Category: Diversity

The importance of supporting diversity

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Diversity People

In memory of greatness

Two great women passed away this last week: Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan.

King did more than just fight for the rights for blacks–she fought for the rights for every person, black or white or yellow or red; regardless of religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Much of the King legacy must be equally shared by Coretta as much as her husband.

I remember reading publication after publication talking about how Coretta spent her whole life fighting for her husband’s legacy. She didn’t spend her whole life fighting for some ghostly image of MLK; she spent her life fighting for the same cause that took her husband’s life. If we can’t respect all that she accomplished, as an individual, in her life, at least we can honor her in her death.

Oddly enough, this is something Friedan would say–that Coretta Scott King was more than just the widow of Martin Luther King. She was an icon of the civil rights movement in and of herself.

Friedan: where would I be today if not for her work. Where would many of us women be. I was too young to be in the beginning of the women’s movement in the 1960’s but I have benefited from it.

I don’t think many people remember what it was like when blacks rode the back of the buses. I definitely don’t think people remember what it was like when women’s primary function, one of the few allowed by society, was to stay at home and take care of the kiddies. If they remembered what it was like, they wouldn’t say such silly tripe as, “I don’t agree with Friedan. I don’t agree with most feminism. I don’t believe women should get preferential treatment. I believe we should be treated equally”.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Reductio

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Update

This post was a mistake. Not the Specks, or linking Catarina, but Adam Green has left me cold…especially when referring to chick blogs. Mr. Green, we’ll also link back when you’re being a dork, too.

 

My original link to Mr. Green was not because he said ’something nice’. I don’t particularly consider, ‘you go, girl’, to be all that complimentary, myself. It was because there was a point I wanted to make, in that diverse discussions are more interesting than ones that consist of similar people saying similar things.

 

However, the point was lost among all the references to ‘girl’, ‘chick’, and hints of our warm, nurturing side (as compared to, as Seth in comments pointed out, the guys and their rough and tumble shoot ‘em up sides).

 

Mr. Green, here’s a note from my warm, nurturing side: leave the outmoded phrases and stereotyping at home with your bell bottoms and polyester disco suit. It is woman or women or even, preferred, weblogger–not girl, and not chick. Was that warm and nurturing enough for you, Mr. Green?

 

(Hopefully we can also cut off the use of ‘blogher’ to differentiate women (those warm nurturing women) webloggers from the men (those tough, aggressive men) webloggers at the pass before this becomes too widespread in usage. Not unless we want to start referring to the male webloggers as ‘bloghims’.)

Adam Green writes on two snapshots of the copyright/RSS discussion on Tech Memeorandum:

One reason why much of the heat has dissipated, and the battle has morphed into a search for a middle ground may be that women have entered the discussion. While this started with the men riding out to shoot up the cattle rustlers, the womenfolk are now asking questions and looking for answers.

 

Is this sexist generalization? Perhaps, but based on the two Tech Memorandum snapshots I’d much rather read a discussion dominated by Shelley Powers, Susan Mernit, Denise Howell and Jeneane Sessum, than Mike Rundle and Om Malik. No offense meant guys.

Adam has discovered something really amazing: if a dialog is extended to a diverse audience, it ends up being a lot more interesting. In this case, women joined the discussion and the dynamics of the discussion changed.

We women have gotten men to link to us now and again; the next step is to get them to actually talk with us. Hopefully, eventually they’ll reach the same epiphany that Adam has.

I’ve adopted a term I discovered from Catarina Fake to describe the phenomena of linking to women webloggers, while reserving debate primarily to the menfolk: chicking the women. Catarina has been reading a biography of Martha Stewart and found that the author had gone out of his way to trash Stewart, without acknowledging all of her rather impressive accomplishments. The only really positive voice in the book had this to say on Stewart’s interaction with Time Warner about a television show:

Sheingold came to sense something else about the way Martha’s colleagues handled her at Time: There was a slight but unmistakable–and ever-present–tone of condescension in their words, as if the members of the Time Inc’s boys club wanted her to know that they still regarded her as nothing more than the fashion model she once had been, instead of the business executive she’d become.

 

In time, Sheingold invented a word for what they were doing to her. He didn’t share the word with anybody, but it popped into his head every time he heard them belittling and dismissing her, in that certain way that would make Martha’s jaw set and her face go cold. …’Chick-ing’ her.

Jaw set…face cold…I hear that.

Speaking of cold, after this discussion about RSS the following represents the chances of me ever providing full feeds again.

 

Categories
Connecting Diversity

Ends

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Kevin Marks:

I’ve said before that the net is large, and contains multitudes, and thus what you find in it is what you look for. Like Caliban, raging at your reflection is counterproductive.
Dave Rogers finds hierarchies.
David Weinberger finds collaborators.
Shelley Powers finds, er, something that she disapproves of.

Yup, that’s the reason I wrote “Proofs”–yet another thing meeting my disapproval. These Technorati folks, they sure know how to categorize all of us. Someone ought to pay them. Or something.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Blogrolls redux

Lest anyone think that I’m hoping to get listed in the weblog roll of the Women’s Media Center, perish the thought from your mind. If anything, this just demonstrates, to me, the evils of blogrolls–their divisiveness and their arbitrary exclusivity (those with friendly neighborhood weblog rolls excepted–don’t hit me). Especially when used with a site purporting to be the only place for information on women.

I’m still amazed that a site starting in 2005 would dare to imply it is the definitive expert on any topic, much less one as immense as women and women and media. However, it’s what I would expect from an organization led by Jane Fonda–another reason why I would not want to be listed at the site. I have a very low opinion of Ms. Jane Fonda.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Feminists and other snobs

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

My appreciations for Frank Paynter for including me with other fine company in his recommendations of women webloggers for the Women’s Media Center. I, like others, was also left rather breathless by the sweeping arrogance of the site’s byline:

The WMC website is the only place for news on women; links to women columnists, bloggers, media organizations, and more…

The links to women webloggers are primarily to those that might be labeled ‘pure feminist’ weblogs, which I guess is the dividing line between women worthy of inclusion and those not. I read several of the ones listed, and they are terrific and should be included: in WMC and everywhere. It isn’t this that leads me to sigh, and feel tired; it is the lack of depth in the list, which shows an unspoken but very real bias among feminists against those of us in the technology field.

What these fine ladies seem to forget is that while they are busy writing about the bias against women, we’re busy out there being the women suffering the bias. We’re the ones in fields that have, if we’re lucky, one woman in four workers. We’re the ones showing that women can aspire to fields and jobs other than mommy, wife, nurse, teacher, and social worker in a women’s center.

Many of us are professionals in media, too, though we’ll not get Nobel prizes, or offered chairs at Harvard. We write on technology, and add that odd feminine element now and again to conferences and book shelves. We help keep the myth alive that any little girl can grow up to be anything she wants. We do so in many cases by having to fight men who don’t want us around. Worse, who don’t even see us when we are.

This we accept as part of the job. We don’t like it, but we were once the little girls who believed we could grow up to do anything we want, and we’re not going to give it up because of some adversity. What truly hurts, though, is we usually do this fight alone, because many of the outspoken feminists are snobs, and to them, we just don’t count.