And one can criticize a design without making generalized stereotyped assumptions about the gender of the designer.

Good for your wife and I hope you have some snappy retort. Then, again...

Imagine if someone here said something similar about some dysfunctional piece of equipment:

   Designed by a woman!

Either both of these made-in-jest sayings should be accepted - which is fine by me - or neither of them. Have a look at the way men are portrayed in commercials to see how far this imbalance has gone: Men are smelly badly-dressed clumsy idiots who would not make it far in the world were it not for all those smart women who... [1].

So, ladies, what's it gonna be? Free for all like it used to be with women making fun of men and men making fun of women or shall we have this boring speech-policed culture where each word has to be weighed and approved by the experts?

[1] ...fall in the trap of buying useless products?

You are over-thinking this. My wife's remark was almost invariably directed at goods and machines that were either aimed specifically at women or roles where women are overrepresented or at things the design of which clearly had not involved thinking that women would use them.

One classic example of the latter is car seatbelts and other safety features of cars. Examples of the former abound in the kitchen which in most families is still the domain of the woman of the house; for instance packaging that cannot be opened unless one's fingernails are clipped short.

My wife just hauls out her sling blade.

It's still casual sexism though, because being bad at market research and design isn't an integral feature of being a man. It's like if you said Theranos failed "because it was led by a woman".

Which is not to say your wife is an awful person or anything, casual sexism is common and often goes unrecognized. But it's good to call it out when you do see it.

Being bad at anticipating the needs of a woman is an integral feature of being a man. At least, when compared to women. And while this is changing, women still do most of the dish cleaning (at least in the U.S.)

> Being bad at anticipating the needs of a woman is an integral feature of being a man.

No more than being bad at anticipating the needs of a man is an integral feature of being a woman.

So you agree then

"Look at how men are portrayed in commercials" feels like a 20-years-out-of-date stereotype that immediately lets you know the person who said it hasn't watched live TV in decades.

Wanna link all those ads you think are running all the time? Cause I haven't seen many. I remember the nice man with the electric car saving the poor robot dog with low batteries, though...

(Ironically, a dishwasher detergent commercial just ran on my TV here, featuring both men and women extolling how great their new pods were, without any different roles by gender or anything...)

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