Carpentry, Contracts, and Code
A small debate about tools that wasn’t really about tools
A woman in my local WhatsApp group proposed organizing a carpentry workshop for women. The idea was straightforward: a space to learn tools together, without interruption, without performance pressure, without the subtle choreography that often unfolds when men and women share physical tasks. Within minutes, several men objected. Why exclude men? It’s 2026. Shouldn’t we unite rather than divide?
One of the same men referenced an experience from his own life. He had once taught a course on sustainability and gender. At the beginning of that class, a woman had asked why a man was leading it. He said the question “ruined the class.” After that, everyone lost out on what he had planned to teach. He offered the story in the group thread as a cautionary tale: raising structural questions about gender dynamics, he implied, derails collective progress.
Back in the WhatsApp exchange, women tried to explain why a women-only workshop might still matter - confidence, safety, space to experiment without being talked over in a trade where men still dominate. The conversation intensified. Appeals to unity were made. Warnings about division followed. The woman who had proposed the workshop eventually apologized for “triggering” such strong reactions. Several women quietly left the group.
No one shouted. No one was overtly hostile. But something structural had just happened.
I live in a farming community now - stone houses, organic gardens, homeschooling, sourdough starters - but I have not left the world of technology. I still run my company. My days are split between code and compost, contracts and carpentry. Many of us here left cities and corporate life in search of slowness, proximity, something more tangible. It would be comforting to believe that changing landscapes changes power dynamics. It doesn’t. We did not leave the operating system behind. We brought it with us.
Our community runs on WhatsApp. Our news arrives through algorithmic feeds. Our reflexes were shaped online long before we started planting tomatoes. What changed over the past two decades was not that men suddenly became worse. Male dominance did not originate with Google or Facebook. Early Silicon Valley - Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, the defense labs — was hardly egalitarian. But dominance behaviors were once bounded by friction. Reputation was local. Arrogance had social cost. Tone traveled slowly. You saw the same people at the post office and the school meeting and the grocery store.
Digital architecture removed that friction. Dominance became scalable. Outrage became profitable. Certainty became engagement. Mockery became currency. The charismatic, unyielding, reality-distorting male archetype was not just tolerated; it was amplified. We did not invent male dominance in Silicon Valley. We industrialized it. We optimized it. And once optimized, it traveled.
In the carpentry debate, the imbalance was acknowledged. No one denied that women are underrepresented in the trades. And yet the solution - a temporary, bounded space for women - was met with fervent opposition. “I am a fervent opponent to this solution,” one man wrote, after agreeing the problem was real. That sentence stayed with me.
If inequality exists - and we agree that it does - then opposition to even small redistributions of space reveals something. It reveals that what is being protected is not unity. It is equilibrium. And equilibrium is not neutral. Equilibrium reflects who has historically held the tools.
This is the same logic animating the broader backlash against DEI. The argument goes like this: yes, inequality happened; yes, there are imbalances; but any targeted corrective is itself divisive. The remedy becomes the problem. The discomfort of redistribution outweighs the discomfort of inequity. What sounds like fairness often functions as protection of default access.
Recently, as the Epstein files circulate again and powerful men once more seem insulated from real consequences, it is difficult not to see the larger version of the same structure. Networks protect themselves. Institutions stall. Accountability disperses into process and delay. At the same time, we are told that artificial intelligence will shape the next era of civilization. AI systems are trained on vast archives of human behavior - our language, our hierarchies, our conflicts. AI does not invent culture. It learns from what we have normalized. If dominance behaviors have been rewarded, amplified, and protected for decades, we should not be surprised when those patterns are embedded in the systems now writing, recommending, filtering, and predicting on our behalf.
The exchange in our farming group did not feel dramatic. It felt familiar. When a woman raised a structural question in a classroom, the question was reframed as disruption. When women proposed a corrective in a community chat, the corrective was reframed as division. The reflex was not to ask what imbalance required repair, but to restore equilibrium as quickly as possible. The tone was calm. The language invoked freedom, unity, humanism. And yet the effect was to pull the conversation away from asymmetry and back toward comfort.
Authoritarianism rarely announces itself loudly. More often, it accumulates through a thousand small restorations of default access. Through tone. Through framing. Through principled opposition to structural adjustment. Through the insistence that neutrality must always favor the existing distribution of power.
Carpentry, contracts, and code are not separate domains. They are expressions of who is permitted to define what is reasonable. If we cannot tolerate temporary discomfort in order to correct imbalance, we will continue to encode dominance into everything we build — into our communities, our institutions, and our technologies.
If you are fervently opposed to women gathering to correct an acknowledged imbalance, it is worth asking why. What feels threatened? Access? Centrality? The assumption of inclusion?
If unity requires women to remain within the existing frame, it is not unity. It is maintenance. And maintenance is how power survives.
I really like this article. You nailed it when you said “If inequality exists - and we agree that it does - then opposition to even small redistributions of space reveals something. It reveals that what is being protected is not unity. It is equilibrium. And equilibrium is not neutral.” And indeed it is not.
Thought provoking and insightful. These discussions are always a trigger for some deeper underlying issues within the scope of gender roles and inequality.