Technology and the empowerment of women

At its best, technology is a great equaliser. With the Internet and the World Wide Web, we have created an environment in which more people than ever before can access vast amounts of knowledge, for the most part anonymously. Providing one can overcome the minimum economic threshold to access the network, little else matters. In principle, this creates new hierarchies established on the attributes our chosen peers value most.

Ideally, this is the domain of the mind, decoupled from prejudices surrounding race, or gender, or anything else. In an interview with John B. Kennedy, the great futurist Nikola Tesla spoke on the extent to which new technologies would first equalise the genders, then later become the catalyst for female superiority:

It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.

I believe this can be applied beyond gender inequality. But first we must encourage people to think about our differences the way Albert Einstein thought about gender, in his letter to a South African girl named Tyfanny:

I do not mind that you are a girl, but the main thing is that you yourself do not mind. There is no reason for it.

Inspired by: The Marginalian (formally Brain Pickings)

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