“If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get five percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card,” Donald Trump said during a press conference last Tuesday at Trump Tower.
In a video response, Clinton fought back by saying: “If fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in!”
The Web, as ever, was quick to make something productive of the spat – a Kickstarter campaign started by (pledged Hillary delegate at the Democratic National Convention) Zach Wahls and his illustrator sister Zebby that will see a real-life deck of Woman Cards produced.
“If Hillary is playing the woman card, this is the deck she’s using,” the campaign page says. Backers can get anything from one deck of cards for $15, due to be delivered in July, up to 13 signed prints of the women included in the deck if you pledge $1,000 or more.
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But, just as the election 2016 candidates have been criticized for failing to make pretty much any mention of tech issues, the Woman Card deck doesn’t reference any female tech innovators who’ve made America great.
The 13 famous women who made the cut for the cards are:
- Hillary Clinton (Ace)
- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (King)
- Beyoncé (Queen)
- Founder of the American Red Cross Clara Barton (Jack)
- Trans women of color activist Sylvia Rivera (10)
- Female pilot Amelia Earhart (9)
- Anti-slavery campaigner Harriet Tubman (8)
- Painter Mary Cassatt (7)
- Suffragist Susan B. Anthony (6)
- Olympian Wilma Rudolph (5)
- Civil rights activist Rosa Parks (4)
- Founding member of the NAACP Ida B. Wells (3)
- Astronaut Dr. Sally Ride (2)
The team has left the final list open to suggestions, and shortlisting the 13 great women was no doubt a tough task, but here’s a few to start: pioneering computer programmer Grace Hopper, Radia ‘don’t call me the Mother of the Internet’ Perlman and women in tech champion Anita Borg.
The project has already been overfunded by more than seven times its $5,000 target, and has been backed by almost 1,000 people so far, in under four hours.
Little might many of the backers know that this is something they may not have been able to do so efficiently if it weren’t for the efforts of tech innovators, including the likes of Hopper, Perlman and Borg.
For a country that has created some of the world’s biggest tech companies, with a population that is incredibly dependent on tech, the near-absence of technology issues from the presidential debate, just like the faces on the Woman Cards, is baffling at best.
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