No Tools for You: A Century of Men Policing Women’s Tools
In 1925 a doctor said vacuum cleaners will make women lazy. In 2026 mastodon dudes said the same thing (and worse) about a woman engineer using a tool to make a CAD part.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/16/no-tools-for-you-a-century-of-men-policing-womens-tools/
@adafruit this is as wrongheaded a post as i can imagine, not least because the author seems to be unaware of decades of feminist critique of how commercial tools aimed at women homemakers in the 20th century were often marketed in exploitative ways and did not end up fulfilling their promise of efficiency. critique of AI has always been rooted in feminist thought, and many prominent AI critics are women, some of whom have lost jobs and faced harassment for publicly discussing the harms of AI
I'm a woman in science, and I have ordered stuff from Adafruit before. But knowing you're using AI to design it DOES make me less likely to order from you in the future. Not because "women shouldn't use tools," but because AI is not a trustworthy tool.
Tell me you built a house with a glue gun instead of a nail gun, and I won't want to buy the house. Nothing to do with the gender of the person holding the glue gun.
@adafruit hi I'm a queer woman and I think AI and this post both suck
@adafruit@fosstodon.org as a woman I am offended that you'd compare the actual bullshit our foremothers faced under sexism to people pushing back against AI, a "service" that's buggy, harmful, ecologically damaging, and being used as a tool in class warfare to push people out of their jobs, something that disproportionately happens to women and minorities first.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Not every tool is good
One of my heatguns was recalled for fire risk
I sent it in
It was a bad tool
LLMs, Gemini included, are also bad tools
If I had to double check my cake mix for poison every single time I used it I wouldn't use that cake mix
Or eat a cake made from it
You're failing to recognize WHY people are rejecting LLMs and things made with it
They're bad tools
If a robot vacuum cleaner does a good job but has a 1% chance of eating my cat it's not allowed in my house
@adafruit Do you and Mozilla use the same Denny's placemat PR firm?
@adafruit Using fake feminism and a bunch of invalid comparisons to defend a technology that men are more likely to use than women ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.06556 ) and which use consolidates all power and money into the hands of a few billionares (all men).
No. No collaboration with LLMs, no credibility for LLM defenders, no fascist AI future. And no more Adafruit orders from me
@adafruit I am a trans woman and I hate AI slop.
I don't support using tools invented by anti environmental, sexist, pedophillic men.
ChatGPT is used to objectify women. It is used to devalue the work of young and disabled people. It is an insult to the craft of electronics. It is an insult to the disabled. And it is an insult to the thousands of women who have been put into porn without their consent by way of "genAI" technology.
