Today I finished readingĀ Technically WrongĀ by Sara Wachter-Boettcher. While I enjoyed the book and agree with much of what Wachter-Boettcher has to say, I don’t think I come away from the book feeling how the author intended the reader to feel: angry and empowered to stand up to Big Tech. Instead, I feel wary. I feel that Technically WrongĀ was a bit one-sided and didn’t have enough nuance to fully convince me without doubt of Wachter-Boettcher’s arguments.
I didn’t feel this way at the beginning of the book. I enjoyed the first half, for the most part; Wachter-Boettcher’s insistence that the diversity issue in STEM is not a pipeline issue (23) rings true with me, though I think some nuance in that statement is deserved. Yes, the pipeline isn’t the issue; it’s theĀ leaky pipeline, which in the second half of the book Wachter-Boettcher seems to refer to as the “leaky bucket” (183). Broadly speaking, the “leaky pipeline” (or “bucket”) issue is that there are women in STEM fields, but they “leak” out along the way, perhaps due to career changes or leaving to start a family. By not qualifying her statement of there not being a pipeline issue until more than 150 pages later, I felt that the author was being a bit too choosy with when she displays her evidence in a way that seems to be trying too hard.
In addition, with the discussion of the “leaky bucket”, Wachter-Boettcher makes the claim that because only 20% of women who leave STEM leave the workforce, the rest are stalled in their career or leave the field because they’re fed up with biased cultures. I would argue this is too simplistic a categorization; for example, a woman may leave the STEM field to take a job that allows her to work from home more easily, allowing her to more effectively have work-life balance. This isn’t necessarily a woman leaving because she’s fed up with discrimination, so is it, as Wachter-Boettcher hates to say, an “edge case”? By being so strictly categorical, the author has introduced her own sort of edge-case bias.
Really, though, the piece of the book that struck me as the most misleading was the portion about Dylann Roof (141-2). Wachter-Boettcher takes us through Roof’s journey of discovering hate groups on the internet somewhat innocently to opening fire at a church. Wachter-Boettcher seems to mostly blame Roof’s actions on what he found on the internet, these hate groups, and how internet searching allowed him to find them pretty easily. This is a vast oversimplification that is honestly dangerous to make. Roof’s actions were not only because of his ability to find online hate groups; while that may have contributed, it is irresponsible to ignore other potential contributing factors like his mental health or upbringing. Once again, I feel here that Wachter-Boettcher sometimes twists evidence to fit her message.
This whole post has been pretty negative aboutĀ Technically Wrong, and I want to qualify it by saying that I did enjoy the book and agree with much (perhaps nearly all) of what Wachter-Boettcher has to say. However, I feel the book deserves some more nuance that it has and should be thought of critically and not blindly followed.