I have taken that into consideration…. and we need to be careful. I would hate to suggest implicitly or otherwise that there are topics that men can write about and that women can write about.
That is the implied partriarch at play. You talk about GIVING women a fair opportunity to talk about things they are experts in — as though expertise in a subject is gender specific. And now that the men are finished talking about tech women are being GIVEN a chance to talk about things that interest them instead.
Perhaps the topics are expanding and Medium is diversifying. That isn’t a bad thing. If writers are being pigeon holed into particular subjects as writers then they’re being curated by design. And that is a bad thing. That may also have been true for early adopters like yourself who quickly learned how to write about productivity.
All topics are human topics and everyone regardless of their genitalia should be commenting on them with equal validity. Medium shouldn’t simply be curating what’s popular opinion. If you do that then you get lazy stories, you get featured stories that preach to the converted and articles aimed at getting claps and little more than surface engagement with the issues underneath.
If you do that you turn off the critical thinkers who would otherwise engage and write with nuance and eloquence.
As far as possible I’d like to read what everybody thinks about all issues. Even if I find their views unpalatable. As soon as you start curating on anything other than the quality of the writing, the system starts to fall out of balance and the platform becomes dull and homogenous.
I want to read articles written by angry, racist Trump supporters. I want to hear about men who disagree with feminism. I want to read the views of homophobes and fascists. I want to read the writings of the female who gets passed over for promotion AND I want to read the views of the man (or woman) who made that decision — and I want them both curated if they’re good enough.
Curation is not an endorsement of viewpoint, it’s an endorsement of writing quality. That’s proving problematic for a team of human editors who have their own biases. Broadly speaking, I think they do a good job, though a tendency to lean slightly to the political left.
I want to read ANYTHING that is good enough to be curated regardless of who wrote it. I want to read ANYTHING that offers an in depth opinion and has something to say regardless of it’s topic or subject matter. I don’t know how Medium would begin to do that, but it’s the direction I think they should head.
Much of social media is falling into echo chambers of self congratulation and the monetisation of vapid and vacuous content. We are all talking more and more whilst saying less and less. I thought (and still think) Medium has a chance to be different. I hope I’m proved right in the long run.
Only time will tell.
