Some thoughts about gender equality

After reading the “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” I wasn’t expecting any sort of reaction from anybody, I thought, well, just another spoiled kid trying to catch some attention, but it seems that at my 32 years I still know too little about how other people think. Some people decided to take positions around this absurd document based on weak suppositions coming from someone, that I suppose had almost not contact with women along his entire life, and that in an herculean effort to comprehend these mysterious beings made some assumptions based on what he learnt form movies, music and so on…

As the younger brother of four sisters and son of the most amazing person I ever meet I think that I’m in a position to put some tings in perspective for those that the only woman they got to know was their mother and not too well for what I rode.

My mother was born after the Spanish civil war in “San Roman el Antiguo” a tiny village in the middle of nowhere extinct decades ago, my grand fathers were farmers. When my mother was a kid, I’m not sure how old she was, she lost her father, but even under a fascist dictatorship and against my grandmothers wishes, she pursed a degree in Chemistry. After graduate with honours and not having enough with this degree, she continued pursuing a PhD.

When she was twenty-something, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, according to the doctors she was going to be unable to have kids, but it seems that my three sisters and me didn’t agree on that…

In the time she was growing four kids with almost no help from my father and working at the same time, she decided that it may be a good idea to get another degree this time in pharmacy. Again, she got the degree with exceptional qualifications.

She bought an Apple II as soon as it arrive to Spain, she learnt to code and was the one who teach me when I was five, to me and to my sisters. I still have “El Grosero”, “the rude” in english, the first “game” I coded together with my sisters, it was about fart jokes and stuff like that, best game ever :)

I really think that she is the most extraordinary person I ever meet, but she didn’t keep her curiosity and will to learn for herself, as I mentioned before I have three sisters. I’ll not bother you with our histories but just to put some thing in context:

• My older sister, she is a doctor with two specialities, she holds a PhD and is specialised in hormonal disorders. She speaks six languages and had been living all around the world working for the most prestigious hospitals and research centres on every country (she also plays the piano, write books and so on…)
• Other of my sisters holds two degrees, one in architecture and another in tech architecture. She started a company from scratch in the middle of one of the worst crisis in the recent history of Spain. Nowadays her company is a very successful one that employs several people
• My younger sister studied arts and holds a masters degree in fashion design. After she came back to Spain from living abroad some years, she started an online company that imports articles form Asia. It is one of the most successful online stores of its type, she is making a lot more than me while working from home and having time for her daughter

I hold a master’s degree on computer science that I finished thanks to my mother. I had been working for several companies in the latest years living in many different countries and meeting awesome people. Thanks to my mother I’m who I am right now, she influenced the lives of all the people who had the lucky to meet her.

As you may understand, I don’t believe in gender, I don’t like the “woman who…” programs that are promoted by Google or any other company, I find sad that these programs are still necessary. It would be great if the people stops trying to classify each other in what is obvious, but some people are just not smart enough to understand complex concepts so they have to relay on race, colour gender and things like that.

If you still believes that the gender can determine what you can or can’t do in this live, just stop and think in what would you be doing if you were born almost seventy years ago in the middle of nowhere with almost no resources as my mother was…

Note: Sorry about the broken english but I’m kinda drunk and I’m not going to ask to my older sister to correct this :(