This is interesting, I've always thought that makers of image capture equipment were striving to create technology to capture the world, as it is, without any bias towards any particular subject.
Maybe, in a way they were, and they simply went for the lowest hanging fruit first? or maybe they simply put most effort where they believed that there would be most gain for least effort.
The reason why they started at one point is not really important, the important thing is that they continue to strive to improve. Not because some group of people are excluded, but because, from a technical standpoint, they're not done before they can capture and display an accurate, neutral, non-biased, factual representation of reality. Same goes for audio, I'm sure getting voice right had priority over music, and that some styles of music had priority over others, but, we're not done before all SOUND, not just music, can be captured and represented accurately.