I am so angry right now. I am so mad at the supposed male-dominated tech community with it’s obvious implications of brotherhood.
I expected one, one of the community to push back at Dave Winer and his outrageous statement about the critics being primarily women bitching about the weblogs.com shutdown, and how it must be because we hate men for some reason. I expected them to be outraged on my behalf because they know me, and know that regardless of my reasons, it would not be because of that.
After all, I have been involved with many discussions on RSS and RDF and Atom and other technologies–they must surely think that I have, at least, some root of technical ability to know that what Winer was saying made no sense from a tech perspective.
I thought of the times when they’ve been wrongly accused of things, usually by Winer, and I’ve spoken out. I’ve been proud of that – perhaps too proud. Perhaps what I should have done is just be silent.
Maybe it’s that I’ve been critical of too many things. Does this make me seem superior? And therefore should I be “taken down” a peg or two for “speaking out”? That’s what a certain anonymous commenter from Amsterdam (who seems to have forgotten how easily it is for a tech person to discover someone’s identity from a specific IP address) said – that I was too superior.
Is that it? Uppity woman not only intruding her butt in tech circles, but also daring to disagree with the alpha males? Women in tech are okay, as long as we write about sex and how much we admire the guys?
I never expected anyone to agree with me when I was critical of Winer and his shut down of weblogs.com. I thought each of us must fight this battle on their own. But when he reduced what some of us have said – what I said – to being nothing more than a woman being cranky at men, what he did was to discredit what I, a fellow technologist, said based on my sex.
Winer was critical of men in comments, and I watched other guys rally around those men–but not the women. Not us women.
I could chalk this up to Dave Winer being Dave Winer but not one of you men disagreed!
And you wonder why women aren’t heard; why more women don’t speak out, or get involved.
My brothers in technology. Ha! Right.
Not one of you said a thing.
Not one.