Category: Diversity

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The conversation (yes, that one) continued over at Scoble’s, until it looks like the thread was shut down. The comment I last tried to make was (re-created from memory so it may be spotty):

Tyme, it’s easy to manipulate the criteria io a meeting until you have exactly the audience you want, or to justify the audience you end up with. “Criteria” is a nebulous thing — and perhaps Microsoft needs to look at its ‘criteria’ for events from now on.

As for your statement, “As you can see from the discussions most women aren’t like me…heck, they don’t have a clue how many women are online and assumed they weren’t there.” You know all women online and what they think, do you?

Thomas, that’s why I didn’t want to follow Scoble’s challenge of who I wouldn’t invite. Then it becomes less a discussion about a subject, and more a discussion on personalities. Leaving that aside, I didn’t pick you — I questioned why you were there if no journalists were included. That’s when Scoble said that no journalists other than those unlike yourself, which seems to be a rather ‘limited’ and specialized criteria.

As for Mena Trott being the only woman in the area having ‘merit’, again without understanding what the criteria is, this assumption can’t help but come across as offensive. I doubt this is what Microsoft intended.

Microsoft, not Scoble. I wasn’t responding to Scoble the person, I was responding to Scoble, the evangelist and employee of Microsoft when I made my original comment–does Microsoft want women to use Longhorn? But Scoble took my comment personally. You (Thomas) took my comment personally. People thought this whole conversation was funny–black bean soup. Then the issue of quotas and ‘lowering standards’ (not to mention women not having the right ‘qualifications’ or enough ‘merit’) was brought up and I took this personally–still do, to be honest. And so on.

A chance for a good dialog on this issue and perhaps making an important point to a major company like Microsoft was lost because all god’s children took it personally.

As an aside to this topic, and perhaps worthy of separate discussion, if you’re going to write as both an employee and a private individual in the same weblog, you need to consider before responding whether a question or challenge is directed to you, the person, or to you, the company representative. Because though we may limit our challenges to each other based on personal decisions, corporate decisions are, in my opinion, fair game.

For instance, questioning the criteria a Microsoft employee uses to form an invitation only event is not the same thing as accusing Robert Scoble of being a sexist. By responding to challenges personally, Scoble makes it awkward to respond to any of the actions he takes as a Microsoft employee. This, in turn, makes it difficult to have a conversation with the company, and isn’t that the whole reason people are pushing corporations to have weblogs?

Still, not taking things personally–difficult to do when it comes to explosive and sensitive topics such as sexism and other forms of bias. This makes it that much more difficult to issue challenges to corporate or organizational behavior, particularly in this environment when there is a thin assumption that we’re all personally associated somehow. Yet I don’t know how we can be expected to make changes in the world out there when we can’t even effect changes within this shared environment because we’re too busy taking everything personally.

Not taking things personally–guilty as charged. I failed in this aspiration after reading some of the comments associated with this particular discussion.

Bob Wyman of PubSub writes:

On women at dinner: 33% of the Microsoft contingent at the SF Jim Allchin dinner was female. It wasn’t a complete stag party… Robert has made the point a number of times that at least one woman (Mena Trott) was invited. Can’t we find something more interesting to bash Microsoft about?

[Remember: Software was invented by a woman (Ada Lovelace), the term “bug” and COBOL were both primarily because of a woman (Grace Hopper). The first programmers at UPenn, etc. during WWII were women. The world of software has always had more women than most other technical fields. Until recently, the world’s second largest computer company was run by a woman. If you’re looking for sex discrimination, look in some other field. There are only slim pickings here…]

To assume that there is ‘no problem’ with diversity when it comes to gender in the computer science or engineering fields is to totally disregard a given fact: look at the speaker list of any major computer or technology conference being held this year, and if you can find at least 25% women, the event is an exception to the rule.

Rather than increasing in diversity the last two decades, the engineering and computer fields have bucked the trends in every other profession by demonstrating a decline of women entering into, or staying within, the field.

Thomas Hawk in comments suggested this could be solved if we would …just do something positive:

You want to fix the situation? Encourage your daughters to go into computer science. I know I’ve got two of my own and I will. Or how about this, donate some of your time to teaching young girls about computers and getting them excited about the prospects of working in the technology business someday. I’ve donated hundreds of hours of my own personal time this year to help provide private school scholarships and other positive recreational programs for disadvantaged, mostly black or minority, inner city youth here in the Bay Area. Now that is doing something positive.

The assumption here is that issuing challenges to organizations that show a regretable lack of diversity is not …doing something positive. If we followed this logic to its natural conclusion, we would assume that women still would not have the vote, blacks would still have to take tests before voting in certain states in the South, and the American worker would still be making $1.95 an hour for 16 hour days.

Challenging the status quo has been an accepted practice for bringing about change since governments stopped arbitrarily hanging people who disagreed with them. If an organization, such as Microsoft, is concerned about how others perceive it, it will pay attention to such challenges. Hopefully the company will then respond in a positive manner, and everyone benefits: women (and minorities) from being included; the organization from getting more diverse viewpoints.

After all, it does no good to bring more ‘young girls’ into a field where the women currently in it have less access to opportunities: whether these be for jobs, visibility as presenters at professional conferences, or networking with the movers and shakers in the industry.

As to making these challenges, well that is where I lost much of my resolve not to take anything personally in this discussion.

Nicole Simon writes in Scoble’s comments and in her weblog that yes she’s a women but not one of those:

The article and comments over at Scoble’s blog really got me angry. Why is it that every time I read or hear a woman demanding to be included just because she is a woman, I want to hold up a sign saying “I don’t belong to them”?!

Then I would suggest, Nicole that you give up the right to vote because it was that kind of woman that got your the vote. If you get pregnant with an unwanted child, it is that kind of woman that made abortion legal, so that you don’t have to go to a butcher with a kitchen knife. If you want equal access to sport, it is those kind of women who helped bring it about–not to mention equal access to the job you most likely have right at this moment. Oh, and you can also own property and do your own thing at 18 because of those kind of women

To return to Scoble’s comment thread, no one demanded to be included because they were a woman, but the issue was raised: what was the criteria for being included in this event? If it was, as Scoble claims, for those who originated software companies that promote weblogging, then why include two people from Firefox? If it wasn’t intended for jouranalists, why include someone from ITConversations?

Could it have been that Scoble off-handedly picked people he thought were influential, and by the choices he made, generated an indirect public statement that aside from Mena Trott, there were no influential women webloggers in the Silicon Valley area? How can this be, when there are several respected and, we hope, influential women in the area?

This, then, goes beyond this particular meeting and into the whole issue of visibility–of women of technology and women webloggers, both. Without accusing Scoble of personal bias (note this, please — no one is accusing Scoble of personal bias), there are consequences attached to exclusionary practices, whether they are intentional or accidental.

I liked what Mobile Jones wrote on just this:

While I don’t think this is a discussion about intentional discrimination, the reality is that discrimination needn’t be intentional to occur. The fish analogy is a good one, but I enjoyed reading about the difference between stumbling over or kicking a dog in “It’s not the thought that counts”. Intentionally kicking the dog or accidentally stumbling over the dog doesn’t matter from the pup’s point of view – both hurt. Fascinating read….

(The read Mobile mentions is Deborah Hellman’s It’s Not the Thought that Counts, which examines the relevance of ‘intent’ in regards to applying the Constitutionally guaranteed Equal Protection.)

Whether intential or not, being kicked hurts. When women are deliberately excluded, we have the law; when women are unintentially excluded, we have public pressure. So I guess, Nicole, I will continue being one of those women.

According to Chuqui at Teal Sunglasses, though, my being one of those women is ‘hurting’ the cause rather than helping:

So why is it blogdom (and Shelley is guilty of falling into this trap, also) seem to insist on defining success for women and women bloggers as acting like the guys? Women make rotten guys. If they try to compete as women would, guys write them off as weak. If they try to act like the guys do, they get written off as bitches. Men have stacked the deck, and women know this. It’s one reason why women rarely go head to head with guys on guy terms; they know the deck is stacked. So why try?

Besides, I think if you sit and talk to most women, they have different goals and values than the guys do, and definitely different than the ones the guys want to have them have.
…
And that’s something being lost in this discussion: too many people (including Shelley) thinking that women have to act and think like guys to be successes. there are lots of women around the blogosphere doing really great things and writing really good blogs. By saying they have to geek and act like geeks, or play in the same sandboxes as the guys do, ignores the strengths they bring to the blogosphere.

One of the issues that kept the Scoble thread alive for so long is there was a lot of debate about the criteria that Scoble used to select people. It seemed, at least to me that this kept changing as each new challenge arose. This is frustrating for those, like myself, who are trying to understand what the ‘rules’ are.

For instance, if you talk to the male political webloggers, you’ll find them saying that the reason they think women don’t get the attention is that women are not willing to step into the political fray; that we’re too adverse to confrontation. Their advice is that we need to be able to just jump in and hold our own, or we’re never really going to get the respect.

Yet what Chuqui is saying, and I’ve heard this from other guys (and women, too), is that if you do issue challenges, or pursue a discussion aggressively, get angry, fight back, or get into a person’s face in some form, you’re a bitch. Worse, that doing so somehow makes you ‘unwomanly’.

Come on, people: when are we women going to finally be able to kick off our Mary Janes? Rules. I know this is a game, but the rules keep changing. How can women hope to compete for respect (or eyeballs), when you all keep changing the rules? Or worse, define a different set of rules, just for us? Us “womanly” us?

I’m reminded of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s comment, Well-behaved women seldom make history. I would hate to think that weblogging proves the exception to this historical precedent, and the only women who are heard, or recognized, here are those who never rock the boat. This implies, then, that we have to wait politely to be given recognition, and this just tweaks my butt.

I was going to write this last night, but it’s so hot and I got a little fed up, so instead I put together a playlist and burned a CD that I call, “The Ladies for the Ladies”. Music always picks me and gives me hope, so this playlist is for the people I’m proud to call my “sisters”–regardless of their sex. In the meantime, my poor cat (cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, her, her, her, her, she, she, she, she) is collapsed on the floor and its time to finally turn on the AC.

Ride Amanda Marshall Desmond Child & Eric Bazilian Tuesday’s Child

World On Fire Sarah McLachlan Pierre Marchand Afterglow

Son of a Preacher Man Dusty Springfield Love Songs

Don’t Tell Me Avril Lavigne Evan Taubenfeld/Avril Lavigne Under My Skin

The Cat in the Window The Bird in the Sky Petula Clark Bonner & Gordon The Ultimate Petula Clark

I Believe In You Sinéad O’Connor Bob Dylan A Very Special Christmas 2

Seven Years Norah Jones Come Away With Me

This Ole House Bette Midler Hamblen, Stuart 1908-1989 Bette Midler Sings the Rosemary Clooney Songbook

Breathe (2AM) Anna Nalick Breathe (2AM) – Single

Sisters Betty and Rosemary Clooney

I Will Survive (Single) Gloria Gaynor 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of Gloria Gaynor

Queen of the Night Whitney Houston The Bodyguard

The Lady Is a Tramp Lena Horne Lena Horne at MGM: Ain’ It the Truth Soundtrack

Puttin’ on the Ritz (1958) Ella Fitzgerald Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook

Fujiyama Mama The Wanda Jackson Show Live and Still Kickin’

Dancing in the Street (Stereo) (Single) Martha Reeves & The Vandellas 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of Martha Reeves & The Vandellas

Rich Girl (Radio Edit No. 1) Gwen Stefani & Eve Andre R. Young, Chantal Kreviazuk, G. Stefani, J. Bock, K. DioGuardi, M. Batson, M. Elizondo & S. HARNICK Rich Girl – Single Alternative

9 to 5 Dolly Parton Dolly Parton Dolly Parton: Greatest Hits

Hit Me With Your Best Shot Pat Benatar E. Schwartz Best Shots

Cell Block Tango Chicago, the movie soundtrack

Respect Aretha Franklin Aretha’s Gold R&B/Soul

I’m mostly considered a technology weblogger, if I’m pigeonholed into any category (usually I fight this kicking and screaming). I’ve written on politics, but I don’t focus on it. Same as I write on technology, but not exclusively (and hiking, and photography, and travel, and …) When I’ve been included in lists of ‘female political webloggers’, this has been more of an inclusive gesture than not, and appreciated.

So I haven’t been too involved in a recent continued discussion about the Steve Levy Article, Kevin Drum’s take, and the reaction thereof. However, one issue that keeps getting raised–that there aren’t as many women political webloggers because we women can’t handle the heat–can be firmly and safely put to rest when you read the responses of the lady politicos at the following weblogs:

Shakespeare’s Sister:

We’re not going to get anywhere as long as the male bloggers who post about this issue continue to do so with such appalling intellectual dishonesty. In private emails, male bloggers who publicly wring their hands about how to solve the problem of the dearth of women bloggers in the upper echelon, will admit that the reality is the difficulty of finding women worth linking to.

Women don’t give me much linkable material.

Women write on subjects that don’t interest me.

Women don’t know how to compromise on abortion rights.

Why don’t women post about Social Security? It affects them, too.

Women don’t write commentary, don’t come up with new ideas.

Gender politics is all secondary issues.

Rox Populi:

… clearly there’s a disconnect between what some male folk convey on their blogs and what they truly believe. And, I strongly suspect the leadership of the Democratic Party works much the same way.

Feministe:

Compromise on abortion rights? Social Security? And women are accused of following trends like a dog with its nose buried in its own turds? Right. Real original, dude. And I’m not even going to mention how specious it is to suggest that women are “uninteresting�? because we follow legislation that directly, tangibly affects us and only us.

Oops, here I go with that hysterical shit again. At least I’m more reserved than Jeff Jarvis’ rowdy channelling of Bushwick Bill: “Damn it feels good to be a cracka.�?

This subject is so unbearably boring and repetitive — and yet so freakishly maddening. And this time especially so. Apparently the candle lit romanticism induced by wide-eyed men blogging about the sad dearth of femininity in the political sphere is nothing but a sham.

(Jonathon, “Damn it feels good to be a cracka!” is better than “White, male, and proud of it!”, don’t you think?”)

Pam’s House Blend:

What is different is the defense floated out there that isn’t a hierarchy in the major blogosphere. This is ludicrous — there is passive resistance to acknowledge, seek out or promote new political voices, especially those that have something to say about gender politics from a perspective that is not white or male — why wouldn’t you want to bring something fresh to the table. You wouldn’t if you didn’t have a serious interest in those issues.

Our big boy bloggers have tended to gloss over the fact that the blogosphere is still, looking at sheer numbers, the domain of the Technorati testosteroni. Men currently rule the roost in terms of perceived bloggers of influence, and the article points that out. Guys arrived at the party first, and it’s a remained a fairly closed system on the Left for reasons that are complicated, but not excusable.

Grr, ladies. You make me proud.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I knew as soon as I saw the Steve Levy article that we would see a backlash about the domination of whites and males in the weblogging ranking systems. While my “Guys Don’t Link” post tried to make a point with humor, and invite the guys to be part of the joke, and the understanding that follows, Levy’s was guaranteed to first of all get notice (after all, he is a white male journalist); get credibility (after all, he is a white male journalist); and, lastly, generate a great deal of guilt.

Guilt is the killer of conversations and the destroyer of discussion because no one wants guilt dumped on them. Mr. Levy, you have hurt us, and you did so with no more than a passing glance and a feeling that “this is just another story”.

But it happened and here we are, and though I sympathize with Roxanne’s weariness of this discussion, I do want to speak to this backlash, and the causes for it. And then I too, will have exhausted all that I can say on the topic, and walk away from it.

First, to the white guys who have been proclaiming your race and sex with such pride: It would seem that not only are you not content with being king of the hill, you also want to be chief underdog, too. Not content to being the center of too many dialogs within weblogging, you also want to be the center of one discussion that, oddly enough, doesn’t center around you: being a weblogger who is not a male, or is not white, or both.

So you’ve perverted the discussion until it is all about you, effectively shutting it down, while making sure that the bits you so desperately need understand that their rightful place is forming a swarm about you.

You see, White Guys, it’s all about you. And you’ll do everything in your power to destroy even an effective conversation, unless it is all about you.

When Levy mentioned ‘lack of diversity’ and pointed a finger at the grouped white males, you cried out ‘foul’ and hastened to point out that Glenn Reynolds and Atrios may be white and male, but they have different opinions, and hence any group they’re in, is diverse. All I can say is that George Wallace would have been proud of your verbal footwork, and supported your distinction.

When a gentle and curious question about having a conference focused on women in weblogging is proposed, you come into comments and you harrangue and harrass and manipulate the discussion, until the concept is tainted almost beyond repair, and yes, the conversation does flow around ‘you’. I, being tired, fell for the trap. Again. I forgot that the greatest hurt I can do to you, the most effective weapon I have, is to ignore you; by not feeding this insatiable and sad need you have, to have all of this be about you.

You proudly claim that yes, you are white guys and discount all the concerns and questions that are being asked, and the challenges being made–not because you necessarily disagree, but because the conversation isn’t about you. It doesn’t matter if you’re seen as good or bad, right or wrong; all that matters is that the conversation be about you.

For once, we had the opportunity to actually explore issues of diversity in weblogging — international as compared to US-based webloggers; white as compared to not white; male and female. We could have grown and been enriched, and maybe we would all been the better for it. More importantly, we may have looked more closely at the technology that drives our perceptions, and had a chance to explore whether blogrolls and popularity lists are more harm then they are worth.

Instead, in a burst of emotional self-defense, it became Whitey versus the Gang. I am waiting for one or more of you to put “White Male and Damn Proud of It!” stickers in your sidebars, as you nod among yourselves about putting down this particular insurrection. After all, this is the ultimate egalitarian environment–anyone can have a weblog. Anyone can become famous. All you have to do, is write well.

Except that you forget that popularity in this environment can lead to opportunity, which, in turn, generates more popularity, and hence more opportunity and so on. Or maybe I have it wrong–you never forget this.

Let me ask you all something, though: if members of Congress or Parliment or whatever body rules you, did what you are all doing now, standing up in session and yelling out, “I am white and I am male!”, would you support this?

If President Bush or Tony Blair or Howard started their next speech with, “I am white, and I am male!”, would you support this?

If the next time most major corporate boards got together the members stood up and said, “I am white, and I am male!”, would you support this?

I would ask that the white guys attending the O’Reilly ETech conference stand up before each session and proudly proclaim, “I am white, and I am male!” If they do, would you support this? (ETech attendees do me a favor: do this, please. I think more could come of this one act than anything I’ve been saying for three years to Tim O’Reilly.)

Perhaps I’m an optimist, but I still think something constructive can be derived from all of this, and that is to look more closely at the technology that is generating the divide between us. I asked earlier whether blogrolls and popularity lists cause more harm than good. I think the answer is, a resounding, “Yes!”

I’m going to borrow some words from Jon Stewart, when he appeared on Cross-Fire (bless you, Norm, for making these videos available). He accused the Cross-Fire journalists, and, in fact, many journalist of harming America because of partisan reporting. He said a simple thing: You are hurting us.

At the time, I didn’t agree with Stewart, for about the same reasons I don’t agree with Levy now. I felt Stewart does more with his satire than he did with this direct confrontation. However, I’m beginning to appreciate the strength of his simple, and compelling approach.

So I’ll say this, directly and honestly, to Dave Sifry from Technorati: Dave, you are hurting us.

The Technorati Top 100 is too much like Google in that ‘noise’ becomes equated with ‘authority’. Rather than provide a method to expose new voices, your list becomes nothing more than a way for those on top to further cement their positions. More, it can be easily manipulated with just the release of a piece of software.

You have focused on comment spam and you see this as the most harm to this community, all the while providing the weapon that is truly tearing us apart. You are hurting us, Dave.

NZ Bear, you are hurting us. With your Ecosystem, you count links on the front page, which give precedence to blogroll links over links embedded within writings, and then classify people in a system equating mammals and amoeba. Your site serves as nothing more than a way for higher ranked people to feel good about themselves, and lower ranked to feel discouraged. There is no discovery inherent in your system — no way of encouraging new voices to be heard. So NZ, you are, also, hurting us.

In fact, to every weblogger who has a blogroll: you are hurting all of us.

Rarely do people discover new webloggers through blogrolls; most discovery comes when you reference another weblogger in your writings. But blogrolls are a way of persisting links to sites, forming a barrier to new voices who may write wonderful things — but how they possibly be heard through the static, which is the inflexible, immutable, blogroll?

So for all of you who have a blogroll, you are also hurting us.

If I had a wish right now, I would wish one thing: that we remove all of our blogrolls and take down the EcoSystem and the Technorati 100 and all of the other ‘popularity’ lists. That whatever links exist, are honest ones based on what has been written, posted, published, not some static membership in a list that is, all too often, stale and out of date, and used as a weapon or a plea.

I would suggest the same for your syndication lists, too–when did you last update it to reflect those sites you really read? I would be content,though, if centralized aggregators such as Bloglines stopped publishing the number of subscriptions for each feed. After all, what true value is this information?

Then we would all start fresh. It would be a new start, and the emphasis would be less on who we know and who we are, then what is being said.

And now, I return to topics of greater cheer: travel and photography and technology, and following my yearly ritual of tweaking the folks at ETech.

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